How a Practical, Existential take on DMT Helped me Integrate

[HealTheWorld]

I had been struggling with some experiences on the spice recently and wanted to share my thoughts on how I worked through and integrated some difficulties. Basically, I have been an atheist all of my life and was generally quite skeptical, or even hostile, to religions and religious institutions (with Buddhism being a minor exception, although I have issues with Buddhism as well). But I had a couple trips on shrooms and then a trip on DMT where I saw the face of Jesus and felt the spirit of Jesus in the trip. Specifically, I felt overwhelmed with compassion and a sense of generosity and self-sacrifice. Instead of feeling like it was a burden to give to others, I found a great deal of joy in it and wanted to give as much as I could. These trips were shocking to me but I embraced them, as I am using psychedelics to try and catalyze personal growth, and I liked the way I felt during the Christ trip and thought being more generous and compassionate would be a good change for me.

The problem came with repeated use of DMT and repeated instances of increasingly challenging trips. I felt like I had to continue tripping to further awaken this Christ consciousness inside of me, possibly to get to a point of "full enlightenment," whatever that might be. The radical and frequent nature of the DMT trips was really messing with my practical grounding and started to open up all sorts of doors into thought patterns that I am not normally accustomed to traversing. I started reading about gnosticism, alchemy, new age stuff, and the bible. The DMT trips convinced me (or I convinced myself) that I was special and that the Christ consciousness thing was a gateway to breakthrough or higher stage in consciousness. I brought higher and higher ambitions and aspirations into each trip, and the trips became increasingly terrifying in proportion to my own ego inflating with these new beliefs and ideals.

Ultimately, I was driven to a crossroads in my trips, where I felt like I was either making a deal with the devil for magical powers or enlightenment, or I was genuinely becoming enlightened and just needed to pass through a few more ego deaths to exercise all fears to the point where I would completely trust the spice and thus be fearless and one with all things. But instead of being rid of my fear, my fear just got more and more intense, and even though I had tripped so many times I got to a point where I just couldn't blast of due to the fear.

At this point I decided to take a break from the spice and try and integrate the whole process. I felt awful and overwhelmed with fear and loathing for the whole process, but taking a break was exactly what I need. I reflected and realized that I had let my ideals and beliefs run out of control and I greatly over-analyzed the Christ-like nature of the imagery in my trips. I decided that I needed to deflate my aspirations in order to deflate my fear, and returned back to my old, practical/existential analysis of what I had been experiencing and this was the key for me.

The image of Christ wasn't there to turn me into a Christian or to enlighten me. It was just there as a behavioral catalyst to get me to be a little kinder and more generous to the people in my life and to get me to try and branch out more in my community. I think the actions of Christ and his behavior towards his fellow man means so much more than belief in a higher power or salvation or enlightenment. My tentative thesis on hyperspace is that it is all our own mind getting a chance to, like Goku's hyperbolic time chamber, bring about change and self development in a quicker and more fluid way that we can otherwise achieve. For me, this is an invaluable tool for my existential philosophy of active self-creation and the revaluation of values entailed in Nietzsche's philosophy. This also helps me make sense of the "surgery" imagery that I saw on so many trips, because it was essentially me performing deep surgery on my own brain to try and fix my anti-social distrust and cynicism so that I could become generally more loving and compassionate.

 

[FranLover]

My tentative thesis on hyperspace is that it is all our own mind getting a chance to, like Goku's hyperbolic time chamber, bring about change and self development in a quicker and more fluid way that we can otherwise achieve.

So our own mind is orchestrating these whole movements of advancement for us that we are unaware of and dont have any say in?

So why are they our minds? How can we own something we cant control? Something that in fact...controls us.

So who are we?

Until you understand these things, how will you know what fear is? You say you felt fear, but can you actually define fear? Can you pin point where it arises and to who it occurs?* You use dmt to vanish your fear...but how can anything exterior to you solve your interior problems...and do you know what a problem is? Why do we have problems to solve?

So what is fear? Will you discover it for yourself, or will you just write me off as more words, more concepts, just a random post?


*Fundamentals for knowledge.

Socrates claims that until you know what a thing is, you can’t answer any other questions about it.
So any inquiry into any moral question presupposes an answer to the relevant “What is X?” question. Not just that there is such an answer, but that the inquirer is in possession of it.
E.g., in the Meno, Socrates claims that you cannot answer a question about virtue (“Can it be taught?”) until you have answered a more fundamental question: “What is it?”
In general, he thought that a person’s having knowledge involving a concept, X, depends upon his knowing the correct answer to the “What is X?” question.

