Wow - everyone, this is perfect. I love your comments.
Here's some motivation:
This is a kind of experiment, an exercise to collect and compile any and all insights/ideas/kernels of wisdom that human beings feel and conceive as alien or transcendental, from the Wholly Other or God, from the collective consciousness of the species or mother Gaia, or from the wizards and elves and beings made of light in hyperspace - I'm interested in every specific detail. I want to understand DMT in a much larger context heretofore denied and considered impossible.
It's the old question,
"Well, what the hell is it?"
It's DMT. You vaporize this stuff.
"Is it safe?"
You guys remember McKenna's immortal words: "yeah, unless you're afraid of death by astonishment!".
---ten minutes later---
WHAT THE HELL WAS
THAT???
hahahahaha
Think of a child asking its father about a table "what is it really?"
A Table!
"Well yeaa I know that - but I mean, what
is it really?"
We have investigated the mechanism of action by which DMT works on the brain - this is what Rick Strassman did in the 90's. [Source =
http://www.amazon.com/DM...periences/dp/0892819278] We learned a great deal from that experiment.
But I think that we together can formulate a mind template of the compound.
Just as psilocybin has its own
mind, so too I believe is DMT
like that.
Consider the next time you are out for a walk, or even if you're sitting there in front of your computer -
simply look around and I want you to notice something in particular. And that is
every object you see was once an idea. This lamp, this bottle, this torch lighter,
this glass vapor genie, this trash can, this light bulb,
this carpet, these walls, this apartment, this city, this pavement, this concrete, my god the roads!
the signposts, the symbols on those signposts, the emblem on your work shirt, your belt, your shoes,
your watch, your glasses, your books, the skyscrapers, the buildings, the waffle house,
the countries themselves, their borders and so-called nationalities -
The point is all these things are the physical expressions, or manifestations, of ideas having condensed into existence, either in the form of symbols or concrete objects. Language too is an idea, you see. Concepts condense.
And I am not the first to say this - I am not claiming originality. But, I want to know if people find this feeling familiar and reasonable.
The Tibetans have known this. Ancient Chinese have known this. This is the heart of religion. This is what it's all about.
The universe is mind. (or consciousness, call it whatever suits you)
Now, taking this a step further - all those symbols and objects aforementioned
are what they are because
Mind itself is in the Matter. Mind is the Matter! We fancy moving things through the air with our minds. Don't we understand? This is what we've always done. When I reach for my bottle, I have intent. I move my hand. I have no idea how. I contact the bottle. Where did this bottle come from? How was it made? Why was it made? Who thought to try it? What singularity of mind out there had this
idea-form, the mental visualization of the object to be?
Hence the question: What is the true origin of an idea?
It seems traceable to nowhere except everywhere.
Here's the general idea:
Human civilization is the result of monkey visualization. Generations of mentation compounding on the last, each succeeding flow of invention more complex than the last. Language has been the stuff of which ideas are made, themselves the stuff by which information is connected together from innumerable singularities of consciousness. The longer this process runs, the more sophisticated and incredible our collective imagination becomes. We are not about to depart for the stars. We are already there. Here, within the cusp of a hyper-connected age of information compression, this is an epoch in which we begin to understand telepathy and the concomitant discovery of a power more immense than anything we have ever known before. And that is humanity's complete capacity to modulate virtual reality.
Think of humanity as a singular mind.
Consider the mushroom as much a mind as one considers humanity as a collective species.
I suggest the same is true with DMT, Salvia, Mescaline, LSD, and so forth:
Is it helpful to think of them as minds of their own?
I really think so. Ever since I've made the effort to acknowledge the origins of ideas in places and objects around me, it's become very clear just how vast the human mind is. It's very difficult to pin down, perhaps impossible, the origin of a thought, because the very conditions that gave rise to that thought can never be duplicated. To express this point, hear the following wisdom of Heraclitus, when he said, "One can never walk through the same stream twice".
But his disciple was wiser. He said, "One can never walk through the same stream once".
This is because your feet, legs, body, eyes, brain is changing as much as the steam itself is changing.
Do two aggregates of motion ever really make contact? What do we mean by contact?
See, this is the stuff I'm talking about. Very difficult to say.
Anyway, that's the idea of this whole thing. Though it seems irresponsible and immature to think one could possibly come to any respectable image of the mind of entheogens, it still seems fun to try.
Can we human beings map dmt's mental topography?
Are we human beings?
Genesis is Now, the Mind is Incarnate.