The Atheist DMT Experience

[Eliyahu]

Hello and Welcome. 8)

I would like to begin by saying that while I myself am not an Atheist I am genuinely curios about the types of experiences that Atheists have while under the influence of DMT...

I want to make it clear that I am in no way trying to mock atheism or anything like that
I also don't have any hidden agenda here....I am NOT trying to convert any Atheist to my belief system. I would like to know however what types of emotionally moving or dramatic experiences do atheists have on DMT or Ayahuasca?

I myself have had many what I would call "spiritual" experiences but I do not really compute the dynamics of a non-spiritual but still trans-formative psychedelic experiences.

So if there are any "Orthadox" Atheists out there in D.M.T land who would like to share any non-spiritual yet still powerful DMT experiences they may have had.
Please do so.

Thanks for reading this.
-Elijah

 

[MMPA]

Can non-DMT transformative experiences be included?

There may be a confusion between the idea of a profound/important feeling and the idea of a god existing. One can feel an overwhelming sense of good/purity/bliss without having to believe in a god. Also, the conversion over to a belief is only as possible as the person's ego/beliefs will allow them to do so. If someone is resistant to the idea of a god, it would prevent them from believing in one. On the other hand, an open-minded person might accept the possibility that some form of a higher being might actually exist.

All in all, it's a matter of what the person interprets the experience as. If one were never introduced to a god, then maybe a religious idea would never cross their mind in an experience. There have also been people who have experiences that completely disintegrate their belief in anything (I recall a couple of Nexians on here saying something like that, though I don't know who to point to).

This answer is simply another perspective on the idea with no definitive answer.

 

[Eliyahu]

MMPA
Thanks you for your response...it is an excellent one..

I forgot to say that I would be interested in hearing about any type of
powerful "non spiritual" psychedelic experience. not just DMT

Also I am not looking for ANY definitive answer I would just like to come to a greater personal understanding of a prospective that is very polar from my own.

Thanks again MMPA for the well articulated input.

 

[slewb]

I'm atheist in that I don't believe in any external god/gods...

I find that psychedelics just grant me a greater understanding of myself. My entire life I've just been a kind of lump, but I now realize the untapped potential that I, and every other human being has. It's infinite, and now that I've started using it productively I feel fantastic. As I said, I don't believe in external gods, but I think that every human mind/soul/whatever has just as much power as gods are reputed to have.

 

[Volvox]

I'm not atheist in the slightest - I believe in God, but more of a general, 'The universe is God and we are all part of it and connected' then your traditional interfering christian type God.

That being said, I've done plenty of traveling and I really don't think we are connecting with other entities or anything really spiritual like that.

I think that is all in our heads and its a very chemical/biological response our brain is going though. I think all the entities, or feeling of presences are just our subconscious talking to us.

I feel the experience is spiritual- to an extent. And chemical-biological for the most part.

 

[Guyomech]

It's a tricky discussion, because it involves having to clearly define some slippery things: what is God? What does a spiritual experience consist of? Where exactly can you draw the line between a profoundly moving experience and a spiritual one?

If I was forced to stand with one of two groups: the religious and the atheists, I'd have to choose the atheists. I think of religion as a manmade thing. I'm definitely one of those psychonauts whose belief system has been permanently shattered: my only remaining beliefs are about myself (I'm living the right life, with the right partner etc) and I think that beyond that I'd be silly to try declaring what the truth is.

My high dosage experiences tend to involve that classic universal connectivity. From that perspective, it all makes sense, yet you can also see how wrong most human religious practices are. For instance, believing in a god "above" you is both true and not true: you are that being, you are everything, you are neither above nor below anything. At the same time you are a primate, made of dirt and water, and you forget your higher self most of the time, so it can feel like there is a strong God above/ you below duality, even though in many ways it is illusory.

I also tend to think that the whole experience is self-generated by the brain; that you are not technically "traveling" anywhere. At the same time, though, you are able to tap into places in yourself so primal and forgotten that it is very much literally a journey. Somewhere in there are the ingredients for recognizing and uniting with higher aspects of yourself. And it's in the highest points of these "godhead" type unions where all rational language breaks down.

