ive been eager to try dmt for a few months now, and finally completed a successful extraction two days ago. My first dose was very small and felt like a nice light mushroom trip, with cool 3D calming shapes when i closed my eyes. my second one, i decided to make a big deal about it and have one of these "breakthroughs". it was a very unpleasant and scary trip. it was a terrifying feeling that iv had before after smoking kronic, synthectic cannabis. kronic was wonderful for me up until one bong that sent me absolutely insane, shaking, and hearing my thoughts aloud in my head. all my thoughts disgusted me and i was absolutely certain that i had become schizophrenic. it felt like i knew exactly why insane people commit suicide. once this subsided i had the best month or two of my life, feeling free of ego, i was much more sociable and charasmatic than my usual depressing, anxious self and saw good in everything. eventually my negative feelings and old thought patterns creeped back in and i have been quite depressed for the last 3 months roughly.
after dmt i had the egoless bliss for about 5 mins, then back to a slightly increased level of depression, which is probably due to the fact that dmt didn't "save" me like i'd hoped.
i hade cubensis shrooms around christmas and had the most enlightening beautiful experience of my life, followed by a depressing, almost suicidal come down.

I am chasing some sort of "enlightenment" or ego death through psychadelics. is this unwise?
i really dont have any other options.. i really cannot live with the person i am. i want my ego gone, but i am so immersed in it.
im probably alot like many of you, a very deep thinker, creative and quiet type. but i am unsatisfyed with my pathetic existence and want to be a great person who people love to be around, which i have been briefly..
has anyone here come from a very sad place, and been healed by dmt? or any other psychadelic? im very scared to have my next dose, its waiting in my room for me

ps. this is probably better suited for the experiences forum but im not allowed to post there for some reason.

You sound a lot like my self, we will find our path in the end I am sure with or without dmt/shroom/iboga/peyote ectect . peace to you

Thanks, i hope you're right.

Treat yourself right by eating healthy and exercising. Think postive thoughts a couple of times a day and meditate. This will help tremendously.

dont be so hard on yourself! we all find our way somehow and we all struggle with things on various levels. Work on yourself little by little and you'll find within a year or two a major transformation will have taken place.


Keep your head up brother

Yes, psychedelics can be very healing. They do not do it automatically and are only part of your mental health, you cannot rely on any one thing. I would wait to take the spice until you are not depressed and have done more research. Maybe try aya/pharmahuasca; it looks to me that is spoken more of having healing properties... So far in my experience it is true.

You also cannot fully get rid of your ego, instead, you should aim for a healthy relationship with it

I would not put to much in the way of hopes, into the psychedelic basket. Psychedelics are only going to enhance whatever drama you already have going on. I'm not saying that they cant be theraputical but you probably need some guidance from a trained professional and not just takin a pot shot at what you hope might work. You sound like you are hoping for something to happen,(ego death), so that it will help you in your awake subjective conciousnesss.. Thats a tall task, even for a very experienced Spice Psychonaut.

I think it may help if you talk that concept out with a friend and try and see how the different scenarios play out. I dont feel that what your suggesting is that easy through the use of DMT. DMT can be a great tool, however there must be some other things that go along with it.

If I were you I would forget about psychedelics for now. I would forget about all of them. Take life in a healthy /fit way. If you want to feel better about yourself, I wouldnt search for that in a psychedelic.

Good luck to you,

IH

Thrust me, I know where you are coming from. For years I was a very depressed person, going through my teenage years alienated from my own body and ashamed of who I was for some mysterious reason. I was thinking a lot about suicide and was mutilating myself for a while. I've always been into deep thinking and it led me to some of the very dark places in the mind.

Then I ended up experimenting a bit with psychedelics and salvia. Those drugs opened quite a lot of doors that I was free to explore.
But they didn't do all the work, far from it.

Entheogens are a tools for you to use. If you are not comfortable with yourself, then you won't use them correctly and will only end up hurting yourself.

As someone who lived through the depression and who is now a very happy person, I believe I have found a path that sets you free from those negative toughts.
Learn to love yourself.

