I have been following Martin W. Ball's work for some time now, and I found this article fascinating. http://www.realitysandwich.com/terence_dmt

In my opinion, it makes a lot of sense.

Was Terence only seeing a reflection of himself when he saw "self transforming machine elves"? Was he only projecting his own ego on the experience?.. How many others have smoked spice and only projected bits of their own egos into the experience?..

I have read reports from people who "make contact" with entities after smoking spice, but to me it seems somewhat unbelievable that there are entities outside of ourselves, as all is One, and there is no such thing as duality. SWIM has broken through and has not seen these "entities".

I am very interested in everyone's opinion.

I think the entities are real. For a long time I didn't but I've been losing my fear of dmt and I think I've made contact. They are probably waiting for you on another level.

I think 99% of it is completely imagined by the user. Not real at all. But there's that 1% that is debatable. The reason I say that is because SWIM has had contact with God through the use of ayahuasca, and it was by no means possible that it was imagined, I believe. In that vision God predicted many things in the future with 100% complete accuracy. These were things that were impossible for any human to predict. It’s possible that it was all pure coincidence, but that is so unlikely as to be almost unbelievable. So, that 1%, who knows. But 99% is for sure purely imagined.

But then again, HOW DO I KNOW YOU ARE REAL?

How do I know I’m not going to wake up someday in an alien world and realize life on earth was just some crazy tripped out dream and none of it was ever real?

I dunno..Im not so big on Martin Ball..I got about half way through that article and it just seemed the same old rehashed thing he has said before about trancending ego..thats the thing that is unapealing to me about him..Martin Ball is all about trancending the ego, and dismisses everything else..ego is not everything, but non-ego is not everything either..

Mckenna ideas have always resonated with my own experiences..I get the idea that Martin Ball didnt really grasp what Mckenna was ever really saying when I read that..His critique of Mckenna is biased ad unfair..Mckenna was a poet and spoke with such great eloquence..he was speaking on the topic of those things which for most ae unspeakable..metaphore is all we have..what else is the guy sopposed to do? You wouldnt take a poet literally listening to everything he says, and hewouldnt expect you to..so why would Mckenna? Surely he was expecting us to be smarter than that..

Id say to Martin Ball..take a deeper look into what Mckenna was REALLY saying..What I got from that aticle is a shallow critique of a mans entire lifes body of work, that has soooooo much more meaning imbedded in it than what Martin Ball has outlined.

I dont have anything against Martin Ball..I just find him to only represent a part of the entire picture..

The confusion of Terence or the confusion of Martin?

I used to listen to Martin Ball on “Entheogenic Evolution” (his podcast). He has become more and more radical in his views as time has progressed, to the point where he now claims to know “The Absolute Truth”.

He seems to be convinced that what he believes (everything is fractal energy, or something like that) is the only truth, and if you don’t share his beliefs then you’re obviously wrong. And he’s not subtle or gentle in stating this.

He has stated that he has never seen entities during his entheogenic journeys, and so he concludes that those who do are obviously deluded in some way. He has an agenda, so read what he has to say with a critical eye.

While it may be true that ultimately “we are all one”, if we accept this, and entities we encounter are manifestations of some “higher mind”, then we must also acknowledge that all beings, including other human beings we encounter in everyday life, are also manifestations of the higher mind. So how do we explain our everyday, non DMT-influenced, experience of life?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that claiming “all is one” doesn’t disprove the reality of aliens. If it did, it would also disprove the reality of beings in general, including us. (Wouldn’t it?)

Personally, I’ve seen many entities in my journeys, and they are generally beyond description and comprehension. They are, I am certain, beyond my mind’s capacity to generate, even with the assistance of a powerful mind-altering substance such as DMT. The experiences I have had make it self-evidently clear that there are highly intelligent beings “out there”. I obviously have no proof of this beyond my subjective experiences, but I also have no proof beyond my subjective experiences that everyday consensus reality is real.

"He has become more and more radical in his views as time has progressed, to the point where he now claims to know “The Absolute Truth”."

Yeah I heard him say that as well..that was when I realy lost interest in him..

Maybe this realms aren't supposed to be so strange and faraway to humans as we assume they are? Sometimes I think that whatever is on the "other side" is not so astonished by our presence as we are astonished by it's very existence. I'm not saying "hyperspace" or "intense hallucinations" are not a big deal... they are. But I'm not so sure if we should be so astonished... after all we are only creatures of this planet ingesting natural chemicals that are on this planet.

We don't need to cast mysterious spells, we don't need to know specific information... we just need to ingest and wait.

