Shpongle said:
Its not a metaphor, self dribbling jeweled basketballs is most definitely not a metaphor
unless it is and you're saying that the experience is metaphoric to saying that the things appear they bounce themselves, and they are beautiful and jeweled and then when you come out of catatonia, its just a basketball...that would be a metaphor...but again, back to what I said about the description being a poor one.
I think DMT communicates with us through metaphor. It takes what we have in our head and uses it to deliver a message. Not all of it, but for the most part. There are certain fundamentals, like the fractal nature of things and that the universe emulates itself on every level. McKenna's reception of this message was that objects sang more objects into existence, which in turn sang more objects into existence, and so on, and so on.
It took me a few trips of being 'programmed' by a serpent before I started having really meaningful journeys. I believe I was being mapped by the molecule, or the intelligence behind the molecule so that it could index me and find the best way to get the messages across using the symbols I understand mapped through the mechanism of metaphor.
He was most definitely talking in metaphor.
We all read other people's reports and say 'that resonates with me' - we don't say 'hey, the very same thing happened to me' - it resonates because somewhere we have a memory of the same message being delivered, only through a different metaphor.
There is a lot going on inside that we can't map to something we do understand and when we are inside we see these things and we get it, but the minute we come out we no longer understand. We then try to by mapping it metaphorically to something we do get, mostly unsuccessfully. There is also a lot going on inside that is other worldly and exists in it's own right. I have seen things that simply are not off this earth, objects for example. It is difficult to fully understand the nature of these objects or what the meaning behind them is.
It's like they're object oriented and an object that appears to one person might have the same attributes as a different object that appeared to someone else. What the people remember though are the attributes that are inherited by the same notion.
I disagree with your definition of metaphor.
a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance
something used, or regarded as being used, to represent something else; emblem; symbol.