I'm curious what you guys think...has your experience with the spice changed your outlook on death?

Did it change, strenghten or deter your beliefs about the afterlife?

Do you believe some of the popular theories that DMT has anything to do with the dying process?

These aren't meant to be grim questions, they are just a couple of a million things I ponder about on a daily basis...


-*O*

I am erring on the side of that ^ being guff. Apart from it just not feeling right in my gut there are too many variables for it to be useful. Say it"s a conduit from what we percieve as the physical world into the grid/consciousness/heaven etc. Then you have to have time to release it when you die. I always worry about the people who get blown up or the like, and the DMT doesnt get time to be released. Do they pass over ok? Or do they get a rough transition? Or not passover at all?

Or perhaps it is a final light show, as some have said. But i don"t understand why you"d get a lightshow before you die. For what purpose?
What are you thoughts Oneironaut? I"d be interested to see other peoples theories.

hug46, I have the exact same fears. If "souls/God/re-incarnation" are real, then they would successfully pass over even if their pineal gland didn't have time to release DMT (e.g. if they blew up their head). But if the afterlife lies entirely within the person's brain and DMT-released eternal timescale, then that could possibly mean that they'd die "completely". That thought gives me the chills, very depressing.

I guess, the best death is surrounded by family, dying from natural causes in our bed. I have visualized that moment a few times, and I think that my last words would be: "thank you".

Not yet it hasn't

DMT has contributed to expanding the range of possibilities and has shown me more clearly what we see every day.

For example, life exists as a conscious experience right NOW. No one has ever experienced the past, and no one will ever experience the future. We are and have always been right here in the eternal NOW.

Another example from everyday life: Subjectively, I have always been conscious. The state of unconsciousness is a state I have never experienced. It is a state that, by definition, cannot be experienced. It is a state I will NEVER experience.

I had one DMT experience that was unlike any other and was very much like a near-death experience. At one point, I was explicitly told not to be too concerned about dying since I never really existed in the first place. (It wasn’t a very comforting thing to be told at the time!)


Many of our beliefs and fears about death are the consequence of our beliefs about life.


As far as the OP and DMT being involved in death and the pineal gland and all of that: The simple fact is that we don’t and can’t know what really happens. What happens to a physical body at time of death as observed by the living is of little consequence to an eternally conscious mind having the experience of “death”.

DMT per se has not changed my outlook on death (if any entheogen has had any direct influence on my reflections about death, as result of an experience with it, that would be salvinorin) but other subjects related to the DMT experience, subjects I've looked into after the experience itself, are changing it. So indirectly, yes.

Nope, no clues for me from DMT (or any other experience) about death, other than the obvious ego death through meditation and/or DMT. I have read some reports of 'flight pilot' testing, where as the centrafuge spins faster, simulating 'G' force, blood drains from the brain until blackout. At which point there are some interesting similarities with 'near-death' experiences and conjecture but..... they all come back to life to tell the tale. From Trauma Coma to emergency operation to astronaught training there are correlations Ummmm

For me it(DMT) has clarified/crystalized some thoughts I have always had, albeit at the back of the mind so to speak. Some obsure basic Philosophy, some primordinal programming. A connection of experience and chemistry and mind and chronology.

Before DMT I would suffer a Cacophony of input from even seeing people in a supermarket, almost to the point where I was somewhat unsocial. After DMT, I feel my intellect and eloquent vocabulary has been refined by it, and my confidence has enabled me to EXPRESS my condition and understanding without even mentioning DMT, in a 'driven' and passionate infectcious way. I will now leave with their names and addresses...... I feel like Rasputin, comming out of his cave after 30 years.....

I use tricks, like.... I say things like, God...... has no religion. and then see what people say. I try and use the frame of reference that the person I am talking to brings to our conversation and cross it with some 'spice'. .

All the above is idle banter, sorry its late where I am, But..... one thing (I am old now) ... try not to focus too much of your time on Death. Its not important. Focus on alive and awareness.

Love and Peas
G

It might have helped me change my outlook on death yes. I'm feeling this whole energy distribution thing I get very often in a physical and visual sense on a lot of DMT trips. The sensation of returning to the planet and recycling my mass so that the journey can go on.

Yes it did. Profoundly.
I feared nothingness.
Now i am afraid of eternity.

Quality

Entering into death, as I felt I di on my 5-meo initiation to the world of dmt, definitely changed my perspective on EVERYTHING.
Having been a 'seeker' my entire life, being very well read in the spiritual-esoteric texts (from kabala to zen) and owning some very strong conceptions derived through some experience, but mostly books, when the Power and the Glory were revealed to me, jesus, how do I put this succinctly?
YES!
Everything was shattered,everything, in fact, I am just now, almost two years later, beginning to integrate it sucessfully and beneficially. <y initial response was that of a caveman with fire, I ran around burning everything including me for awile, but finally Ive learned how to control this power somewhat.
It made things like suicide impossible for me, and allowed ,me to be able to deal with the subconcious pain and traumas that make me inflict pain upon my environment, because I no longer feared it,or death because I was shown, with NO DOUBT that there is something greater than myself, and all my fears were illegitimate, preventing me from manifesting potential, from being a MAN.
NOTHING HAS EVER HAPPENED TO ME NOR EVER IT WILL
There is death, and there is no death.
There is god and there is no god.
There IS you.