My descriptions of the entities I see reflect me, yes, because I pick the side of them which is recognizable to me. However, my words will NEVER actually capture the nature of the entities I have encountered. I think Terence's description of them is his own, of course, but I equally believe the entities are real.

In the beginning when I read the "his high nasal voice indicates he is not energetically centered and speaking truth from his heart" -part, i facepalmed. This whole thing made me wonder-has martin read or listened to anything of his besides these two mediocre videos? Or has he considered that maybe thats his natural voice he's had for life before denouncing his admittedly personal ideas as trivial and nonsensical since, according to Ball, their not from the heart chakra which is number one in Bell's eyes?

oh boy i guess ill jot down thoughts as i go through some of this monster

TM-"A friend of mine says, "That's the sound of the radio-entelechy of your soul tearing out of the organic envelope" (audience laughs more and T joins in with a nervous laugh). Which is what it sounds like. It sounds like your body has just been wadded up and thrown into a corner and now you're a radio signal approximately four light seconds in diameter spreading out through an alien universe."

Ball goes on to draw these conclusions from this metaphor (along with abolishing the concept of the soul (0.0) with the Entheological Paradigm Model he's toeting):
MB-"Terence again tips his hand and demonstrates the deep level of disassociation that DMT causes him. He completely disassociates from his body, and with it, consensual reality, and envisions his "soul," (a concept that is dismissed within the Entheological Paradigm as a clear product of ego projection) as leaving this world for an alien universe. Terence finds DMT to be alienating from reality."

It's littered with these oddly construed mis-interpretations and stretched conclusions. Along with vagueness like- "By comparison, DMT is more an infinite spectrum of colors and geometry and patterns that can be visually hyper-distinct and appear in mind-boggling detail"-that make me wonder about Balls dmt experience (as if thats all it is) and real motives at trying to rip apart terence in every little aspect. "he acts like the tone is universal when it certainly is not".OK, What is your point?

Sometimes it seemed as though this was a poorly attempted backlash at Terence due to his comments on how he preferred dmt to what he considered was the less spectacular 5meodmt-balls favorite.

He says that terence only ever experienced the elves on dmt and nothing else, while always failing to comply with their request to "do what they're doing" and sing the language. Wrong bally boy, you weren't listening or reading.. Gasp* ,Maybe hes not in his center Theres audio and books in many places of terence describing the experience of singing this language, and other oddities of the dmt experience beyond elves and eschatons, which is the obvious focal point of their work and therefore gets the most attention. Thats all i can read of this for now

"In the beginning when I read the "his high nasal voice indicates he is not energetically centered and speaking truth from his heart" -part, i facepalmed."

Yeah, just another example of the ego stroking "im sooo enlightened" weridness vibe that comes from Martin Balls words.."his high nasal voice"..wtf??

I do know what he(in his mind) is referring to..Ive listened to all martin balls podcasts and he has spoken of how his voice changed after his work with entheogens, and that the way he talks now makes some uncomfortable..anyway..

I dont really want to turn this into a Martin Ball bashing thread..thats not really fair or something Im interested in. I think the guy generally means well and does his part ot help others..I really dont doubt that at all. Some of his stuff on energetics is actaully really facinating..but I definatily dont take everything he says at face value, or anyone really for that matter.

Your opinions are appreciated. I do think that Martin has a point though. From my experience, everything is fractal, and everything is interconnected. I don't understand, by that logic, that there could be such a thing as "entities" outside of us. Any entity that we see is only a part of ourselves.. more or less a projection for the ego to use.

Why is it that some people see entities, while others don't? It makes sense to me that it is only our imagination projecting the image of an entity.

There was one time that I was convinced that I saw "lady salvia" after smoking salvia.. But now I believe that what I saw was myself in a distorted psychedelic mirror. Mythology is a powerful thing in human psychology, keep this in mind.

Well, this is also rather telling. It tells me that there is a guy who wants to leech off a great poets life work in order to establish himself as a big figure in the psychedelic community. I don't think that mcKenna was projecting anything. He was just good at trying to describe what he saw by downscaling the experience into 3D reality. He failed to bring back anything valuable (like the visual language thing???) because you can read out of his nasal timbre, that he never transcended ego?? C'mon, seriously.

What I DO believe is, that many people hold to tightly to his words which leads to their ego expecting things to happen.

You do have a point. I don't necessarily see how his nasal voice points anything out.

Martin's voice has changed since the first podcasts he made. He went through a process of moving into authenticity. I do believe that Martin is genuinely authentic in his actions. He does have a tendency to make people uncomfortable when they hear him talk, but what he speaks, he genuinely believes to be true..

