is it real?

[just mark]

as i said in my introductory thread, i haven't used dmt and probably never will, but i am very interested in observing the growth of of it's use as a social phenomenon. and i believe i can easily prove that it's use and knowledge of the substance has grown alot in the past 2 yrs i've been aware of it. very simple: just look at the dates of the posts on this site and also look at the replys on u-tube videos of terrence mckenna. awareness is growing by the month, when will it appear in the "mainstream"? when will people like glenn beck and oprah winfrey be talking about it? and wouldn't it be interesting if it continues to spread but oprah, beck, time magazine, etc NEVER speak of it? what would that mean?

anyhow, these are the kinds of questions i'm interested in, i don't know why, to each his own, some people like to chase balls around or shoot ducks with a shotgun, this is what interests me.

the one question i would like to pose to Nexus-citizens is: Do you believe what you see on DMT is real? do you believe that the entities you encounter while using this substance are real persons? do you believe that you have actually traveled to a real place? do you think that these entities have appeared in or interfered in your "straight" life in anyway?

alot of what motivates me to ask these questions are various things daniel pinchbeck said in "breaking open the head".

i am not going to argue with anyone's reply and do not want to start arguments, but i am avidly paying attention to your thoughful replies.

 

[Ginkgo]

the one question i would like to pose to Nexus-citizens is: Do you believe what you see on DMT is real? do you believe that the entities you encounter while using this substance are real persons? do you believe that you have actually traveled to a real place? do you think that these entities have appeared in or interfered in your "straight" life in anyway?

While I can only speak for myself, I believe I have a good understanding of the nature of entheogenic journeys. These questions are very complex to answer. You have to understand that with the aid of entheogens (and other shamanic and spiritual practices) one can twist our awareness in ways that simply isn't possible to explain in our language. After all our language is made to explain the awareness most people have in everyday life. I could write thousands of pages of answers to your questions, and you would probably still look like a question mark until you experience it yourself.

I don't have a lot of time, so let me say it as easy as I can... I believe that what I experience during these journeys are other dimensions of both our self and our surroundings. For example I may speak to an entity that in fact is a personalization of some aspect of my own psyche. It may be a experience manifested as an energy within myself. With the aid of entheogens, I can communicate directly to this energy.

I also believe we can access experiences from earlier lives and communicate with these energies. As such you may view them as independent entities or as a part of yourself. It all depends on your point of view. If you look at yourself as one being, you can say that it's all in your head. If you look at yourself as a being consisting of various other beings and energies from various dimensions, you can say that you are communicating with parts of yourself.

Furthermore I believe you can also access entities and/or energies (again, the definition depends on the perspective) beyond yourself. I don't believe I can talk to aliens living in the dimension we physically live in, at least not usually, but I believe we in some instances may contact entities and/or energies outside the realm of ourself. But you have to know that entheogens are generally aids to understand ourself, our ego, our essence, our purpose, and our meaning. You also have to know that some entity or energy you consider beyond yourself may be considered within yourself, and vice versa, depending on your perspective. We are all one, but yet we are individuals. Accepting different perspectives is the key to understand.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. If you want to understand, you should experience it yourself. Our language doesn't possess the ability to communicate these experiences in a good and fair way. Thanks for the questions though, this is an interesting subject. I am looking forward to see the other replies in this thread.

 

[Ac30f5pade5]

Like you, I have never had any experiences with the spirit molecule.

Do you believe what you see when you're sober is real?

Like Evening Glory was saying, entheogenic experiences are near impossible to portray through words. So is any abstract but everyday concept, like emotion. When others try to explain an experience and emotion attached to it, it's very hard to get the whole picture since each individual's thoughts stem from their own experiences. Sometimes the message doesn't get through, since they have nothing to really draw from.

"Reality" is subjective, and I agree with Evening Glory again that it's all about perspective. How real is everyday life? The mind allows us to experience our world just as well as it allows us to experience Hyperspace. Would you only consider beings that were external from ourselves to be "real?" Everything is up for interpretation.