I have often thought that the light show and feeling of DMT does occur when you die, but it has nothing to do with the molecule itself, but rather the effect it has on your brain.

We don't know for certain how it works, but we know that psilocin agonizes the 5-HT2A receptor which depresses activity in the brain and that higher doses cause less brain activity + a more psychedelic trip. (People who take massive, ego-destroying doses of LSD seem to be almost brain-dead). Since DMT and psilocin are so structurally similar, it makes sense to me that they would behave in roughly the same way.
If that's the case, then the DMT "trip" would be basically a massive reduction in brain activity (DMT being more efficient then psilocin, or whatever).

So, I've often thought that perhaps, if you die slowly, as the brain shuts down, your perception of reality gets more and more psychedelic. As you approached true death, you would go deeper and deeper into hyperspace before total ego death set in and then real, final death.

That explains, at least to me, why NDEs could happen without the need for a massive release of DMT, which we don't know occurs.

As for what happens after death, I think it is a state of ego death.

Blessings
~ND

I tend to like the Rastafarian mindset of there being no death, just passing..

As for DMT, it has changed my outlook on just about everything (and still is)

All for the better I feel also

for me, yea

Death is dying, the soul is the soul. Your ego is this body. It is fun to theorize about what the afterlife could be. But we will never know. Or even begin to understand it.

Existentialism is the struggle.

Hey thanks for all the great responses my friends!

ZenSpice, that pretty much sums up my overall outlook on death. It is more of a metaconsciousmorphasism (don't bother looking it up...). I do believe our consciousness/soul can and does exist outside the physical realm. After all, every night we are immersed in a multistory universe within. It is not that hard for me to imagine this reality is just another "dream"... when this one ends the next one picks up instantaneously.

As for the role DMT has in death, I'm not certain it has any more relevance than does a lucid dream, OBE, meditation, LSD, MDMA or for that matter any altered state. It is a shift in consciousness. A different frequency. Altered perception.

Imagine if you could suddenly see all bands of light, from radio to gamma, with your eyes! As shocking and crazy as that would be, it has nothing to do with death. You existed in the same conditions as you did before the super sight, the only difference was an altered perception. I think "life and death" are much like this.. another state of perception that is already there.

I would imagine if you were instantly vaporized, you would find yourself in the "next" state instantaneously. Like you pointed out Hug46, if our passage is reliant on the brain actually delivering the DMT from the pineal gland then that certainly doesn't seem like the best design. And if it's there just to "distract" us from dying, then that makes absolutely no evolutionary or logical sense.

With all my personal experiences, It is very difficult not to subscribe to the fact that we are conscious beings beyond the physical world.

For me absolutely.

During my last couple of voyages the fear of death was definitely "up".

I had the direct experience/vision that my soul is indestructible and that in death there is a merger with the infinite.

I definitely sleep better at night.

The idea that dmt is released at death and is somehow a molecular 'phone call' to god, or whatever, and is the means by which we access a after physical death state, is, for me, absolutely chilling.
Does one have to have this in order to 'die right'?
Eastern traditions, like Tibetan Buddhism, talk about "dying right", and while a large part of it has to do with living well, as Leary saw in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Bardos, there is something that happens within the body as well after the death of it appears to have been complete.
I am terrified of dying and not being able to do whatever it is the body must to die right.
I have died and been resucitate from heroin ods before and remembered nothing, not even remembering nothing, just.... gone....and back.
IDK, but like I said earlier, I do think that dmt has something to do with it, but that's just me

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is pretty clear that one must prepare and train for the passage through the Bardos. If you die right, you can pass with awareness.. much like entering a lucid dream from a waking state.

But if one must "die right" and give the DMT ample time to do its thing, then drowning would seem to be the way to go. I'll hold out and take my chances though. Hopefully the old fashioned way... old and wise.

Last Monday a close friend of mine drown while casually swimming. He was 32, in good shape, and was one of the most easy going, friendly, intelligent and kind people I have ever had the good fortune of having in my life. Before DMT, I was becoming quite an atheist. Raised Catholic, I felt lied to and cynical towards the idea of an afterlife. After all no one can possibly really know right? Since DMT, I feel life is much more of a mystery than we will ever know. My gut tells me we may have evolved to a level of conscientious that makes us a part of a greater reality, possibly the goal of all evolution. Seeing my friend in his coffin, I told myself it was just his body, that his conscientious has continued on. This gave me comfort in a difficult time. I don't know for sure of course, but DMT has opened my eyes to the possibilities of life being more incredible than we could ever know.