There would be no Goku without Gotama. This is the effect Gotama had. 2500 years ago he perhaps lived, and yet the greatest work of animation 2500 years later is a direct result of his glory. Do you understand the buddah's glory? Christ's glory? Goku's Glory?

Rememeber the theme song? We are angels

 

[HealTheWorld]

I am not going to take the time to answer all of your questions. I am not a fan of Socrates precisely because he placed far too much faith in the ability of language and concepts to directly express the truth of reality. To me, language is an approximation, a tool used to communicate and connect. Whatever the truth might be is much more vast than language (logos/the word) can ever hope to map out, so the entire Socratic method is ultimately a waste of time, especially when questions are not asked from a place of decency and respect. Socrates was a troll who asked overly vague questions with the sole purpose of humiliating and undermining his interlocutors. He took any idea that he didn't like and asked leading and impossible questions to make it seem like the idea was false, but of course never applied the same rigorous process of questioning to his own faith in the Gods and to his own belief system regarding the virtues, the after life myths he often touted, and the various other unfounded beliefs he would slip by in each of his dialogues.

Here, let me respond to your post just as you responded to mine:

How do you know Jesus or the Buddha has any glory at all? What even is glory? How can you say Jesus has glory if you cannot provide an exact technical definition of what glory is? Can you define the self first, before we talk about people? I mean, you presuppose that the Jesus and the Buddha exist in some form, but you have not defined what it means to exist first. How can you claim to know the glory of Buddha or Jesus or Goku if you have not written to me in this forum a complete metaphysical and ontological account of every concept known to man? How reckless!

Do you see how ill-spirited this reply is and this mode of inquiry?

 

[owerfull]

In a way, you was enlightened as you have understood the simplest, the most important and yet the most mysterious of the truths which is love. What you wanted from the very beginning, you have understood in that very first experience. We are but a divine spark that seeks presence of the living God.

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.

 

[FranLover]

Do you see how ill-spirited this reply is and this mode of inquiry?

I really dont see it as mean spirited at all and would never have expected that reaction. Its just who I am and how I talk.

 

[HealTheWorld]

Since you insist that you weren't asking all those questions from a place of disrespect, I took the time to answer them, at the very least to offer you a perspective other than your own.

So our own mind is orchestrating these whole movements of advancement for us that we are unaware of and don't have any say in?

Sure, why not? I do not have absolute knowledge of my entire mind, so it is possible that my subconscious or various mechanisms from within my own mind are experienced as external while tripping but are actually internal to my mind. Like a higher or deeper self offering a mode of reflection. This is a working theory, but it makes more sense to me than believing in aliens, Gods, or whatever else these entities are supposed to be.

So why are they our minds?

Because this seems like the most obvious hypothesis and the one that is most logically consistent. If I dream about a friend of mine, and then meet that friend later that day, I can distinguish between the version of them that existed in my mind and the one that does not.

How can we own something we cant control?

I never mentioned ownership. Ownership of objects is not the same as identity. Why must we "own" our minds? We are our minds. In fact, I do not think our minds are our "own" at all. We do not own ourselves and are not ultimately in control of the totality of who we are. There is much about our own minds that lies beyond our "control."

So who are we?

There are different "I's." There is the small I of conscious awareness, but this is not all that we are. The mind is much more vast than this small I, and thus we can experience ourselves as a multiplicity. Just as space can be divided, so too can the mind. The mind can thus experience itself in forms that the small I takes to be an experience of something outside of the mind, but that in reality is internal to the mind as a whole. We are the totality of the mind in all of its vastness, but we cannot directly experience, control, or understand the totality of what we are at any given point in time. We thus are essentially alienated from ourselves in various ways, ignorant to various degrees of the totality of our own minds. We only experience a fraction or part of ourselves. On psychedelics, I take it we get to experience much more of our own minds than we normally can, but I suspect never the totality, thus leading to the states we have on the substances.

You say you felt fear, but can you actually define fear?

