I am sorry to be pedantic but haven"t you just made a blanket statement about what DMT can do and are therefore being a bit misleading? (but if you are right about the life after death thing i am very happy for you and the rest of humanity!)

I have no desire to argue and will not deny you you experience.
However I will stand by what I said.

I have also heard people say that DMT absolutely showed them that there is no life after death.

I do not consider testimony, nor opinions of things we have not experienced (like death, which is absolute in the sense that the dead are dead, not legally, medically or clinically dead, but simply dead) to be of any use for me. Nor do i consider experience to be informative in any absolute sense, for I have experienced far too many contradictory states and things to be absolute about anything other than to state that some things are absolutely unknowable until they are experienced first hand.

That being said I did allow a friend to provide some DMT to another fellow who was mourning the suicide of his friend some time ago, suggestion was used to facilitate the perception of the existence of his friend, whom he claimed to see, and then after that he was as peace and no longer mourned the suicide of his friend. I will admit it was a blatant psychological trick in this case, we deliberately manipulated his perception using DMT to pull him out of a state of severe depression and it worked very well. I admit, I and others have done this kind of this with many psychedelics and many people for their own well being and therapeutic benefit, some might consider it a bit shady, but I feel that psychedelic states can afford tremendous progress in regards to mental and emotional problems and I am aware of how to use suggestion and am also aware that a psychedelic state can essentially evoke belief systems in terms of experience, regardless of those belief systems, provided that the person is open to the experience and suggestion. I do not however hypnotize these people and I do not work with certain types of people because of the inherent risks of such work.

Not at all. I'm making a statement about what I have learned from dmt. I did not and would not attempt to say what it can or cannot do for others. My point is, dmt may provide different lessons for different people. Also, dosage, set/setting, state of mind can vary greatly with each person. To sum it up, I disagree with someone attempting to tell someone else what dmt can or cannot do. This is just my opinion. Not trying to start an argument, here.

No different than what religion can do for people. If it helps you and your are satisfied with it, score.

DMT can provide details to the afterlife, whether or not it is correct or not is another topic. Each person is left to their own devices when it comes to that sort of thing.

What DMT can or cannot do is subjective to each individual who experiences it. So please stop trying to tell everyone what it can or cannot do. You simply have not grasped the scope of this drug, if there are 6+ billion people on this planet and each person were to experience DMT then there MAY or MAY NOT be 6+ billion different answers to 6+ billion different questions, so in essence you know nothing save for what it has taught YOU and YOU ALONE!

So far from what i have read no one is disagreeing that what you get from it is subjective.

If someone says it can do something that just means its possible. Now i would agree that doesnt mean it will. Just that it can.

Although any one with hopes that it can, i would say don't go into it with any expectations.

Myself as well as others have had experiences that are difficult to ignore as answers to life after death. Now that is subjective, but it still happens. I personally try to keep an open mind about it, but i still had these extremely strong experiences that are difficult to ignore.

No one knows what dmt, afterlife, this life ect is anyways. So to end, if its subjective then live and let live. I do believe this thread is about keeping a promise to not do drugs so let us stay on topic.

Pehaps making claims that dmt shows anything is filled with problematic subjective opinion. If you cannot prove, via measureable and tangible evidence a claim of a subjective experience, then it is not knowledge, nor evidence, nor proof, just opinion and belief.

DMT does not actually show anyone anything, it is like a lense, your glasses may focus some details for you, but they are passive and how you look has more to do with what you end up finding than the lense. Moreover in this case experiences can mislead.

I recall one man who under the influence of 4oh-dmt made all sorts of interesting claims but could not prove any of them and was later proven wrong, for he made dated predictions about the end of the world.

The point is, just because you experience it and believe it does not make it true, especially when it pertains to any form of psychedelic experience.

I dont believe anyone claimed dmt to show them truth, just answers that they feel works for them.

If you’re lucky, DMT may lead to different ways of thinking in general.
The notion of living and then dying is very much part of the materialist paradigm.

If all that exists is consciousness, and if consciousness has always existed, then there is no “you” and there is no “living” and there is no “dying”.

You may think of yourself as a physical self, but physicality and “selfness” might just be abstractions.

“You” exist in the eternal now. You have never experienced anything other than the eternal now. You will never experience anything other than existence in the present moment. For some that’s comforting, for others not so much.

I agree, but isn’t everything ultimately subjective?

What evidence do you have that your experience of everyday reality isn’t just a sustained “hallucination” being had by something other than what you call yourself?

Contrast.

If reality is hallucination, then the word hallucination becomes undefined and meaningless.
Hallucinatory phenomena is by definition in contrast to reality in terms of it being A inconsistent and B unsubstantiated by the experience of others, ergo not measurable, while reality is measurable.

If reality is a measurable, consistent and substantiated hallucination, then the term hallucination becomes meaningless. Moreover without evidence, measurable evidence that reality is a hallucination, there is no reason to suppose that hypothesis is tenable. It is like saying how do you know your mother's real name is DGHTS and she and nobody else happens to know it. It becomes utterly meaningless, even if it occurred to you in a DMT breakthrough that her name was DGHTS.