Learn to let go of the hating toughts toward yourself, they really are the only thing keeping you in that mind-state. Learn to forgive yourself of the past mistakes and try to live in the present. Before you become comfortable in your own body and mind, you need to want it. What it means is that you shouldn't be looking to forget and disapear, but to be fully present and live here, right now. I found that what was keeping me in a depressive state was the fact that I had pity on myself instead of looking for ways to evolve into the person I wanted to be.

You will find that once you find the motivation and the Will to grow and become your True Self, the negativity will disappear by itself and you will realise that it didn't have any substance.

Mushrooms and DMT may help you see things from a different perspective, but they will never do the work for you. You first have to stop trying to escape reality and take full responsibility for who you are.

..korbitt..as i'm sure you've heard depression is usually believed to be a result or the sertonin (and other) systems being out of balance, but there is no need to resort to the pharmaceutical industry's solutions..
this thread - Plant based Anti-depressants
had a few responses from self-medicators..
..IMO entheogens like dmt and psilocybin are more suited to occassional or semi-regular 'peak experience' work, not daily, and there are plants suited to the long-term healing of depression or anxiety..in the thread some entheogens are suggested in micri-doses (sub-psychedelic) daily to alieviate depression..

really relate man, psychedelics though i haven't done dmt are such an amazing tool. i did mushrooms ALOT. DMT isn't gonna ruin you. go for it.

Thanks everyone, some of these replies were very helpfull.
I think i will try ayahuasca before smoking dmt again. Even though I agree that alot of work in the real world is required to get yourself out of a rut, i also know that a drug experience can completely change you, atleast temporarily, because it happened with kronic. And sometimes theres just not much opportunity to improve yourself via real world efforts. It seems as if society wants insecure/depressed people to be hermits, It seems to be geared to make the confident and satisfyed even more confident and satisfyed, while neglecting those who lack these things..
Everyone already knows that though, but its somewhat tabooed to talk about. guys do not talk about confidence issues(except on the internet!). Its kinda just accepted that some of us have it, and the rest are lonely and unsatisfyed. that feeling of confidence and entitlement is such a neccessary requirement to live a satifying life, but society puts almost no priority on making sure people develop it. but i guess we're talking about the same world that lets a billion people starve while a handfull live in mansions with private jets..

anyways, no more bitching about the world from me, theres people in far worse situations

Trust me... the average, happy-looking member of Western civilization is rarely confident or satisfied! Although your depression and negative thought patterns sound like something to be reckoned with, general discontentment is accepted as part of the human condition these days...

Korbbit, you're talking about ego death like a permanent solution, but when you come back from any psychedelic trip, even if your ego was destroyed in the trip, you will still re-develop/inhabit/create one when you come back. Psychedelics won't change who you are for you, they only help you figure out who you are, it's ultimately up to YOU to do the changing yourself.

Ayahuasca is a wonderful and fairly gentle healer, however given the experiences you've mentioned here a proper dose could be buttfuck terrifying for you. Could it help you? Yes. Will it help you? That's up to you. At the end of the day, you must conquer yourself, while psychedelics simply hold up the mirror you must shatter.

(And don't ignore the possibility of trying out natural anti-depressants, or seeking help elsewhere than the Nexus. I'm not saying entheogens are necessarily the best option for you, but more answering your question)

Your ego is you, its who you are in this life, its not going anywhere. If you want to be this "great person who people love to be around" then you need to love yourself first.

You sound like you're trying to escape from yourself.
If you wish to use psychedelics to better yourself than you need to stop running, face yourself, accept, love and trust yourself.

In tandem with what MySmelf said, the "big bad ego" isn't something to just dump on the side of the road. It has many useful purposes like preserving identity and allowing you to go about your human day, interacting with discrete parts of the world. This is really more of a balancing act - that of balancing the analytical ego with your more emotional, symbolic, intuitive mind. Obliterate the ego for a short time? Sure, but it's coming back whether you like it or not, and if it didn't there would be no integration of the experience. No way to learn or digest any of what had just happened to you in your ego-less experience. Balance is key, and while true enlightenment may not be realistically attainable, striking balance in your life between all polarities will bring you about as close as you'll come.