Fear is tied to desire. I am no Buddhist, so I am not going to say that all desire and fear is grounded in delusion and is thus BAD. Fear and desire, just like the small I of the practical ego, have their place in life. They are useful. Fear might prevent me from doing too many drugs, for example. It might turn me away from a harmful situation. It might get me to seek help from friends and loved ones. Desire, as well, can help structure my life. It can help me seek health and generosity. I desire the welfare of my friends and my community, and fear the ill-health of myself and others. I desire love, and fear living from a place of hatred and despair. I accept that fear and that desire as sensible.

Can you pin point where it arises and to who it occurs?

Obviously, where and when fear arises is unique to each situation in which it arises. To whom it occurs seems to be the little I of the conscious self, since the conscious self is aware that reality is not entirely in its control and thus its desires may not be met. It arises in the shadow of of our, the little I's, meaningful desires.

and do you know what a problem is? Why do we have problems to solve?

I think I do, sure. A problem is an extension of the desire of the conscious self in combination with an indifferent and oftentimes hostile reality. It is the clash between desire and reality, and the subjective experience of the subject's active interaction with reality. However, the self is not one with the totality of things, but instead must process and manage a series of processes and events that occur in time. Problems are the experience of this divide between the aware consciousness and the whole of all things. Problems, like desires and fears, are essential attributes of existing conscious entities. To wish to absolve oneself of one's fears, desires, or problems, is ultimately grounded in a rejection of reality and what we might call a death drive, which is likely grounded in resentment towards the hostile nature of reality, and the active process entailed in being a living creature. Every problem that we solve will always give way to another problem, so long as we continue to exist, and this in itself is not a meta problem to be solved, but a meta-understanding to be accepted with humility.

In general, he thought that a person’s having knowledge involving a concept, X, depends upon his knowing the correct answer to the “What is X?” question.

The problem with Socrates is that he took concepts literally as if they were objective. I think concepts are tools, not unlike hammers and nails, and thus are both of human creation and to be used for human interests. We can do many things with concepts, and the important thing is precisely how and what we are using them for, and which concepts we choose to create. There is no answer to the objective truth of the nature of any single concept, just as there is no objective or absolute answer to the question "what is virtue." The concept of virtue is a political tool that humans use to reflect upon and thus create political justice in the world. We use it for the sake of our desires regarding right and wrong. Virtue is nothing more than an extension of our own desires revolving around what purpose that concept serves.

Do you understand the buddah's glory? Christ's glory? Goku's Glory?

I think I do. They represent a grand and general absence of desire and ultimate death of the conscious mind. They are the death drive taken to extreme measures in a wholesale embrace of nothingness and nihilism. Ultimately the Buddha himself moves beyond all Gods and goddesses, all angels and demons, and even beyond love itself, since the Buddha sees love itself as empty and ultimately devoid of meaning, because love is tied so closely to desire and thus to existence.

Goku might just be a more honest depiction of what the Buddha and Christ actually are: a mind tormented with desire grander than anything else in the world and ultimately burdened by an unquenchable thirst for transcendence and ultimately...power, power over reality and the self as such. They get what they want, sure, and become enlightened, but this looks more like an escape from reality than it does any sort of mastery of reality or genuinely good thing.

I recently gave up a life as a philosopher to enter social services and I respect the real work being done there more than I do some monk who does nothing but eat rice and meditate all day, or some self-proclaimed messiah who inspires some while damning others, creating ever more division and hostility in the world through his divisive proclamations. The crusades, and the endless division between religious sects are the shadows of messiahs and the karmic debt that the world pays for the infinite hunger of these "great" individuals.

If you are wondering, I am an atheist and a communitarian anarchist. I despise the ego-centered world view that thinks in terms of saviors, kings, messiahs, and Gods. I think the difference between a cult and a healthy society ultimately depends on whether or not there is a single individual at the center of how the society (or thought process) is structured, or if the society is a rhizomatic organism of participating agents and equals who all play a key, but non-hierarchical role. Christs and Buddhas of the world are just monuments to difference and inequality. They are compassionate and kind kings, but still kings nonetheless.

 

[FranLover]

Thanks for taking the time my friend ^_^ I get where you are coming from and its all very interesting.

