A derail in another thread really got me thinking, about how important finally giving up the idea that I could "solve" or figure out reality through psychedelics was in my personal journey. "They" just laughed at me (the derail convo aimed at Abrazaderas was what I am referring to)

When I started psychedelics I wan an avid reader and internet surfer and I felt like if I had enough information in my head I could "solve" reality. When I discovered psychedelics I thought they were the key to unlocking this further.

After a few years of rampant psychedelic use and a few near brushes with death through narcotic use I gave up this attitude and no longer tried to find the "ultimate" map to reality.

Using DMT and Ketamine, along with hearing a few mystics and quantum physicists speak, were the final signal to my mind that it really has no idea what is going on(metaphysically atleast) and can never know an "objectively true" reality.

I haven't dropped the mind or thought completely,(is anyone really enlightened?) but, I no longer seek an ultimate thought or map of reality and my experiences. I allow the mind to categorize and map but I don't take any one thought or map as true. I just allow the mind to try its best without allowing myself to interfere and believe, "This is IT!" This has allowed me to entertain more than one reality map simultaneously or in different situations.

This was a huge turning point in my life and my psychedelic trips. Also a huge relief to my seeking mind.

I am curious what other Nexians have experience with letting go of their quest for the "ultimate truth" and how it took them to a new level. Or, from the other side of the argument does anyone still believe psychedelics can bring realization of an ultimate truth. (Other than that there is no ultimate truth)

I know just what you're saying...although I'm not ready to give up the quest just yet...I find it just too amazing being able to change my mind at any given moment...
The more I learn...the more I get baffled/changed/empowered/wiser. Believe in Nothing but contemplate Everything...

Recognition that the quest can never be truly fulfilled is one thing...spending your life actually 'questing' is another..

The 'fun' of it all is the constant flux of ideas and the ever changing horizon.
I hope I'm still 'wondering' at my time of transition...

A wise man said "Nothing is True...Everything is Permitted"

very nice post Not Knowing!

I don't think learning more and improving yoursef are in contradiction to giving up looking for an ultimate truth. I also don't think you have to stop questing or searching or wondering.

I don't think I ever had this kind of a turning point that you describe Not Knowing, but I certainly do not (or no longer) entertain the idea that there is an ultimate truth or anything ultimate for that matter. For me I am constantly in search of the next step of my personal development, the next mystery of this universe to elucidate. Whether we find answers or just more questions, it doesn't matter. What matters is that we point our attention towards it, that we ask, that we move forwards... at least to me that is what matters.

I especially like what you said about having various maps at the same time. It is something I often try to tell people when it comes to interpreting their experiences. It can be extremely insightful to interpret them in various fashions without judging which one is the "actual" or "right" way.

thanks for the thread!
cheers

Never stop the quest but realize that the answer seems to be completely elusive. Looking at what goes on in society I am clueless.

Yeah I haven't given up learning or entertaining ideas.

To put it very simply I would say now I enjoy and live in the question instead of hoping the question will lead to any final answers. Although contemplating all the possible answers is definitely fun.

@Cyb....Hassan I Sabbah, wise man indeed. Always liked that quote.

I think when people reassign the point of their existence from "destination: the ultimate truth" to "destination: the journey" , they're starting to catch on...

And about your question: is anyone really enlightened? That's a really good question, and I think when people talk about "enlightened" people like jesus or buddha, it's not that these people have found the ultimate truth or anything, it's just that they've discovered who they really are, and completely accepted it. So on the outside it will seem like they're radiating with wisdom and love and effortlessness, which causes people to build religions around them to worship them, when in fact they just want everyone else to find and accept themselves too. It's like these enlightened people are pointing a finger in a certain direction but everyone is just hung up on worshiping the finger instead of looking at the direction it points to.

In my introduction I stated that I seek truth and came into this exploration with a similar mind set. I do not believe myself to be better equipped than anyone else in figuring out any type of puzzle or secret, but rather I wanted to add and integrate into the experience.

Psychedelics teach many people different things. A common thing that I find it can teach you real quick is how society paints a big picture of your world for you and you may not realize it. I became aware of it after my first heavy mushroom experience, no matter how much reading I did on the topic before hand and knew how safe it was I still felt guilt and shame for doing something that was considered "wrong". I came out of the experience though realizing that we all create our own reality to a certain degree, and until we realize that, our reality is actually formed by people around us.