Likewise if reality was subjective it would be self subject, but if perception and experience are subjective, and consistently so, this evidences objective reality exists otherwise some experience would lack subjectivity.

the imaginative hypothesis of "if it was a dream how would you know" becomes meaningless in light of contrast of what we call dreams and the lack of evidence for reality being a dream state. one need only compare it to a dream state to confirm that the notion is untenable.

Objective reality is a hypothesis constructed by (subjective) consciousness.

The idea of an external objective reality is consistent with the hypothesis, but there is no way to test it let alone prove it.

The only way a claim that consciousness is subjective can be made is if objective reality exists as a foundation for the subjectivity, thus any concept of subjective or objective invokes objective reality.

I think you are all me and I am you, which is we. We should do this again sometime.

Wait, what's the topic of this thread again?

davemt, you posted this question on a forum dedicated to DMT. So of course the general consensus is going to be a resounding "yes". The real question is, do you want to try DMT? And when I ask this, I mean the current "you". Not the "you" from a few years ago. Hell, I promised myself at the age of 18 that I would inject heroin into my arms constantly to make absolutely sure that I never saw the age of 25. Then, after a while, I decided that it was a promise I no longer wanted to keep. People change over time. The "you" from a few years ago decided that psychoactive compounds were not serving you well at the time, and this may have been accurate. But the current "you" is questioning whether or not psychedelics may have something more to offer, something greater than a few crazy nights and an excessive amount of euphoria. Perhaps you posted this question as a means of validating your desire? Perhaps not, but I think it is a possibility that deserves consideration.

For me, DMT and other psychedelics have been an extremely beneficial tool in "growing up", enjoying my life, and developing my spirituality. I am fairly certain that I would have kept the promise that I made at the tender and naive young age of 18, had it not been for the completely new perspectives that I happened to stumble upon when dabbling in the world of naturally occurring psychedelics. Psychedelics have provided me at times with what seemed like "proof" that there is absolutely without a doubt, an afterlife. But they have also helped me develop into the kind of person who is able to take those experiences and say "okay, that's one possibility, but there are others that must be taken into consideration as well. I don't know for sure, I probably won't ever know for sure, and it would be unreasonable for me to pretend like I do."

I would agree, that your intention is a little specific and could potentially be a recipe for disappointment. If you go into the experience expecting to find a black and white answer to the question of whether or not there is an afterlife, I think it's pretty unlikely that you'll come out with a definitive answer. You still might return with something worthwhile, but probably not a yes/no answer to such a specific question. I think a lot of the time when people do return from a psychedelic experience with such a specific answer, it is often merely a verification of their preexisting beliefs or suspicions. I could be completely wrong about that part, but I can only speak from experience and opinion.

If you do decide to do some exploring of DMT's potential, I would advise that you go into the journey with more of a neutral exploratory approach, to find out if maybe this particular altered state could be beneficial to you in some way.

I hope that at least some of this post has made sense and I also hope that you find what you are looking for, davemt, regardless of where you find it.

Nor am i. All said and done i was probably being a bit picky and i agree with the different things for different people statement.

To the OP i think that maybe you had already made up your mind to make the plunge when you made your post asking the question, and are seeking a bit of encouragement.



I dont see how you could feel that you have let yourself down if you have gone into the experience with the right intentions.

I can share from personal sacred experience that the entitys i have met were not just trypped out visuals, but a reuinion of sorts. They appear so impossibly foreign, yet they speak infinite telepathic knowledge which reminds me that i am them, i am the one.

Yours is a semantic argument which doesn’t really address the issue.

When I have the time, I’ll explore this further in a new thread. How does “The Improbability of Hyperspace, Part II” sound?

it sounds excellent

I can relate the the OP's topic of going through a sort of calloused stagnation in life - feeling that it all is pointless and futile, and then suddenly feeling open to the possibilities that everything in the universe has not been explained away already… the hope that there is something outside of my preconceived notions.

I would argue that psychedelics have long helped me 'pop the cork' and see the world anew, however as many others have posted in this thread, I wouldn't expect answers so much as more interesting questions.

Regarding the fear of death, I have long since stopped worrying. Either there will be nothing which I won't experience anyway, or more likely (imho) there is something, and even more likely something so weird and unexpected that speculating on it is about as useful as speculating what DMT is like before you try it.


It may be useful to ask - "Who is it that dies?"

Even within the materialism conceptual model, the identity of 'you' is a sort of illusion. This is pretty far out, but it is well within accepted science --- if the universe began in a big bang, then everything in existence is a continuation of that big bang. You and I are the big bang, just further down the road. We separate observable objects in the universe into nouns - this is a tree, this is a rock, this is a person -- but these distinctions are linguistic. According to materialism, all that is is that primordial bang, changing forms every moment and rolling down the line.

So who dies when you die? The clay of the universe changes shape as it always does.

You could say "Well, thats all well and good, but what happens to me? The observer that is the center of this experience, what happens to me?" I of course don't know (neither do you), but I choose to relax and go with the flow. Hasn't served me wrong yet.

In my current personal conceptual model, the 'me' that i would recognize as me will likely disappear when I die. But it has already disappeared millions of times in my life. The 'me' that existed when I was 3 years old is gone forever. I am not even the same physical matter that i was back then. We are all constantly changing. Only the pattern persists, and even that changes. All is change.

So…. don't worry, be merry, and for god's sake, puff tough. Hasn't let me down yet