I mean, you presuppose that the Jesus and the Buddha exist in some form, but you have not defined what it means to exist first

This is precisley where you can help me; is there any reason why you saw Jesus in your trips? Was it a clear vision? (E.g: maybe Jesus lives in the universal unconscious)

 

[HealTheWorld]

Probably due to social conditioning and a subconscious association of Jesus with compassion and love. My trips were about compassion and love, and the image of Jesus, I take it, was a tool to bring about this insight and foster greater compassion and love in myself. But ultimately I do not want to give any legitimacy to messianic imagery, and Jesus is messianic. I initially welcomed the imagery and considered belief and faith. The intensity of the messianic imagery increased with each trip. The DMT was telling me I could be Christ and could be "the one" to save humanity. I went along for a while before realizing how ridiculous, and immoral, the whole idea is of a single savior. As if humanity needed to be saved, by me or any one man or woman, instead of collectively just working together.

Like an alchemist, I can distill what I need and toss away the excess. Love and compassion without the messianic idolatry. Just human beings working together on Earth and loving each other. There is no need for the religious and messianic elements. As above so below. As we reach upwards to the heavens and the gods in search of transcendence we sin and stretch roots deeper into hell. I prefer to remain in the middle and reject both heaven and hell, as I think they are two sides of the same coin.

 

[FranLover]

The messiahs image is bad (and of course I accept as true the line of reasoning presented) yet it was through the messiahs image that you came to this conclusion that the messiahs image is bad. So in your encounter with the messiah, could it be said you were aided by the messiahs image?

I have one more question

What do you think of Terrence Mckenna's thoughts on dmt?

 

[FranLover]

I initially welcomed the imagery and considered belief and faith. The intensity of the messianic imagery increased with each trip. The DMT was telling me I could be Christ and could be "the one" to save humanity. I went along for a while

I would love to hear about the imagery. How exactly did it present these things? It told you directly or indirectly? What place did you visit and what did you see?

 

[HealTheWorld]

could it be said you were aided by the messiahs image?

Yes, sure. I think I needed to uproot and mediate some religious and political baggage that I hadn't dealt with fully. I am reminded of zen Buddhists who are told to ignore the Buddha if the image of the Buddha appears during meditation. Even the image of the Buddha is still just an image, and not Buddha nature itself.

What do you think of Terrence Mckenna's thoughts on dmt?

I am not familiar with his views, outside of a few videos where he described some of his DMT trips. I have not researched his philosophy.

I would love to hear about the imagery. How exactly did it present these things? It told you directly or indirectly? What place did you visit and what did you see?

So I first had the image of myself as king and messiah while on 600ug of lsd. After a long dissolution of my ego during that trip, right after a long and still silence of being nothing at all, I felt like I was struck by lightning. The lightning pulsed through my mind like a thousand bolts and I saw what felt like God/everything that could be seen all at once. I felt all things together at the same time; love, hate, fear, courage, hope, care, the whole works was all being felt at once. It was during this trip that I felt fully enlightened. I saw a white lotus, or felt it at the center of my being, opening infinitely and I felt sacred and like I was a king. It was the feeling, an unmistakable feeling of sacredness and royalty that lasted the entire lsd trip. This experience has returned to me multiple times after in different ways.

That original lsd trip didn't feel Christian at all. The God I saw was this indifferent God that represented the state of things in their totality, so more like a philosophical God than a monotheistic creator God or Demiurge. It was like the top of a pyramid, the all-seeing-eye, kind of God. Very masculine and phallic. I saw all evil and all good, all violence and all love, as emanating from the same source indifferently, and in this God hope was annihilated because nothing could be other than what it must be, and that all things, good and bad come into the world out of necessity.

The latter half of the LSD trip, after the lightning strike, slowly turned very still and meditative. This is where the white flower appeared and I felt less like a king and more like a Buddha.

Christ first appeared to me during a mushrooms trip later on, and felt very different from this original experience. This Christ feeling was sacrificial, like I was being called to sacrifice myself for humanity, as a gift to humanity. I went with it and felt amazing through this giving spirit.

I again had a Christ-trip on mushrooms where I felt like I could heal. I listened to Bjork's album Medulla and really connected with it and what I felt to be a primordial healing nature to the music. I remember at one point feeling a strong pain in my abdomen and lying down on my bed. I then felt like people or entities were feeding off of me, like I was a mother feeding my young and I was filled with pleasure through this act of giving. The pain in the abdomen went away as I gave in this way. I operate primarily through a combination of feelings and concepts when I trip, not so much visuals, although DMT is much more visual.

