Okay I'm really not sure how to begin or even what to say really..and I am not trying to offend anyone but ideas will clash on this topic..

I guess I have been around too many people that are blind believers of something we are calling "spirituality", which has become nothing more than a ridiculous fad for many individuals that I have been observing over the past few years.

I am guilty of the buy-in as well, believing that energy, chakras, crystals and other such things were a very real phenomena, whether you actually bought into it or not. That there was an underlying essence of truth to these things, to the metaphysical in relation to what we experience on our physical plane. Why though?

What I'm really trying to say or ask me fellow psychonauts, is to what end are we fooling ourselves and tricking our mind into accepting such things as..well..credible?

I would like to point out that anyone that wants to respond can spare me the philosophical explanation into what spirituality actually encompasses..as I am more than aware it is so varied and individualized for each of us..and what I am referring to when using the term is the ideas I mentioned before, such as the belief in a soul, interconnectedness of everything in the universe, higher consciousness, sacred geometry, chakras, energy..you name it. Is this nothing more than a made up RELIGION of sorts? Something we have to channel our beliefs to in order to process what some chemicals have allowed us to experience with the power of the mind?

I don't get it, psychedelics are beautiful introspective tools, allowing change and growth in ways we never felt possible before..but why do people think they can grasp any truth from them? I feel like people are way to apt to accept their hallucinations.

Please help me understand, this has been bugging me for a very long time.

DMT experiences can have a certain weight of reality to them (or at least seem to). The "spiritual" things that I'm a believer in, I am because of my own experiences, but not because I read about it in some new age book or something like that. With crystals for example, I don't remember where I've posted about this before, but I discovered my chakras (and incidentally the power of some crystals) all by accident.

When I take DMT, there is a large energy component to it (it seems to be a component on which the entire experience is derived), and through some practice and meditation, I've learned to harness the energy to some extent while sober. It's a very physical feeling thing. It has a force to it that moves my limbs autonomously upon contact. Through much experimentation I've found that this energy is directly connected with attention as well as breath. One day while I was studying one of my crystals, holding it up close to my face so I could examine it, my arm began oscillating forcefully back and forth as if the crystal had a magnetic attraction/repulsion with my face.

So of course I come to theorize that perhaps it was interacting with my third eye chakra, so I decide to hold up the crystal to other parts of my body to see if I can elicit the same energetic effect. It doesn't really do anything when I place it just anywhere, but when I put it in front of my throat, I got a very large effect, as well as with the solar plexus and sacral chakra. The only chakra it really didn't seem to want to work with was my heart chakra. When I placed it in front of that chakra, nothing happened. There was absolutely no energetic activity like it was a dead spot. I tried different crystals...nothing. As I sat and thought about chakras and what I had heard about them, I recalled that the chakras were all associated with different glands and organs.

So "there it was" I thought. If the chakras are aligned with the different organs and not perfectly straight down the spine, then the heart chakra would be offset to the left. So I took my crystal, held it in the center of my chest: nothing happens. I hold it on the right side of my chest: nothing happens. I hold it on the left side of my chest: eureka! It was like turning on a battery. My arm began forcefully oscillating back and forth. It is because of this experience that I believe in chakras. I feel I can say that it goes beyond subconscious auto-suggestion or something of the sort because according to my prior beliefs, as far as I knew all the chakras went straight down the spine (as it is so often depicted) and so by that logic, my arm would have been oscillating where I had initially believed my heart chakra to be, but that just wasn't the case at all. I think several days had elapsed even before I made the connection with the offset organ.

So this is a very long example and way of saying that to me, what is spiritual is what I experience directly. A lot of new age ideas are incredibly turn-offish to me, but others that connect to my personal experience in such significant ways feel inherently more plausible to me. So yes, I think there is a kind of religion aspect to the new age spirituality movement, and there can be some dogmatic followers, but it's a bit of a different case to have direct experience with certain elements. I don't need the "Ancient Alien" guys on television to tell me that there is something significant about Egypt with my innumerable Egyptian visions that rank among the most important and meaningful to me in their own right.