So I think in one way, awakening would be realizing the influences of others on yourself, and gaining the ability to filter those thoughts and realize what your own thoughts are. I find a lot of people lie not only to others, but themselves. They will change their stance on something solely to feel better rather than accept the truth/reality.

Finding your inner light, yourself.

I think this is why a lot of people are "scared" of psychedelics as well. Their self-lies that they construct get thrown in their faces and there is no way to run from them. Perhaps this ties into the thread that contains that topic as well (Why are people scared of Psychedelics)

As for some ultimate truth for the universe... Who knows... I definitely think that substances like DMT and it's derivatives provide an experience that certainly informs us we do not know everything. Perhaps as mentioned earlier we can't know everything and it's just the journey that we should be looking forward to, not the answer. If there truly is an answer, perhaps we will know it in death.

Those are my thoughts

Life is about the journey not the destination. I feel that with psychedelics, like others said, that even more questions will come up, rather than answers. However, I feel that you can learn a lot about yourself and find truths within yourself to better yourself, if that makes sense the way I wrote it. You may not find the Ultimate Truth, but you can learn a lot about your self and this strange reality.

I've been taking psychedelics probably since around 16, mostly being acid. I went into it with the idea of "expanding my mind." I knew there was so much more out there, and boy did I expand my mind. There were those moments when deep in a trip, like others have probably had before I'm sure, where it seemed like the Ultimate Truth was shown/experienced, but later when you're sober again you can't recall it clearly.

Within the past several months my psychedlic usage has taken a turn towards journeying within myself. I now use them more as tools to learn about myself and better myself. I did that before too, but for a while I think I didn't properly integrate some trips and for a while I felt kinda "different" like I felt weird in this reality on earth. Now that I make sure to integrate I feel I have tapped into a higher part of my self and am now more true to myself. My life is better now than ever, I believe.

Live your own ultimate truth, if that makes sense. For me I try to eat as healthy as I can, do good for mamma earth, and be a good person to others even if they do wrong. I try to see why they do wrong and try to help them understand the process thru which they think in order for them to better themselves.

Life is weird, I don't think we can discover any ultimate truth to reality because it's so damn complex and mindboggeling. For now we should just try to help each other and ourselves, so we feel closer to our own ultimate truth.

Ah, beautiful thread NoKnowing. This has been what, you could say, my life has been leading up to over the past decade and a half or so. It's the abandonment of an emotional stake in "figuring it out," of arriving somewhere that I can then say, "I know" or "I have it." But the abandonment isn't an angry dismissal, it's a laughing, wonder-filled shrug, followed by a long sigh.

When you get down to it, there is this incredible discomfort, even terror, driving the whole thing, the whole search for answers. Because it's perfectly obvious that there's no way to figure out what's going on here. Billions of human beings before me, not to mention non-human organisms, have died without receiving any answer, as far as I can tell, as to why they were born in the first place. (Isn't that the DAMNEDEST thing? I laugh myself to tears at the humor of it all.)

The opposite of the search for ultimate truth is enjoying existence for no reason, relaxing for no reason. It's possible to let yourself feel the joy and satisfaction you think you'll get once you "know the answers," now, sans answers. It's the easiest thing in the world. It doesn't require anything. Ready? Smile! That's it. Boom, "enlightenment." All there is.

Or you can continue searching desperately and withhold the love. That's an option too.

As to whether anyone is "enlightened," I have no way of knowing, but I don't think so. There's no enlightenment separate from celebrating existence, as far as I'm concerned, no special state, that is. And I don't find comparing myself to other homo sapiens, trying to get something from them by watching their videos or reading their books, to be very helpful or kind to myself. Sure, they have interesting things to say sometimes, but I mistrust "gurus" very much.

Anyway, those are my thoughts, such as they are. Thank you for providing me a space to vomit them up.

No Knowing,

Thanks for posting that. That was a very good read, as was the derailed thread you linked.

You made a lot of good points that resonated with my own experience.

I can only hope that someday I can come to a strategy similar to your own.

I am trying to be ever more open minded AND skeptical - DMT has taught me this. . . . yet, I find that as time passes, my ideas of what is important, what is real, what is truth, what is good, is evolving on some fronts.

I don't think I've ever believed in an ultimate truth. If it exists it seems to me that puny minds such as ours were not evolved to perceive or understand it. Perhaps I am wrong. I don't know.

