As they say in the Catholic Church, I've "been away from the church for awhile" In this case, however, the church is Hyperspace... My best friend and I used to grow our own P. Cubensis back in college, inspired by Terence's writings. We took the heroic doses, we skipped the light fandango, we envisioned ourselves atop the world tree...

I've been out of college for a decade now. Back in those days, there wasn't a lot of info about how to extract smokeable DMT from plants. I had (still have) this book called "Psychedelic Shamanism" by Jim DeKorne which has in it what now seems like a very archaic extraction tek for DMT/5-meo-DMT but that was about it. We lived in a Midwestern backwater town, and there wasn't a lot of lab-grown DMT swirling around... I was never brave enough back then to try it the extraction tek from Psychedelic Shamanism, and while we learned much in those days from our fungal friends, freebase DMT remained the elusive Holy Grail. Even after I left psychedelics behind and began to peruse Eastern Meditation as an alternative, I vowed that, given the chance, I'd return to hyperspace if DMT presented itself...

Now, I'm back in the Midwest after years on the West Coast, and now have in my lab everything I need to extract DMT... I'm nervous, and excited, and my best friend is returning home to join me and drink from the Holy Grail!

My spiritual journey since then has been a strange one. I've lived in a Yoga commune, and ended up becoming Roman Catholic when we had our first kid. While I came to the Catholic Church because of the deep tradition of contemplative religion and the powerful testimony of the great Medieval saints to the Majesty of their ecstatic experiences with Spirit, I have found the modern church to be a desert wasteland when it comes to the Perenial Philosophy, and have now felt the call back to the Hyperspacial realms to once again drink from the Well of immediate experience.

I'd like to get to know some of you on here, to find the community that was so much what I was looking for when I decided to become Catholic. Honestly, I haven't had much of a chance to be my true self with almost anyone except my wife since leaving the West Coast to return to the Midwest. Hoping to find a place to be honestly "me".

Hehe, I like you. I'm really interested in all kinds of religion, so I'd love to hear about those Medieval saints! I've read some Meister Eckhart (who I adore) and some Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. But, yeah, I could never find a system or a philosophy that connects all the dots. That's one of my biggest dreams right now. I think Jung and Hegel are pretty close...

Pseudo-Dionysius is good stuff. The Cloud of Unknowing is probably THE BEST book on the planet, in my humble view. Meister Eckhart also very good. Also amazing is "The Imitation of Christ," which has as its last "movement" a dilalogue between the seeker and Christ which comes off very much like a "chanelled" work, to use the New Age parlance. It also reminds me of times when I've encountered Beings in hyperspace who I could actually interact with... This was accomplished in my case by following Terence's advice of taking a heroic dose of P. Cubensis and smoking a HUGE joint right at the peak of the trip... Kinda "pushed" the ego dissolving tendency of psilocibin away from me and gave me enough space to think clearly and see rather than being lost in the void. For anyone seeking to have the kind of "meeting aliens and talking to them" kind of trip that Terence often discussed, this is the route I'd recommend. Dosage at that time was, if I recall (we are talking at least 10 years ago), 7g dried P cubenis and probably a joint the size of a 1/16, although I don't think I was really able to smoke the whole thing. During that trip, I also had this incredible experience of glossolalia, or what Pentecostals refer to as "speaking in tongues" The entity I encountered taught me to sing, and together we sang the song that wove the universe into being. I was co-creator with God at that moment, singing His song of creation. Pretty amazing.

Yeah, Terrence McKenna has a great video about creating stuff with songs. I'll check the books out.

We are similar but different.

I believe in the existence of Christ or Yeshua as I like to call him. In my opinion it is possible to commune "face to face" with the messiah while under the influence of psychedelics.....especially DMT. I have had many such experiences.

The difference is that my path is a Hebrew one instead of a Catholic one. I study Genuine Kabalah and the Torah because I feel like it helps me to understand the mind of the Messiah.

So in a way I can relate to where your coming from with the whole religion/DMT thing.

I grew up pretty hardcore Southern Baptist. I had to reach 33 years old before I accepted what my own experience has taught me...that faith & spirituality are to be experienced, not just cognitively comprehended. Felt really good to let go of my need to belong to a community that just didn't accept who I am. Since making that decision, I have felt free to experience my own spirituality day to day, by finding the wonder beyond the stresses & showing compassion to myself and others. I feel Gods presence in my life more than ever.

This kind of approach to DMT amazes me. I mean - how could something so unifying make you a convinced follower of a single religion? You need to trip more man...

Organized religion DOES serve a positive purpose in culture. I mean, the shamanic religious experience is "organized" to a certain extent in the Amazonian cultures... And Jesus WAS an emanation of The Godhead... No matter what crap people have piled on top of that over the last 2000 years, Yeshua ben Joseph WAS an emanation of the Godhead. I have seen it. I have seen it the way the Shaman sees. It is real because I experienced it.

I would change that first quote to "Organized religion CAN serve a positive purpose". More often than not, I feel, and you seem to know, it gets in the way of what it's supposed to provide. Carl Jung disagreed that it can serve a positive purpose, I believe, suggesting that all organized religion is a psychological defense mechanism against direct religious (return to union) experience of what Plotinus called The One. There are "good" churches, good pastors quietly doing good work, serving their communities, but the "bad" ones get the press...

^think he finds the Torah/Bible the best guide he knows for DMT-related shamanism/shamanry, based on other posts he's made, but I'll let him speak for himself.