At this point I do believe that a lot of Martin's theories could potentially hold a lot of truth.. But I don't see it as absolute truth.. I will only know that once I physically die.. and until then, I still have a lot more to experience in my life before I come to any conclusions.

Terence will always have a spot in my heart, whether or not he really did see entities outside of himself.. The fact that Terence did not like the 5-meo experience says something to me.. The 5-meo experience takes you beyond the range of the normal nn-DMT experience.. This is also talked about in the James Oroc book about 5-meo and the sonoran desert toad.

I take both Terence and Martin's point of views with equal respect. Maybe they are both wrong, who knows..

I'm perhaps a little oversensitive towards some figures, because i most often get tthe feeling, that they're trying to establish them as gurus of some sort. Take Pinchbek for example. His last book isn't more than just some incoherent babble and and insult to the community ("Well, they'll believe eversything if it's just extremely way out there....hahahaha".

That to say, I've also enjoyed some of Martin Balls Podcasts and i feel that he's a better spokesman than pinchbeck.

But McKenna never put himself on like that. He was always making it very clear that he was just a dreamer. And now tell me that he didn't transcend the illusions of the ego but Ball did with his newly found ultimate truth.

Some people seem to project outward. Those types will say that they contact aliens, come up with conspiracy theories, secret knowledge theories. I don't know much about Terrence. But for me, DMT shows a very simple idea, yet profound in its scope. The idea is, life isn't what you thought it was. But some seem to project this idea outward. As if there are beings somewhere out there, as if there is something that needs to be done out there, some knowledge that needs to be spread out there. And yet dmt seems to be tell me, "EVERYTHING is IN HERE. There is no out there". This does not manifest as theories about 2012, or math, or theories about aliens, or radical social agendas. It manifests as a more free flowing, joyful life.... minus the over analyzation and intellectualization of the mysterious.

Of course your cultural influence and back round and personal history has a massive influence on psychedelic journeys.

Shamans who live in the jungle tend to see jaguars and snakes while shamans who live in Siberia tend to see deer and other snow beasts.

The thing with T Mckenna though. Hes fine as long as you don't take him too seriously. Take him at face value: a wild speculator.

i thought inuit that were given aya - saw big cats and snakes - things they dont have that far north - they ahd no words for what they were seeing - so they drew them.

Yes, we can have a ball with Martin, but his opinions are just that, opinions, albeit magnified by his giant ego. Who has the patience to write such an essay is in serious need for attention.

Terence McKenna's work and words are an inspiration. Not more, not less, just an inspiration. If someone is dumb enough to mistake his opinions for The Truth, so much the worst. But that's his advantage over Martin W Ball, PhD. Instead of saying ad nauseam how much more experienced he is over everyone else, Terence just spoke from his heart. This way his words will remain forever, while Martin W Ball's (PhD) opinions will soon be forgotten.

However, Martin W Ball PhD may be excused if we take a little snippet from his turgid text and replace Terence's name with his own:

"When this perspective is understood, it becomes immediately clear that virtually all of what Martin W Ball PhD has to say about DMT experiences are projections of his own ego"

There. I like it much more! If we can read the text again with this assumption it will make much more sense!

I think I agree with most of what you say, but if we follow your logic, aren’t other people in the same boat as entities? Just projections for the ego to use? And whose ego?

I don’t know why some people see entities and others don’t, but it seems that those who don’t tend to discount their reality. As they say, seeing is believing.

Of DMT & his ideas:

"I offer these ideas in a speculative vein. I have no strong personal intuition as to what is going on..."
T. Mckenna, Food of the gods

The difference between Mckenna & Ball is a question of humility. Mckenna speculates and acknowledges the speculations. Ball speculates and infers knowledge of absolute truth.

Be wary of anyone who tells you they know the truth. And professes to teach it. There is a distinct difference between sharing and proselytizing.

I have trouble taking Martin ball seriously since reading "mushroom wisdom". A sophomoric idea painfully elaborated to 189 pages, and written in the prose of a 17 year old. Which in and of itself is not, in my opinion, worthy of criticism - until you start lashing out at other's ideas and claim unique knowledge of the absolute truth.

"Given my own personal experience, I seriously doubt that there are many people on this planet who come anywhere near my experience level with 5-MeO-DMT, and I probably have more experience with the far weaker DMT than most as well. I would be genuinely surprised if Terence had as much experience with 5-MeO as I do. And while Terence may have more experience with DMT than myself, I do have ample experience with it as well."

"The very sound of his voice indicates that he is not speaking from his energetic center. "

"These are all quite clearly ideas for Terence, not truths he has experienced and felt in his heart. "

Martin Ball

Contrast these quotes, and the article itself, with the Mckenna quote above...

JBArk