I believe in experience, whether internal or external.

 

[Autodidactic]

Just my opinion, I've very little evidence about it but, I think we have too few senses available to us to really see the entirety of the world we live in. Our brains process so much information every second and has to filter a lot of it out for us. I think it's possible that it may take our consciousness to other dimensions. For me along with quantum physics, it confirms my belief that this reality we experience may not even be real to begin with, like it's a digital reality or something. Maybe DMT just allows us to see the real realities of the universe. In anycase it is the most amazing substance I've ever experienced, and the closest thing to a spiritual experience I've ever had.

 

[soulfood]

I think it's all in my head.

I also think there's an awful lot of stuff in my head that is so far beyond my understanding of myself and what I am that... well it's just rediculous.

I'm not the sort of person who is in search of truth in origin, but I can tell you where ever this is all coming from, when used correctly it has some huge benefits to how I live my life. I'm just greatful I have that.

 

[WSaged]

There are many, many other animals on this same planet that can see into the higher & lower spectrum's of light, while also being able to see into our spectrum of light, some can also hear & communicate with higher & lower soundwave frequency's!!
In other words there are other creatures on this same planet that see & hear & more importantly use more of this world than we can!!!

They perceive a different & in a lot of cases larger "reality" then we do, but still share the same physical world as us.
How different would even the every day, physical sensation of touch be, if you where covered in scales, or fur?
And how do you think that might alter your sensation's of what reality "feels" like? (Think about that one for a second!)
So is their perception of reality..."not real"...because it can be drastically different than what we see/hear/smell/taste/touch as our reality?


What we humans all see as "reality" is not even seen by our eyes!
There is an infinite spectrum of light frequency's out there & the ones we can not "see" are being filtered out by the eye, so only the tiny, tiny slice of frequencies that can actually be perceive, are let through. Then the visual cortex assembles these freqs into what we perceive as our all encompassing "reality".
When in fact, we perceive only a small fraction of the light constantly surrounding us & making up our everyday world!

This goes for what we hear as well!!
Physical soundwaves go down to .1Hz, we start perceiving bass freqs around 20Hz & that is actually felt in the body more than heard!!
Our ears don't start actually "hearing" bass until about 25-30Hz, depending on the individual.
Our ears can hear treble freq's up to about 20,000Hz.
So humans hear From 20Hz to 20,000Hz, but soundwave frequencies continue going up & up infinitely!!!
Once again, our ears only pick up these freq's of acoustic energy & convert them into electrical energy that our brain then assembles into what we perceive as sound.
Our ears are simply transducers, just like a microphone. Turning one form of energy into another.
No air molecules surrounding us to ripple into sound waves....no sound!!
How our brains perceive direction & space with soundwaves is called psycoacoustics & is used just as much as visual cues to create the size & shape of the world we appear to be inside of.


Whales, use the freqs of sound below 10Hz to communicate over huge distances...underwater!!!
Dolphins use the freqs of sound above 20,000Hz TO SEE...underwater!!!
Fish don't realize they are underwater, they are just in there environment. Just like we don't realize most of the time that we are swimming around in oxygen...it's just our environment.
But if you were to be plucked out of the atmosphere & pulled out into space, you'd notice it pretty Damn fast I think!! Like a fish out of water!

Our "senses" have been tuned to our environment's in a way that makes it safest & easiest to survive.
But they are only antenna....the brain is the motherboard that calculates & assembles the data into what we see & interact with, as our "reality".
We are consciousness, our bodies are the biological computers used to get around down here!!!
Walk around for a day or two observing people & doing whatever you do, with this in mind & it becomes quite obvious...with or without DMT use.


So how real is our "reality" anyway? When we only get to experience a tiny, tiny sliver of it!!



WS

 

[BananaForeskin]

I think Evening Glory really hit most of the nail on the head, there. Entities, I tend to believe, are not necessarily "real" in the sense that the average person might mean-- but they certainly exist. It is a simple matter of how, with DMT, I am perceiving both aspects of myself and of the world. The only problem is, how does this differ from the difference between our normal stimuli and their "actual" forms? It doesn't.

