Hello forums! As the title states, I have not used DMT before, so I'm sorry about that, but I have a deep fascination with it and have studied it quite a lot. I've fallen down the rabbit hole pretty hard, and had some shocking revelations about the human condition that I've attempted to share other places, but it seems no one ever gets my points except psychedelics users. So I've come here hoping you may understand.
A couple months ago, I downloaded Stanislav Grof's book Realms of the Human Unconscious, and one section on page 26 caught my eye:
A while later, I came across this thread on the DMT nexus, and immediately my brain made a connection. Let's hone in on one thing joe says...
Well, isn't that curious? This is a really great post, and I commend joe for this one because he may have accidentally reached the heart of the psychedelic experience: it's an illusion. But don't be fooled -- it's no more illusory than your reality while sober. For psychedelics to even work, they require some kind of self as their foundation. Otherwise you could take DMT and nothing happens.
More and more, it seems the "ego" is simply a means to escape pain, or to stop a good thing from slipping away. But by nature it's artificial. You tell your brain, "I cannot accept this", or "I cannot lose that" and it begins to warp your perception of reality. This is why the human brain slides so naturally into psychosis in times of stress -- we're all experiencing a soft version of psychosis 24/7. I don't see the world like you do, even while we're both sober. But if you take psychs, you know that self is not a fixed thing; it's arbitrary. Which is why one especially good trip can cure a person of depression for life. And so obviously there's a clear dynamic now: You can either embrace your ego with all its ups and downs, or try to scale it back with something like Buddhism and pray for enlightenment. Simple, right?
...
...But there's one thing that baffles me. Despite how big this knowledge is, I can't help but feel there's a much bigger fish somewhere under the surface. Take a look at these posts:
Could they be BS? Yeah, of course. But I've been seeing posts online like these sporadically for years. Like some guy who meditates beyond a certain point, and then all he wants to do is relax under trees all day. Or another guy who practices 'metta' Loving-kindness meditation and has what amounts to an endogenous 6-hour MDMA trip. Through my own experiments with meditation, I've accidentally simulated some effects of alcohol and cough syrup. There's something very odd going on for sure.
If we suppose our human existence has any rhyme or reason to it, then perhaps the Buddhists are actually wrong about the material world, and a complete retreat from it (by rejecting the ego) is the wrong move -- or at least, not the ultimate move. Buddhism has been characterized by some as the Eastern equivalent of Skepticism in Ancient Greece. Which is to say, there was a vibrant culture in the Indus valley before Buddhism appeared which was attempting to reach a specific goal, and they failed to attain it, so Buddhism appears in the Orient during the twilight years of this Vedic culture as a last-ditch attempt to stake a claim on their destiny. It's well known that the Buddha did not discover the Jhanas, but instead learned them from the forest ascetics who believed the bliss of the Jhanas to be the absolute peak of life on earth and spent all their lives in that state. The Buddha though claimed that the Jhanas not the end, and Buddhism ideologically says, "Go even further. The Jhanas are not the end". But this has historically failed since countless monks reach that attainment and spend the remainder of their lifes "blissing out" in deep trances to the point of neglecting to teach younger monks how to attain the same. Buddhism tells us there's more beyond that, but evidence is spotty.
At this point, we have to stop and ask: Isn't this weird? Our brains have an incredibly elaborate system of ego, but in apparently all cases, it's better to scale back the ego than to develop it. Why should this be so? How does that make any sense? I know you already have the Darwinian answer hammered into your brain -- ego makes us better at survival! -- but let's forget that for a moment. What if the ego exists for a reason, and we simply don't know it yet? What if the ego is capable of a permanent bliss state? Let's not forget that taking LSD simply acts as a signal to produce virtually any kind of sensation. It's not actually necessary to produce the sensation; it just says "Go ahead and do it now". Not to mention the whole endogenous DMT thing.
...And that's where I'm at. Many signs point to, "This should be possible!", but that's all. If I do a deep-dive on more Hindu/Buddhist stuff, I'm sure I'd find more stuff to support this. But as of now I'd like to drop this here for perusal. This may be jumping the gun, but it appears meditation could be the universal tool to change one's ego, and the Buddhist paths are only a handful of endless possible journeys.
