Cazman043 wrote:This question is something I have thought about, but i dont feel i have put enough time into questioning and theorising. This is a question about the approach to DMT, in that i mean, how should we approach it in terms of exploration? Do we approach it as a way to explore consciousness, explore our self, explore the foundations of the world, explore the universe, explore our spirituality, remove the ego?
To some degree, it's a bit irrelevant how you decide to approach it. For example, your intentions may be to explore consciousness from a rigid materialist standpoint, and end up having a spiritual experience. DMT does not always give you what you want, and while your approach may affect things, it might not always do so in a way that matches your intent or approach. A lot of these approaches you outline should be seen perhaps more as consequences of engaging DMT. Of course your outlook is going to color the way you perceive your experiences to a certain extent, but the point I'm trying to make is that when DMT throws a strong and extreme enough experience your way, it will often override your approach. You may find that you want to experiment with multiple approaches and see which one works best for you.
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What i am asking for, is other peoples perspectives/experiences on how they approach the psychedelic experience? I am somewhat confused by what people mean when they say "approach it spiritually" as i am not too sure what they mean by spiritually... I do however, just have a strange, incomprehensible way of understanding that dmt is not something to mess with and needs to be approached in a respectful manner.
I can think of two basic categories of people who would approach it "spiritually". One would be people who have not had a spiritual experience with it, but have heard of its spiritual potential, and long for a soul-touching experience. The other category would be the people who have had a spiritual experience with it, know in part of its potential first-hand, and desire more spiritual experiences. There is of course an extra category of people who don't approach it spiritually or devoid of spiritual intent, and as I indicated above, can end up with a spiritual experience anyway - some who were completely unaware that DMT had any spiritual potential in the first place. When a spiritual experience happens to this third category of people, is when true magic occurs - when you have the heart melt of a rigid, adamant, skeptical cynic because the particular experience that DMT offered up happened to change the direction of their life to some extent.
I'm being kinda vague, so let's see if I can be a little more specific on what would qualify as a spiritual experience (though it's extremely personal and can easily vary from person to person). Perhaps for this reason, I will let you know some of the spiritual phenomena I've encountered, and why I consider them to be spiritual. The classic mystical experience is an easy one. Fully immersed in white light, time has come to a halt, a constant sense of elevation at rocket speeds, the sense of infinity and presence before the majestic godhead are enough to bring a seated man to his knees. I remember after I had such an experience after months of work with DMT, the euphoria was almost too much to handle - I recall getting bowled over with merciless joy. It was a kind of euphoria that I was sure that man was not meant to experience; it felt like I had somehow cheated the system. I suppose it might not make sense unless you've had a similar experience, but it really is like an orgasm of the soul. Also note that I was an atheist, and my first such experience like this after many months of working with DMT completely changed the way I look at things, and especially the DMT experience. My approach was completely changed. Spiritual experiences have a knack for that - they are pretty good at stopping you in your tracks and putting your direction on a different rail.
Sometimes there is holy imagery like golden gates, stained glass chapels, being up in the clouds in the sky with sunset lighting, etc...these sorts of experiences are often accompanied by feelings of purity, divinity and authenticity. Encounters with deities are easy qualifiers for spiritual experiences. I recall in an experience I had with a mother goddess figure, I became cradled in her feminine motherly love. It's a feeling so cute and adorable with just the warmest most reassuring love right down to the very core of your being - here too is a spiritual experience - it perhaps if even only for the moment resolves the oedipal complex. It makes you just completely satisfied in the moment - this here is a spiritual experience; there is no longing for anything at all.
Interactions with ancient cultures can get pretty spiritual from the interwoven Hindu tapestries to lessons from old asian women to (my favorite) the Egyptians. My first encounter with anything Egyptian in hyperspace was when I was going to smoke DMT on my back porch, but it was too windy outside to light the GVG out there, so I decided I would smoke it in the house and immediately go out to the porch when I was done...well I never made it out the door
I somewhat instantly found myself in a gigantic pyramid. This experience was unique for many reasons, one of which being I was standing upright for the entire thing since I had originally intended to be making my way out the door. In the center of the pyramid were 3-4 pharaohs (can't remember) that were multidimensionally moving through each other. The pharaohs looked just like the King Tut sarcophagus down to the detail and color. This experience was spiritual to me in a number of ways. For one, I didn't know that Egyptian experiences were possible at all with DMT, so this was a wake up call. Secondly I had never seen interdimensional movement like that before. It's not an Egyptian hallmark, as it turns out to be a sort of innate quality of hyperspatial things is that they can do things like that, but up until that point I had never seen it like that before. As they folded through each other it was like the face of one would become the profile of the other would become the back of the head of the other, and so on as they seamlessly passed through each other. It demonstrated to me that there is something about the Egyptian geometry that actually lends itself very well to this kind of activity among other special hyperspatial transformations that I would discover are possible at a later date (most Egyptian imagery can be made from extremely simple DMT geometry). Even just being in the pyramid was a surreal experience. It was the feeling of getting to experience something genuine and authentic which is essentially off limits to the masses. To top it all off, I have my experiences with the
Bennu Bird, and
an experience that seems to be straight out of the kaballah which sort of speak for themselves in regards to their spiritual nature.
"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind" - Albert Einstein
"The Mighty One appears, the horizon shines. Atum appears on the smell of his censing, the Sunshine- god has risen in the sky, the Mansion of the pyramidion is in joy and all its inmates are assembled, a voice calls out within the shrine, shouting reverberates around the Netherworld." - Egyptian Book of the Dead
"Man fears time, but time fears the Pyramids" - 9th century Arab proverb