After these trips I started taking DMT for the first time, and forgot about these religious experiences for awhile. DMT was initially much darker, conceptual, and mysterious than the shining light and abundant feelings of lsd and shrooms. I felt nothing on DMT except for a strange vibration in my head, and the majority of the DMT trip was visual, with slight sensations. I felt like I was exploring an infinite maze, or trying to move from one stage to another in a puzzle game like Myst. But after many trips that dealt with fear, anxiety, and the need to open up and trust the DMT, I finally felt like I could trust the DMT fully and could breakthrough.

My first full breakthrough on DMT involved a small hit first, where I was surrounded by fire. In the fire a woman appeared and beckoned me to take more hits and try and breakthrough. The calling was clear, so I did. She made it seem really, really important that I breakthrough, or at least this is what I felt at the time. So I took a huge hit and finished off the rest of the 40mg. I experienced instant and complete ego death that was indescribable. I just felt like I was at the scene of my death or accident, and my consciousness was outside of myself. I felt worried that I had died for good but I saw entities working on my and saying not to worry, that this is all part of the plan and that I just should trust them.

Slowly I felt the mechanisms of my mind being pieced back together, and I felt completely reborn. I then saw an image of myself as king with a messianic essence, and felt, emphasis on felt, like I was the chosen one and these processes were my complete awakening. The messianic nature wasn't just felt as a religious awakening, but also as a deep political responsibility to lead and 'save' the world from all the corruption and delusion that dominates human politics, and that if no one else was going to do it, I had to. This combined with the feeling of having died and been reborn, it is no wonder I was willing to believe all this at the time.

I then entered what felt like a "regimen" of DMT usage, where I was called every day to breakthrough. Since I felt like I was chosen, I had to go through all these trials to become this king-messiah creature. I broke-though multiple more times, experiencing ego death each time and felt like I was being put back together. I felt like I was part of some grand event, or shift, of something on a global political scale, like I could actually be the messiah. I think ultimately my mind created all of this out of desire and desperation, desperation pertaining to my cynical attitude towards the human race as a whole and our collective consciousness.

And this all came to fruition when I just couldn't breakthrough any more and was overcome with fear regarding the grandiose nature of the project I felt I was undertaking. I gave up and had to shake out of the delusion, or ultimately I chose not to believe that I was the messiah. This caused me a great deal of depression for a couple weeks, and I have been trying to reintegrate ever since, and remember who I actually am and stop trying to actualize some messianic super-ego.

I have no doubt that I created these experiences for myself out of my own desires and values, and created more of them by affirming the messianic imagery at first as good and true. There was a part of me that I did not know existed that really wanted to be a messiah, and this part of me got to have a go at it through these DMT experiences. I think it was educational because of how much responsibility and seriousness, and ultimately egoism, is grounded in such a desire, so I am glad to have educated those latent desires within myself of the irresponsibility and shadows of such ambition.

I sometimes visit places on DMT, but with the breakthrough trips I am nowhere, or deeply within myself. Everything at this level feels like a direct transmission or oneness with a message, not like I am interacting with beings or being told things with language.

 

[Scylla]

"The image of Christ wasn't there to turn me into a Christian or to enlighten me. It was just there as a behavioral catalyst to get me to be a little kinder and more generous to the people in my life and to get me to try and branch out more in my community. I think the actions of Christ and his behavior towards his fellow man means so much more than belief in a higher power or salvation or enlightenment."

It does really benefit to think things through in a reasonable way and I think you came to an excellent conclusion.

I think the first sentence here is semantically work dissecting "The image of Christ wasn't there to ..." These semantics can be interpreted to allude to some sort of purpose independent your own interpretation of what that purpose is; of course your subconscious can be teaching you as an entity distinct from you, but lets ignore that rabbit hole or those definitions for now. I think it is important, as you have done, to integrate experiences in a way that acknowledges your own thoughts are what is creating any meaning in the experience. In this way, it isn't GOD, or DMT, or entities, or aliens, telling you to be a Christian or become a messiah or whatever. It is you. And whatever perspective is taken, whether or not it assumes part of this experience is coming from outside of you, you are at least half of the equation. From a perspective of logic...what is to be gained? Stepping back calmly allows one take away what is strictly useful...while assuming you are the next messiah probably isn't useful..... being "a little kinder and more generous to the people in [your] life and to get [you] to try and branch out more in [your] community" certainly is.

So I think the experience you shared is helpful to people reading this that may be having similar experiences.