You cannot fight against the ego and win, just as you cannot fight against the air - Eckhart Tolle

Boy Korbbit, as so many others here already said, I can surely relate to your position on life. It happened for me in roughly the same way, a constant ache in my heart for something lacking, something just not right about life on Earth as it was being presented to me. Death was a problem that no one seemed interested in grappling with until it was unavoidable, but for me life was impossible to live so long as death cast its shadow over it. So, from a very early age, I tackled the biggest philosophical problem of all: if death is the great equalizer, what meaning can anything I do in my life possibly have?

I'd see people running around pursuing relationships and money, trying to make it in life and I was sort of on the sidelines, watching life as it seemed to pass me by. Once I could break the shackles of western Christianity had placed on me, I began to pursue this idea of enlightenment. The concept seemed to fit nicely into what I was looking for: that there was an answer to life's many woes that a human can figure out somehow. This began a long, hard road that did end up having a happy ending (I get life now and am at peace with it). However, entheogens were only the final key I needed to pick the lock on life's mystery, I had already had a measure of understanding before I went into it as a spiritual pursuit.

I've been doing some study of Hermeticism lately. Briefly stated, it's a very old gnostic philosophy that was highly regarded back in the day (until Christianity all but wiped it out). One of the key concepts I've come to understand in Hermetic thinking is what's called the negrado, or the blackening. In old alchemical thought the negrado was the lead that was to be turned into gold, but in hermetic thought the negrado is a prerequisite to attaining a deeper understanding of the universe. It's a process whereby the human soul burns out all of the shit that can be considered wrong in life. It's the decay of a lifelong friendship with the realization that the friendship no longer serves the highest function of the soul. It's the breakup of a marriage because the two parties are not really truly in love with each other and have been just going through the motions. It's losing a job or a career that was taking you in the opposite direction of the spiritual path. Basically, the negrado is a process of suffering that opens the door to enlightenment.

I'll use an illustration, are you familiar with the japanese anime Dragonball Z? Hopefully you are because the way the character named Vegeta in that show attains the super saiyan state is similar to this concept I'm talking about. For the entire anime this character Vegeta is questing after this mythical and powerful state called a super saiyan. In many instances, he falsely claims he has attained the state of super saiyan only to get utterly pummeled into submission by a more powerful foe. After his rival Kakarot and his son Trunks attain the super saiyan state and he still cannot, he nearly goes mad in his pursuit of it. He leaves planet Earth to train in the greater universe, and no matter how much he tried he could not attain the super saiyan state. Then, one day in exhaustion, he is on a planet that is surely about to be destroyed due to a meteor shower. Having no energy left, Vegeta finally comes to a place where he didn't care anymore. He didn't care if he ever became a super saiyan, he didn't care if he was better than his rival Kakarot, he didn't even care if he lived or died. And it was there, in that moment of having nothing that it happened: he transformed!

Enlightenment is sort of like that. You will never 'attain' it so long as your looking for it, and yet at the same time it requires some effort in seeking on your part doesn't it? It's a complete paradox, but it's not without it's own way of working itself out. There is a school of buddhism called Shingon Buddhism (probably not spelled correctly). It probably has the best understanding of how a soul attains enlightenment. In the Shingon school all one needs to do is call upon the name of the buddha once, only once, in true sincerity and eventually, no matter how many reincarnations it takes, the seeker will attain enlightenment. That's sort of all you need to do. Make up your mind that that is the goal, and your life will take you down that path probably in ways you didn't expect. So, see, you say you have issues with depression and the person you are but you seem to already have set your esoteric eyes on enlightenment as a worthy pursuit. That path is not a rosy path, and every person who truly wishes to go down it will be met with their own challenges and blackening-type experience.

Think of it sort of like how Christ says that to enter the kingdom of heaven you must be born again. It's like that, and what comes before rebirth is, sadly, the death of the old way of life. This is painful, this HURTS! But it's necessary to break us out of our old habits and shitty way of looking at things. If the things in your life were already what they needed to be, you wouldn't need enlightenment would you?