And I'm glad. It's good to have some questions. A lot of questions. Unanswered questions. Good to have some mystery remaining . . .

Thanks again for your post - I will watch it and the replies with interest.

Good post.

There's one much, much worse outcome than quitting on the search of an ultimate truth, and that's believing you have found it.

Psychedelics can be excellent tools for many purposes, and most of them have to do with knowing your self. That's perhaps the only place you can find something that rings as an ultimate truth, and it's always an ephemeral truth since your self is constantly mutating. That's why the search never ends, because you are never the same.

And about the not-self, I think what psychedelics do is helping to dispel illusions of knowledge. They renew the questions, change perspectives, kick your ass out of any comfy chair you have managed to somehow sit in. So realizing there's no ultimate knowledge we can get a hold of might be one of the serious, big lessons that psychedelics bring.

So I would say congratulations.

Nice thread!
mmmm utimate truth, thats a biggie.
one of my theories is that everyone knows the ultimate truth, like it"s encoded in our DNA. But due to our human infallabilities we can"t grasp it completely. Mankind evolves with certain key ethics like thou shalt not kill which may be relative to this truth. i don"t know.
People go through their lives and have moments of clarity and times when you get a millisecond of "wow it all makes sense!" but you can"T put it down in words (well i can"t!) cos its just too wow!! . Little exasperating flashes of THE ULTIMATE.
I think, as i guess a lot of people do, that it will all become clear when i shuffle off this mortal coil. I imagine if i knew the ultimate truth in my current state i, and my universe, would implode. But it sure is fun theorizing!
The ultimate truth comes ultimately , but what about the penultimate truth?

As I mentioned in that other thread, you speak with a clarity that demonstrates genuine insight and this post is another example of that. Would you mind describing the moment when that perceptual 'shift' occurred which left you with the ability to think in non-dualistic terms? Did you feel that the search ended entirely, or would it be more accurate to say that it seemed to open out and expose other developmental trajectories?

I ask as the nuts and bolt of the process of awakening, the bare techniques and phenomenological descriptions of various states and attainments, are a major part of my life and practice. In my experience so far, awakening can be best described as a process since, although there are certain major 'landmarks' along the way - the names and criteria for attainments differ depending on which tradition you're working within - it seems to just continue to develop in a fractal-like fashion. Even after attaining such states as Nirodha Samapatti and The Vision of No-Difference, from Buddhist and magickal models respectively, there are still ongoing perceptual shifts occurring which lead to a qualitative differences in the way this flesh and blood body experiences the world.

Anyway, I'm rambling...back to the OP...

My story is fairly complicated and drawn-out, but to cut it a bit shorter: The search for an ultimate truth came to an end for me the moment I realized that there was no longer any experiential distinction between subject and object. Duality ceased to exist and all that remained, and has continued as such albeit with further 'refinements' or 'cleaning', was this entirely unified sense field.

Since then, my practice is mainly focused on observing and collapsing the continuing mental fabrications from which our entire experience is built, and also working with those fabrications through practices such as "tsa lung" and "tummo".

Psychedelics and entheogens, for me, had always been a sort of 'back door' to mystical or spiritual experiences. I'd experienced amazing things through experimenting with drugs when I was younger and also through an apparent natural inclination towards altered states of consciousness, but I set out to see whether or not I could reproduce those states through meditation which is pretty much what led me to get seriously involved with magick and meditation when I was about 20. Nowadays though, I consider entheogens, tryptamines in particular, to be significant in that may offer one access to what the Tibetan Buddhists call the Bardos, which, from a developmental point-of-view, could prove to be important in helping other sentient beings to end their suffering.

I may have gone off on a tangent, I'm afraid I just smoked a fantastic lump of weed just before I started this...

You are probably familiar with this already, but since others may not be... Timothy Leary wrote a really interesting book about this, called "The Psychedelic Experience". It basically takes the Tibetan book of the dead and it's process for experiencing death and rebirth, and reinterprets it as a guided psychedelic journey. I haven't tried incorporating any of it myself since returning to psychedelics, but it could be very interesting to experiment with, particularly in regards to DMT/Ayahuasca (which seem to frequently have heavy death themes anyway).

@Non Dua Natura...I would say my first Godhead experience (also the first time using DMT) changed my dualistic thinking forever. Immediately after this experience I went down a dark road of addictions and compulsions. And through hindsight, I can see that I was trying to hide from the intensity of my new thought patterns and being.