to tell you guys the truth i really am not into chakras or crystals
neither do i believe any much truths experienced in the psychadelic experiences ,

for me its quite simple as a lover of beauty i like to see it as much as possible and this is where psychadelics come in , i really have no other purpose when it comes to psychadelics especially DMT except experiencing multi diemensional patterns , colours , feelings and life

i had no spiritual beliefs a few years back and only when i met my Guru ( sounds strange i kno ) did i realize the spiritual truth , no psychadelics could do it for me , at that time i had only done LSD & mushrooms , more than a few hundred times , so i considered myself pretty solid , yet a conversation with the divine for about 5 minutes in life changed me forever , i never met my Guru after that 5 minutes ever in my life again ,

the conversation i had with my Guru was not a conversation any human could have with another human , the conversation was not of words but magic , when i saw him he lifted a bucket of leaves and threw it in the air , these leaves turned into words and they floated around me , everything that could be said or discussed was disscussed in those 5 minutes , the words were english but they were not language , not the language humans would use to communicate , it was beyond the greatest poetry , it was magic with words which meant everything and nothing at the same time , you could say my Guru was beyond what a madmen can be , yet he was totally controlled and equipoised in madness , he was not some fool in an asylum , he was The Divine Soul doing its magic in the jungle , sitting in a cave i found him angered at my intrusion ,

he spoke to me words beyond language , he read my thoughts , he did the impossible , he spoke to the soul inside me , he read my mind and communicated the answer before i asked the question , baffled in disbelief and utter amazement , i knew i had found God , he spoke to me reading me and my friends mind like it was nothing , talking not to us but directly to our thoughts , mind and Soul and then dissappeared deeper into the jungle , not wasting anymore of his precious time he was gone as soon as we had found him , giving us the most valuable teaching of our lives

for me personally him speaking was like a psychadelic trip , the world around me dissappeared , i could only remember his eyes ,

this has been the single most profound event ever in my life , psychadelics bring me to similar understandings yet , this conversation with the Divine stands always true , in the harshest of times it is my sail , it is my boat , it is my food and it is my sea , it is all there is for me , i could not have hoped for more

Spirituality is probably the way to get the things you want through unordinary means. Maybe its the way of the unexpected, yet suspected.

I have a certain wish since kid... Back then I believed in christianity, I believed that it can help me, but... well, it didn't help me at all, so I dumped it. Since then I started believing only myself and will do it until I don't reach what I willed for. The wish looks quite impossible for this realm, yet I believe that there is a possible way to bring it here. I don't know how I'm going to do it, I don't even want to ask why am I sacrificing so much of me to reach it, I just know that I want to reach it, to see it, to enjoy it. Through my way fulfilling my wish, I've stumbled upon hundreds of "spiritual" things, yet I still find my spirit roaming around, searching for it, crying out for it, but still nothing. I've went so far in my way that now I cant even stop myself, I just can't stop going forward, I continue breaking every bound that prevents me from following my spirit.

In the end, if I find it, I will call my path "spirituality", If I don't find it, I'm going to break this meaning of spirituality to nothing more than just a fake lie leading you to nowhere.

i think it really all boils down to one thing.
and thats belief if you truly believe in something and then put your faith in that thing it becomes real, if your the only person who holds a particular set of beliefs people will call you mad, it doesnt make them any less real to you though. but when those beliefs are shared by many they gain a certain kind of power. psychedelics seem to be very good at breaking down social cultural beliefs that society and governments seem to form and push onto people, and open people up to alternative views of reality. now i suppose if you believe everything you read you'd be stupid and gullable but if you disbelieve all of it your ignorant, so you need to strike a balance and find the things that resonates with you and the people aswell. so its upto you to make that choice.
which also happened to be the resounding message from one of the most intense spiritual/psychedelic experiences ive had was simply a beautiful angelic feminine spirit saying those words to me

'make the right choice'

Ive spoke to paranoid schizophrenics who believed that the devil lives in their kitchen or that theres a higher power controlling their thoughts. When i spoke with these people it really resonated with me because it sounded like a permanent psychedelic freak out to me and i felt like i'd been to the same place where they permanently reside. So if psychedelics can induce bad psychotic trips maybe they can also induce good psychotic trips (if that makes sense) blissful insanity kind of thing. Spirituality to me is like believing in ghosts, even if you see one you might just have experienced a chemical brain thing that tricked you into seeing or feeling something. We can never be sure of anything unless it can be measured and recorded.

Ive probably went off topic but what i'm trying to say is that believing in something unprovable is akin to seeing devils in your kitchen.

I actually like what you said, I feel like the brain in accordance with psychedelic experiences tricks us into buying into certain things..what is real to you is real to you but that has never been good enough for me. Believing in such things is no different than believing in something like Christianity which works for tons of people in making them feel like they are living a better life..

I'm a stubborn skeptic.