Hahaha, there have been many oecumenical councils who've spent hundreds of years defining if he was, or wasn't. The only truth I've found in DMT is that everyone is right. I do like Christian religion, it has amazing symbols and ideas in it. I do relate strongly to them, as I was raised with them. My first breaktrhough trip was strictly Christian, and I was talking about Jesus a week after that to such an extent that my friends got worried I'm losing it. But Jesus is just a symbol. He's a symbol of the human who has to die in order to become divine. He's a symbol of the fear and pain of ego death (Take this cup away from me for I don't want to drink its poison...).
Actually, each one of us is Him. Each one of us can become The Godhead. So yeah - you're right.

I'm quite certain that Jesus is more than a symbol. Yes, his quest is archetypal, yes, he calls us to BE HIM. But he is not just a symbol. He is a living being, with mind, soul, body, and conscious presence.

Reality Sandwich had an article I read recently talking about the dogmas of the New Age movement. One of those dogmas is "All is One", which is a very close cousin to your "everyone is right" postulate, autunmsphere. I would concede that all religions possess grains of immutable truth, but I strongly disagree that "everyone is right." Someone HAS to be wrong, because the worlds' religions hold many mutually exclusive dogmas and world views. The buddhist belief that we are born again and again until we figure it all out cannot be right if St. Paul was right when he said "There is but one life, and then the judgement." I think a much more accurate turn of phrase would be "Everyone is wrong," as any words which attempt limit the limitless, define the undefinable, dissect the unity... None of these human boxes will ever truly possess God, they will only become idols, graven images which we will worship instead of Him.

Can't we all AT LEAST agree that Scientology is wrong?

CatholicPsychonaut wrote: ..agreed!

..to me, most modern Christianity is 'Paulinism'..not the teachings of the original 'Nazarene' sect, who broke from Judaism because they felt the knowledge/law was being corrupted by power hungry rabbis..

the only forms of Christianity/Judaism etc which make any sense to me a Gnostic orientated forms..i.e. 'talk'/receive from 'god', don't read other people's proclamations in books..just use books for a bit of technique and reflection..those who believe the bible is the 'word of god' verbatim are, IMO, dangerous fools..

..i personally reject both Christian and Judiac (& Islamic for that matter) focus on the Messiah..
i say don't look to someone else (especially in history) for the truth..it's inside you..we are all potentially the Messiah..

..that said, as a former aetheist i do essentially believe in a single creation source..thanks to DMT..
.

The true history of Christianity is a bit more complex than this. In the earliest days, there WAS conflict between the Pauline sect and the "Jerusalem Church" which was led by Jesus' brother James and St. Peter. I assume that this is the "Nazarene" sect you mention. They didn't really "break" from Judaism at all. They continued following the Jewish dietary and purity laws, worshiped in the Temple, and kept the Saturday Sabbath. All of Judaism was waiting for the Messiah, and they simply considered themselves Jews who had discovered Him.

The Pauline sect was primarily composed of non-Jewish converts to the teachings of Paul about a being he called "Christ Jesus," who he had encountered on the road to Damascus, where he was going as a Jewish legal authority to root out what he considered a form of Jewish heresy (the followers of Jesus). After arriving in Damascus, blinded by his experience, he learned from the "christian" teachers there, and soon began preaching "Christ Crucified."

The reason for the success of the Pauline "Christians" over the "Jerusalem Church" is twofold. First, Paul argued before Peter and James that non-jews converting to the teachings of Jesus shouldn't have to "become jews" (aka: get circumcised), nor should they be required to follow certain dietary restrictions, like abstinence from meat that had been sacrificed to Roman Gods (Nearly ALL meat avalible in the marketplace at that time was offered to the Roman Gods before being sold). Second, when Rome finally cracked down on the Jewish uprising and destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple, traditional Jewish religion as it had been practiced up to that point (with sacrifice in the temple at its center) ceased to exist. Worship moved to the Synagogue, and because they ate and worshiped with the new non-Jewish followers of Jesus, even those who wre a part of the Jerusalem Church were more and more ostracized from the Jewish community until they simply ceased to identify with it at all after a couple generations.

In the next few hundred years, as Christianity became more and more influenced by Greek thought, the Gnostic groups you speak of began to spring up. One of the mistakes made in the DaVinci Code version of history is the idea that Gnostic thinking was earlier in Christianity than Orthodox, or Pauline Christianity. When history is actually examined, we find that in the earliest days, the Pauline version was actually far more liberal than the teachings of the Jewish disciples, and that most of the Gnostic sects came from those groups which arose out of Gentile communities, founded by or at least influenced by Paul and his disciples. Does this mean that Jesus was not a mystic? I don't think so. I think it is more likely that those who were around him were too stuck in their Jewish paradigm to truly understand what it was he was bringing to them, and it was only the later "Gnostic" believers who were able to tap into what He was really hinting at.

^..thank you for an interesting post CatholicPsychonaut..

how do feel (if you do) that, other than in actions, you and the Messiah are different..?

The difference is one of duration, focus, source. We are THIS, of course, just as Jesus is THIS. However, Jesus is sent by THIS, to inhabit a human body and point us back to THIS. We, we rise up from human bodies, with no memory of THIS, and seek it out. We follow Jesus because the very nature of being human is to be drawn to THIS, and Jesus is an emanation of THIS, a CONSCIOUS emanation of THIS. We re drawn to him because we see in him that to which we are capable... That to which we are made to be inside.