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Is this all in the mind?

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GreatArc

GreatArc

Rising Star
Hello,

This question is directed specifically to those people who suspect/believe that there is any part of the DMT experience which is not completely being generated entirely by the brain under the influence of the substance.

**Before I ask my questions, I also want to make it clear that I am not looking to have any adversarial or argumentative discussion with anyone. Even those of you who freely admit or accept that there is no evidence for their beliefs or claims, or that your position is not entirely reasonable or rational. It is enough that I want to talk to anyone who is satisfied to the point they DO feel DMT is interacting in some way with something external to their own brain.

So, essentially, what I would like to know is:

1.) For those of you who suspect/believe DMT experiences are not entirely limited to an internal experience, what else do you think is going on?

2.) What helped you to determine or at least suspect this was more than just what your own mind was generating?

My own first experiences were essentially similar to massive doses of other psychoactive substances, except in scope and scale, being that they were several orders of magnitude more immersive and pronounced than even heavy doses of LSD, 4-Ac0-DMT, and Psilocybin Mushrooms.

It was my first breakthrough dose which put me in contact with what I absolutely felt was an alien intelligence, a completely different states of existence/non-existence, or what one might roughly call a different dimension or universe. I experienced impossible things which would have astonished me if there were even a mind or self present to identify as.

Upon returning to our shared reality, I am considering if there is any sensible reason to believe that those experiences were produced by anything other than my mind, even when my mind was completely satisfied during the trip that something more was happening. How would I ever distinguish or determine the difference? How do you? And is it reasonable that DMT experiences where we are satisfied we DO interact with something outside of our minds are not good or compelling reasons to believe that is actually the case?

(For philosophy folk, I'd rather not wander down the path of solipsism too far and broadly, but rather stick specifically with DMT breakthrough experiences where you come away believing some external phenomenon took place.)

Thanks in advance,
-GA
 
Two resources you might find interesting are:

1. The book Inner Paths to Outer Space Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds th…

2. Andrew Gallimore's "Talking with Aliens" lecture

Both of these resources discuss how being inside and outside the mind are not necessarily mutually exclusive. From engaging with these, I have personally come to believe that our minds are like receptors/conduits of information/consciousness and that DMT alters the way in which our brain processes information to an extent that allows for access to and communication with realms that we do not get to experience in our everyday lives.
 
I believe that the universe is some kind of intelligent life force. I think we're some kind of experiment for the force to see what happens. It doesn't matter how much dmt you smoke. If you don't have the right brain you're never going to see it. I noticed that i have to smoke a extremely pure form of dmt to get to the source. If it's mixed with NMT or a Maoi I just get a different experience. Im not sure why because some people don't have that problem. It's almost like my brain knows that it's not natural if I mix it with something else. You're going to know it's real once you feel the universe flow through you. It's something you can't put in words and it changes you forever. It completely changed my personality and helped me realize that none of this really matters and that's very freeing. If we died tomorrow we would probably be forgotten about within a year so why have a low self esteem about anything. It takes more than a drug to change you like that. I think if you're a sensitive and a introverted person you're going to go far on dmt. This is just my opinion.
 
I have personally come to believe that our minds are like receptors/conduits of information/consciousness and that DMT alters the way in which our brain processes information
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I was going to make a complicated argument going to this ^
Once on acid, I looked at my cat and realized we were the same soul experiencing reality through different bodies. To this body, different layers of souls are embedded, they come from all the experience in one's life (and the life of his ancestors) and constitute his sense of self.

From this, I have grown an understanding that eternity/endlessness/vacuum exist simultaneously to our time-defined reality. Lately, I sort of saw that in a new light as Us (the whole Universe) being a decomposed version of that greater being Eternal (so it's a matter of focus), which shed a new light on mythological dismemberment and the psychedelic experience - as, it's like the whole universe is this decorporation, decomposed, state of Eternity that I experienced with Changa. Feeling this you thereof feel like the Universe, you become Eternity.

From this standpoint, the psychedelic experience equates a new focus.

Before answering your question more precisely, I need to say I only had one experience with Spïce.

1.) I would like to say reality is an internal experience. You might think it equates the "everything is in your mind", but I think it is a more heartfelt version of it. We have interiorized the world, as humans.

2.) I couldn't remember anything. At first, I thought it was due to the speed of it but then I remember some Salvia experience that was just as short and intense (as loss of identity and such) and I could remember most of what happened.
With Spice, every time I would try to remember I would feel like it was me creating a mental representation of what I had seen (which I could not remember anyway but...) and experienced. So I went through the "Impossible" - "I don't know, what, I, uh, ..." phase.
Later on, I sort of linked that to watching nature very closely. It is very hard to visualize this level of details and intricacy mentally. It's so complex, whatever you will mind will be a gross representation. When something reaches such level of reality and is experienced as such, maybe it doesn't matter anymore if it is real or not (so yeah, it really always come back to definitions of 'real', 'mind', etc).

From this, I would put a spin on the mind manifesting quality of the experiences: When I look at a tree, I'm interacting with an exterior object. What am I interacting when I look through the lens of Spïce then? Don't know, but I would go back to this Eternity thing. This Eternity I sort of saw it as a grain of sand - so they are obvious connotations to the Big Bang, the Universe is still that grain fo sand, all information still exist condensed into that unique non-moving vibration-particule. And that may be the realm of the mind, the mind is unbound by time. All ideas of time travel machine really come from there btw, the ability of the mind to project itself in time - for most of its time, Humanity has been soaked into the belief of divination and precognition and such. Because you tap into that realm of the mind. And that is the subconscious, Dream Time, Cydelic space, etc. And it is very much alive!

You zoom in into the mind. And at such level, body and mind are one. Would you say something isn't real because you look at it through a microscope? Then again, everything that exists is real, is natural. It's dead ends all the way, at the end of the road you can only experience it truly by dying. So, it's evident all of this falls short compared to the experience. It's really weird, wanting to understand this from a rational standpoint. I somehow think the best way to describe it would be through raging poetic fury ...

Really other than that: "I don't know what know don't I know don't what don't know I don't I know I don't I"
 
Hmm, I guess I'm still not understanding what it is that has convinced any of you that everything being experienced during a DMT trip is not completely generated by your own mind.

Like, I could understand if some of you were convinced that you had brought back some knowledge or something which challenged the default assumption that this was entirely going on in your mind. I know how inadequate language and comparative concepts can be at this level of psychedelic experience. I had experiences where I most decidedly entered another reality/universe/dimension and interacted with alien intelligences.

But I am unconvinced these things actually happened, but rather my mind was in a natural brain state where, for a time, I believed they happened as fully as anything else in my life. The difference being, I was under the influence of the most powerful psychedelic ever discovered, whereas for the rest of my life, I am not, and can make critical evaluations with more confidence. Added to which, I have a shared reality with all of you which we can compare and check out with one another to assess our own cognition, as opposed to the completely cerebral and private realities accessed using the drug.

TLDR: What do you believe is happening? But more interestingly, WHY do you believe it?
 
My point from another point of view, just found it in the Breaking Convention Podcast:


I guess in the end it's really about your definition of reality. And of course for speaking about something beyond definition (as is the world, that cloud, and your mind!) is ... pointless (?)

Edit: another one on this subject more precisely, same guy:

And I remembered this Jon Hanna article which I read sometimes ago on Erowid: https://erowid.org/chemicals/dmt/dmt_article3.shtml
 
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