I believe that some of what I experience via DMT is equally as real as many of the things I experience in everyday life. However, I also believe that many of things I experience in everyday life are not very real. They are only perceptions of aspects of different energies-- subjective perceptions.

For instance, a couple of nights ago I had an experience where I was in a patient's chair and a doctor of sorts had opened a panel on the right side of my head and was examining things and doing some work, much like a dentist. He even hummed and hawed and told me how to better take care of myself, did some rewiring and other things, closed me up and sent me back to reality. Upon arrival, my brain did something akin to a "reboot". The spot on my head where he had worked felt odd for a day, and from then onwards I have had a mental clarity and capacity for thought, memory, and logical process which I wasn't aware of before. Unlike after most DMT experiences, I can actually remember things BETTER now. In computer terms, I feel like I had my hard drive defragged. Did an intradimensional doctor LITERALLY plop me down and open me up? Most likely this was a perception of the drug's action on my brain. Did it have a lasting impact on me? Yes. So was it "real"? I suppose so.

The experiences which are harder to determine the nature of are the ones where some sort of otherwordly vista opens up on your wall, and there's a fifty-story lion-breathing Mesopotamian sun god STARING at you. Or the experiences where suddenly you see years of yourself in Egypt (past lives?) learning gnostic mysteries. These also have a lasting impact on me, albeit a different one, in their impact on my philosophies and idea of life direction. Are these, then, real? They sure as hell feel like it.

 

[marz]

its Real entheogenic journeys will rock your socks off!

 

[gibran2]

Another point to consider when asking DMT users if their experiences are real is that each of us has experiences unique to the individual.

Some people have experiences that aren’t very visual – they feel “energy” in and around them. Others see complex geometric patterns, but have never had entity contact. Some experience entities as humans in somewhat recognizable settings. Some see themselves in their past – visions of their childhood. Others experience alien realms in settings unlike anything they have ever experienced or imagined.

Even within a single individual, experiences can vary. DMT provides an incredibly rich range of experiences.

So when considering the question “Is it real?”, how one answers depends on the nature of the experiences they’ve had. I like to say that everyone will consider the experiences to be real and “outside” of their mind when they have a reality-confirming experience. If you don’t think it’s real just means that you haven’t yet had an experience that will convince you it’s real.

My particular experiences suggest that the immaterial realm is real and “outside” of me, although the difference between “inside” and “outside” becomes inconsequential. I have had experiences that are as real as my everyday reality, so to question the reality of those experiences requires me to question the reality of everyday experience.

Regardless of one’s particular beliefs, DMT shows us all that there is more – there is more to life than we ordinarily perceive, there is more to “mind” than we can fathom, there is more to reality than we can comprehend.

 

[jacetea]

One thing I have noticed about these entities is they are almost identical to the ones I see in my dreams. The only major difference being the DMT entities aren't always in human form. When I dream, I create places and people that I've never seen before. Somehow I'm able to vividly experience a place I've never been and it may not even exist. I create streets, buildings, forests on the fly. How is this possible, I don't really know. It's always based on something earthly though.

From my experience, there isn't much difference from DMT to dreaming. Some things are different obviously:
- Colours behaving like I've never seen them
- Complex multidimensional areas, not based on places on earth like in dreams
- Feelings associated with the DMT trip (physical and mental)

Now this is what really blows my mind. Only after experiencing a DMT trip could I have dreams about a DMT-like place. There's a thread somewhere that people have mentioned DMT trips while dreaming.
I would theorize that we are either pulling this experience from somewhere else, or the DMT itself is affecting us in such a way that these places are distorted versions of what we normally dream about.

 

[hyperspacing]

Depends on what "real" is. Reality is commonly known a the string of images, sounds, and feelings that form a thought in your brain. If you can't process something into a thought is it real? Can it exist? Does color exist to a lifelong blind person? You can only define reality to yourself. I can tell you hyperspace feels real but until you encounter it for yourself it can never be.