A couple months ago, I downloaded Stanislav Grof's book Realms of the Human Unconscious, and one section on page 26 caught my eye:
A while later, I came across this thread on the DMT nexus, and immediately my brain made a connection. Let's hone in on one thing joe says...
Well, isn't that curious? This is a really great post, and I commend joe for this one because he may have accidentally reached the heart of the psychedelic experience: it's an illusion. But don't be fooled -- it's no more illusory than your reality while sober. For psychedelics to even work, they require some kind of self as their foundation. Otherwise you could take DMT and nothing happens.
More and more, it seems the "ego" is simply a means to escape pain, or to stop a good thing from slipping away. But by nature it's artificial. You tell your brain, "I cannot accept this", or "I cannot lose that" and it begins to warp your perception of reality. This is why the human brain slides so naturally into psychosis in times of stress -- we're all experiencing a soft version of psychosis 24/7. I don't see the world like you do, even while we're both sober. But if you take psychs, you know that self is not a fixed thing; it's arbitrary. Which is why one especially good trip can cure a person of depression for life. And so obviously there's a clear dynamic now: You can either embrace your ego with all its ups and downs, or try to scale it back with something like Buddhism and pray for enlightenment. Simple, right?
...
...But there's one thing that baffles me. Despite how big this knowledge is, I can't help but feel there's a much bigger fish somewhere under the surface. Take a look at these posts:
Could they be BS? Yeah, of course. But I've been seeing posts online like these sporadically for years. Like some guy who meditates beyond a certain point, and then all he wants to do is relax under trees all day. Or another guy who practices 'metta' Loving-kindness meditation and has what amounts to an endogenous 6-hour MDMA trip. Through my own experiments with meditation, I've accidentally simulated some effects of alcohol and cough syrup. There's something very odd going on for sure.
If we suppose our human existence has any rhyme or reason to it, then perhaps the Buddhists are actually wrong about the material world, and a complete retreat from it (by rejecting the ego) is the wrong move -- or at least, not the ultimate move. Buddhism has been characterized by some as the Eastern equivalent of Skepticism in Ancient Greece. Which is to say, there was a vibrant culture in the Indus valley before Buddhism appeared which was attempting to reach a specific goal, and they failed to attain it, so Buddhism appears in the Orient during the twilight years of this Vedic culture as a last-ditch attempt to stake a claim on their destiny. It's well known that the Buddha did not discover the Jhanas, but instead learned them from the forest ascetics who believed the bliss of the Jhanas to be the absolute peak of life on earth and spent all their lives in that state. The Buddha though claimed that the Jhanas not the end, and Buddhism ideologically says, "Go even further. The Jhanas are not the end". But this has historically failed since countless monks reach that attainment and spend the remainder of their lifes "blissing out" in deep trances to the point of neglecting to teach younger monks how to attain the same. Buddhism tells us there's more beyond that, but evidence is spotty.
At this point, we have to stop and ask: Isn't this weird? Our brains have an incredibly elaborate system of ego, but in apparently all cases, it's better to scale back the ego than to develop it. Why should this be so? How does that make any sense? I know you already have the Darwinian answer hammered into your brain -- ego makes us better at survival! -- but let's forget that for a moment. What if the ego exists for a reason, and we simply don't know it yet? What if the ego is capable of a permanent bliss state? Let's not forget that taking LSD simply acts as a signal to produce virtually any kind of sensation. It's not actually necessary to produce the sensation; it just says "Go ahead and do it now". Not to mention the whole endogenous DMT thing.
...And that's where I'm at. Many signs point to, "This should be possible!", but that's all. If I do a deep-dive on more Hindu/Buddhist stuff, I'm sure I'd find more stuff to support this. But as of now I'd like to drop this here for perusal. This may be jumping the gun, but it appears meditation could be the universal tool to change one's ego, and the Buddhist paths are only a handful of endless possible journeys.
I am joking.
I am listening! 
I've never been to the heart of the psychedelic experience! what's it like?? holy crap THE HEART? bum bum, bum bum 