Entheogens are tools and they seem to always give you exactly what you need when you need it. If you had a really bad experience, you probably needed to have it. I absolutely understand how horrifying a bad trip is, I've been there myself, but even the worst trip I ever had, upon reflection, turned out to be a road mark on the path to enlightenment. Sometimes we have false things so embedded in our psyche, even unknowingly, that getting us to see the truth can sometimes be excruciating. My worst trip, I had to come face to face with a voice screaming at me how unworthy I was of the hyperspace realm, how that was a holy place and I was sinful. When I finally had the courage to look at what was happening, to see that this was my EGO trying to convince me to stay with it, in it, that voice stopped and I've never had an issue with feeling worthy ever again. In a vision, I saw the ego curl up into the fetal position and whisper, like an infant 'don't leave me... don't leave me... i don't want to die...', and from where I was I couldn't understand what the damn thing was getting so worked up about!

This is a hard path my friend, but the rewards are worth it even if the process is slow. Sadly, enlightenment isn't something that one just gets overnight and that's the end of it. No, rather, enlightenment is like that path less travelled in Christian philosophy. It's a path that one takes in life, with all the twists and bends that come with it.

Keep at it, and whether a month, a year, ten years, or several lifetimes, you'll get it friend. You'll get it.

Sure, living in our world can be painful at times. But it is not the world that makes the confident people more confident, it is themselves. The moment you accept to thrust yourself and the universe, everything will start to play in your favor. Sure there will still be obstacles here and there, but you have to understand that they are challenges that are placed there to make you evolve into something better. You will then be able to accept challenges with a positive mindset. You have to realize that if society doesn't help you become more confident, then you will have to do it by yourself.

Do not escape from yourself, do not look at yourself with pity. Embrace your Self, be yourself.

You are blessed with EXISTENCE. Isn't that completey amazing in itself? Doesn't that make life miraculous? Don't you see all the possibilites?

So if you can't live with yourself why not try to change what you don't like. The things you can influence. I think durgs are the wrong way to get loved by other people, watch other people why they are loved and start adopting things. Drugs can help you to see you more clearly or to ovethink things which are digged deep into you but they certainly won't change your social life in the positive way you are expecting it atm.

, I know exactly were your coming from , also if you seek healing from dmt , then you should try ayahuasca . The messages can be understood much better and you can bring the lessons learned back to reality , unlike vaping dmt.

Nothing is wrong with you! You sound normal to me... Everything you are experiencing is a characteristic part of seeking.

One thing we all need to be aware of is how our egos build and maintain our sense of identity- sometimes destructively. Even in your posts, where you are simply trying to explain yourself, there are multiple mentions of you being a depressed, isolated person. The ego will take statements like that, turn them into mantras, and they become part of the structure from which your identity hangs. Try being mindful of how you refer to yourself, as these things can be self- perpetuating. It's one thing to say that you feel lonely and depressed... And another thing entirely to call yourself a lonely, depressed person. One is a temporary state, the other is an aspect of permanent identity.

Since you recently had such a great shroom trip, you could try that again, this time really meditating on loving yourself, accepting that the universe made you as-is and that the path from where you are toward greater understanding will be an unfolding thing of beauty. I highly recommend taking notes in a sketchbook as you come down... Find new mantras and affirmations for yourself.

You wrote that so well, and I can certainly relate to it via my own experiences in the distant past. But be careful, its sounds a bit "bi-polar" to me Not sure if powerful psychedelics would be the way to resolve a situation like that.( I mean if that were the case,it might not be )

Good luck whatever you do.

I listen to alot of Tolle, infact i think he convinced me that a permanent ego-less state is possible..

Great point

I think I should also clarify that my definition of "ego" is lifted straight from eckhart tolle text. It is regarded as a "false self", one made up of ideas you have used to define your self. and when these ideas are attacked or shown to be false, you feel threatened, because your ego is facing destruction. which leaves people in a fairly constant state of fear, because the ideas we identify with are always temporary and constantly changing.

this philosophy resonates so much with me. and it is so obvious in our culture, people defending ideas to the grave simply because they have made an identity out of it.

Tolle insists that all humans can achieve a state of permanent peace, where they do not identify with anything from the environment, or any thoughts(which are ultimately products of the environment). maybe he's just delusional, or a rare person that is capable of living in such a way.

Doesn't it seem strange that all other animals are capable of living in peace without ever questioning themselves or creating unecessary pain, while humans being far more intelligent cannot?

Thanks everyone, great bunch of people. i think my question has been aswered; psychedelics will not change me like i'd hoped, ayahusca is a better option than smoked, and maybe stop listenning to Tolle