~peace and love

 

[Shayku]

I think it's all in my head. So yes, real.

 

[AstraLex]

Namaste

Do you believe what you see on DMT is real?

What is ‘real’? How do you define ‘real’? If ‘real’ is something you can see, hear, touch, smell or taste, then ‘real’ is nothing more than electro-magnetic impulses interpreted by your brain.

Steven LaBerge, using lucid dreams, has proved that while dreaming and you do stuff (like counting, singing, dancing etc.) in your dreams, the same areas of the brain are being activated as if you were doing the same stuff while being awake. So, for your brain, any input it gets is as real as it can be. Your brain doesn’t make any gradations of real, like ‘more real’ or ‘less real’. It doesn’t rate realness on some sort of scale. It simply proceeds any input it receives in the way it’s wired up to do so.

If you want to dive in the psychology and the structure of your brain, you will discover even more things about ‘realness’. For example, there are countless amount of processes going on in your brain in parallel (=simultaneously), always. Sometimes there is less of that sort parallel activity, while you are at rest for example. Sometimes there are a lot of those parallel processes going on, like when you are performing some heavy cognitive task. But there is not a single region in your brain, where those processes come together. Nowhere. Not even in your neo-cortex. Surely, a lot of those processes, especially those concerning inhibition, control and appointment of behavior, go through your cortex, but they don’t stop there, nor do they arise solely from there. No serial processing is being done in your cortex (prefrontal lobe). Therefore, your brain is not you, because somebody must make use of all those countless parallel processes.

This is where your mind or spirit or whatever name you prefer comes into play. Your mind IS you. YOU take something like a snap-shot of those parallel processes at a given moment, bind them in a serial, and voila - you perceive the world around and within your body. It’s YOU (your mind if you want), who decides: “Well, those snap-shots that I was taking while dreaming are ‘un-real’, because I have taken them while asleep. And those snap-shots that I am getting right now are real, because I am awake.” Or “I was on psychedelics, therefore anything I perceived was ‘un-real’”. Well, it’s your decision after all, everybody is free to believe whatever he/she wants to believe and since every belief system is self-reinforcing, it will always be all right for you, no matter what you believe. But remember, from the brain-structural point of view - EVERYTHING you perceive is real. It’s all the same electro-magnetic impulses in the same brain-areas after all Your brain doesn’t make a difference between a psychedelic-induced input, dream-induced input or ‘fully-awake input’, but YOU can define a difference if you want to.

I can go on and on, telling about the concept of realness, but to spare your (and my) time, I will stop here. To make a conclusion of my answer to your question: “I believe that everything I perceive is real in one way or another, otherwise it would not be proceeded by my brain in order for me to get that specific information. Altered state of consciousness while on DMT and information that I get in that state is no exception”.

do you believe that the entities you encounter while using this substance are real persons?

Oh dear, if I was going to explain, what I understand under a ‘person’, it would make an even bigger post than the previous one, where I explained what I understand under ‘real’. So, I will put it simple: the entities, I have encountered so far, have clearly a theory of mind. Therefore, I consider them to be a ‘person’ and threat them as such. The same is true for some of the entities that I have encountered in some of my lucid dreams. If you want to know, what Theory of Mind is, you can read the next wiki entry: Theory of mind - Wikipedia

do you believe that you have actually traveled to a real place?

As you can probably derive from my previous answers, I consider any place to be real. While in Hyperspace, I have a 100% conviction that it’s ‘real’ (not a surprise if you know how the brain operates ). And since it is a different experience than the forest or the room where I started smoking DMT, I guess you could use the term ‘travelled to a place’ for the sake of simplicity.

do you think that these entities have appeared in or interfered in your "straight" life in anyway?