I cleaned up and got my life on the right track and slowly came to realize how much my mind had changed during these months of recovery and growth. Sometimes I think this may have been the only response I could have given to the situation because that Godhead experience shattered everything I ever thought about myself and reality. Allowing my mind and body to heal while slowly coming to grasp with the new modes of thinking was still intense to bear. But, maybe, my mind couldn't have handled this intensity immediately after a 10 minute DMT trip and the revelations would have engulfed me. So I'm happy to have gone on the long path of integration I did and to be where I am now.

Which is, a place of ever increasing personal power and awareness. I find myself changing myself for the better daily and I perceive more of reality, daily, also. My willpower over my self(and sometimes others [scary I know]) amazes me with each new day. With each day reality also seems fuller and more intense. Both within my senses and through 6th sense perceptions.

In regards to ending the search, the search ended within my mind. I no longer sought amazing thoughts or "secrets" of reality. (Although I still experience these). But I now search for new things to do or ways to function. Simply I would say my focus has gone from inner, to both outer and inner simultaneously (non-dual)

Definitely worth a read, I didn't fully appreciate Leary's work until recently but to seriously work with "The Psychedelic Experience" you need to go from at least 350 mics and above to access what he describes. I posted a report while loosely working with this model on another site which I'll maybe post on here sometime, I didn't access the Bardo states but, through previous meditative experience combined with acid, I came to understand the Clear Light much better.

Nice, I can relate to the often harsh process of integration too, the archetypal "Dark Night of the Soul". It's very, very, very common for this to happen after your first experiential (rather than simply intellectual) 'awakening' since the entire edifice of a seperate, permanent "I" gets blown to shit in that instant. Unfortunately, most modern approaches don't take it into account and people end up stuck in Chapel Perilous for years at a time...

I really like your descriptions of how things are for you now, and can definitely relate to what you've said above so I hope that you can continue to make progress. You sound like a genuinely good guy and I appreciate you taking the time to say more about your adventures.

If you'd like to experience life even more clearly, more vividly and intimately, then simply notice the senses as they operate of their own accord. Notice how there is no actual, experiential distinction between the sense of hearing and the sound heard, other than as a false duality created by a mind conditioned to think in terms of "I" and "not-I". Easier said than done, perhaps, but, in my experience, incredibly worthwhile.

@Non Dua Natura Yea wow I know exactly what you are talking about with the hearing. And how you are experiencing the sound rather than hearing it. I have also experienced something similar with the other senses.

Chapel Perilous is a concept I have studied extensively. I wonder if you are familiar with the writings of Antero Alli on the subject. His description of this state and how to get out of it helped me alot in the beginning of my journey.

We seem to be on similar paths in the awakening of new modes of awareness. I'm looking forward to hearing more about your own journey and how your experience had deepened and become less dual.

I relate 100%. Life is such a mystery. When I first tried psychedelics (LSD) I was positive that it was the key to life. I ended up running away and following the Grateful Dead in search of as many different psychedelics as I could find. I read Mckenna, Robert Wilson, Stan Groff, Ken Wilbur etc . I ended up doing more psychedelics than I could have ever dreamed of, but I still felt empty...maybe even more than before.

Psychedelics do indeed seem to propose more questions than they answer. I ended up taking a dark turn into heavier narcotics too after so much deep exploration at too young an age.

I ended up taking a long break from psychedelics and only recently started exploring again.Psychedelics have helped me find a new appreciation for this great mystery. They don't have all the answers, but they do give you a glimpse into whats possible beyond normal waking reality. Amazing tools if used wisely. I'm extremely grateful for them.


[]Deace

You're absolutely correct in what you've said about noticing this with the other senses, it's the natural state and to be able to 'tune in' to that is an incredibly effective way to practice.

I'm familiar with Antero Alli's work, I like his style and the way he works with the Eight-Circuit model. I've found very few writers who've dealt with the spiritual/psychological crisis as well as a guy called Daniel Ingram, his book "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha" was instrumental in my practice and I recommend it to any serious meditators. He claimed to be an Arahat at one point, which is basically like claiming to have attained the same as what Gotama attained, but his view has changed since he wrote that book. He's a friend of mine and is a really cool guy, but I'd still recommend his book even if that weren't the case.

Yeah, synchronicity aplenty and so I look forward to sharing our adventures in this splendiferous psychedelic convivium!