I believe that I am living a lot of different lives in different dimensions. Deriving from my dream-realities, I have more than 200 (the number of different entries in my Dream Journal) different ‘lives’. Some of them are only slightly different from this physical reality; some of them are very unlike my current life (like being a murderer, a rapist, a military man, a Starship captain just to name a few). None of them does interfere with this physical reality in which you are reading my post, nor does DMT reality interfere with it. They seem to be completely separate, unless I willfully decide to incorporate some of the elements that I ‘pick-up’ in those other dimensions into my physical dimension, but that’s a different story

P.S. Light and Love to everybody reading my post (of course I wish Light and Love to everybody on planet Earth (and beyond), but only those reading my post will be able to receive my wishes, therefore I direct my wishes especially to them/to you )

 

[WSaged]

AstraLex!!!
DIG IT!!!



WS

 

[just mark]

much thanks to everyone for your answers. i am reading each of your replys and want to make some intelligent observations, if i can, when i've got more time. i knew, when i posted this, that a big aspect of the discussion would be to define "exactly what do we mean when we call something real". well, shucks, i don't really have an answer to that question, myself! am i really here??? am i actually operating in multiple dimensions right now, as i type? all i can say is that i hope that in some of those dimensions, i am sipping on an exceedingly fine kentucky bourbon, on ice. maybe with hunter s. thompson and janis joplin.

 

[Felnik]

I believe this whole idea of whats real has been greatly discussed and can be a slippery slope.
Many things are possible, in fact anything is possible.

I think its important to be open to all possibilities.
I tend to form provisional theories as I progress with my work with this stuff.
As journeys progress each one tends to blow alot of these theories out of the water.
Each time theories are reformed and modified.

But some things i've experienced seem to have certain patterns and consistencies. These are the fragments I tend to keep.

I found it to be important to take a stand on this whole "whats real" thing.
Question everything but have some kind of base line to start with and a place to come back to.


Integration to this matter reality got alot better when i began to provisionally except some of what i was experiencing as real.

I fought the impossibility of it for a long time . After i had enough encounters with these certain energy beings i finally had to give in and stop fighting it.

The realness of it by present scientific definition is impossible right now.

when the answers finally come they will crazier than anything we could have possibly imagined and then some.

 

[Ice House]

the one question i would like to pose to Nexus-citizens is: Do you believe what you see on DMT is real? do you believe that the entities you encounter while using this substance are real persons? do you believe that you have actually traveled to a real place? do you think that these entities have appeared in or interfered in your "straight" life in anyway?

It's as real as anything else I experience.

Real depends on the software my operating system is running.

When the neuro transmitter or software is seratonin, then what I experience in my normal subjective conciousness is real or is my reality.

When I change software or neuro transmitter to DMT then my reality is Hyperspace.

The way my mind operates or reasons is like this-

If Im experiencing it its real. The concious experience I am having as I am typing this post is one of an infinite ammount of outcomes that is the holographic me, or universe. They all exist They are all happening, They have all already happened and they all will happen, they always have been and always will be.


I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

One of those infinite outcomes is that I am you, reading this post.

Its all really very simple.

 

[kyrolima]

Reality is not in your hands. You can not BE in reality without being the observer. Your brain interprets signals and that defines your reality as a human being.
DMT gives your brain a lot more capacity to receive signals, to interpret and to "see more" - I'm not sure about this whole idea of lurking into other dimensions.
I sometimes doubt it.
But we are all conciousness, the ultimate reality is what we make of reality.
And psychedelic drugs can help adjusting the view on the world and on oneself.

It helps to be aware of your life, your existance, your place in the universe and helps understanding certain imbalances better.

I hope I could make things clear for you, just mark.

 

[asdroeido]

DMT will go mainstream by October of this year onwards. The Spirit Molecule will get released, and a lot of Santo Daime people will give lectures about Glauco's death. The timewave indicates a resonance with the end of the Pax Britannica, if I'm not mistaken.

I guess your actual question is "Is DMT useful? Where do these people come from?" as you just seem to be asking for a lecture on basic epistemology when you ask "Is DMT real?".
Is DMT useful? It is, like any psychedelic.
Where do these people come from? They are probably dead people. Most probably, you after you die.

 

[endlessness]

"is it real?" -> A pragmatic approach: What is "real", and when is it actually useful to ask this? - Philosophy - Welcome to the DMT-Nexus