So I can't call myself an atheist if I'm talking about a universal consciousness. I guess that's something you'd call a spiritual experience. I still think of myself as a rationalist, though, and just admit that there are aspects of life where no rational language applies.

 

[MMPA]

Atheist entity with an open mind here: I am only beginning my adventures with mind-enhancers, DMT not included. My experiences have slowly given me a simultaneously contradictory view to everything: I am gradually feeling more connected to nature and I am slowly learning about these new levels of existence mediated by meditation, focus, thinking, and pychedelics. At the same time, I realize that a lot of these states of mind are simply the effect of various chemical reactions in my head which, in turn, completely supports yet invalidates my idea of spirituality and gods.

As far as gods/higher beings are concerned, I don't believe in their existence but I do believe that I can manifest and harness my ability to create higher states of mind and being though my own self-exploration, so any experience that has an impact on me really affects my view of life and existence rather than affects my belief in a God. However, I do like to have my own sub-belief that there are forces controlling everything in nature, but that is currently a personal-made and unfounded feeling.

I hope this helps. In summary, psychedelic experiences have little relation with my belief in a God even when those experiences happen to manifest great god-like beings/forces.

 

[endlessness]

IMO atheism is a belief, just like theism.. Its the belief that god/entities DONT exist.

Agnosticism, on the other hand, seems much more reasonable and humble to me. It's a "who really knows, ultimately? " attitude. It's a "I dont have beliefs but I have my suspicions" attitude..

Also, agnosticism is not contrary to being a spiritual/mystical/existencial (and scientific) explorer, and neither means a cold over-rationalist approach, but it means you wont come to absolute conclusions and fall blindly for one single model of how to explain the different phenomena..

Lastly, I agree with Guyomech, that there are key questions to be asked such as, what is god, etc..

PS: Dont know if you ever read this thread but its relevant, and one of my favs: A pragmatic approach: What is "real", and when is it actually useful to ask this? - Philosophy - Welcome to the DMT-Nexus

 

[Citta]

IMO atheism is a belief, just like theism.. Its the belief that god/entities DONT exist.

Atheism per definition is no more a belief than not playing golf is a hobby. Atheism is a lack of belief in the proposition "God exists". An atheists is simply a person that doesn't get convinced by this claim, because of the complete lack of any kind of evidence for such a claim and because of the many things that talks in the favor of the hypothesis "God does not exist" (a hypothesis that never have been falsified, by the way).

Is it for example the same to believe in pink unicorns and not to believe in pink unicorns? To believe in Santa Clause and not to believe in him? To believe a proposition is principally different than not to believe in a proposition. Religious people believe in God, atheists simply doesn't because they are not convinced to do so.

Atheism requires no belief, at least not by far in the same way that theism does.

As for the question of the OP, of course atheists can have extremely spiritual and moving experiences. I am an atheist myself, but I love DMT and it gives me a hell of a lot. I have had mystical experiences on DMT, deeply spiritual ones, merged with the "Godhead" and/or the whole Universe and so on and so forth. I just think there are completely different reasons underlying these experiences than does a spiritual/religious/mystical person. What atheists (we) don’t tend to do is make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about the nature of reality on the basis of such experiences.

 

[endlessness]

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Supposing god doesnt exist is a belief, because you dont have evidence of the contrary. It's a faith in your own subjective judgement regarding what this universe is all about. There are infinite ways to imagine the world in ways that would not challenge the known laws of physics/science and yet would allow for some kind of grander scheme. Matrix-like scenarios, for example, are entirely compatible with the reliability of science.

This is not to say that one or another of those explanations/scenarios are true, and specially not saying we as humans with limited brains can know it (and therefore preach about The Truth, like many religious people), but I am saying that ultimately, we have no clue about what's really behind these regular patterns that we can observe.. Science only talks about these patterns, which are reliably consistent, but beyond that, anything else is pure speculation, belief, hypothesis. Science doesn't touch existential questions, it touches questions regarding observable patterns in our universe.. And if atheists claim the theists should be honest and know how to differenciate between facts and speculations, so do atheists need to live up to that, otherwise its a double standard.

 

[olio]

As a teenager I was a self-titled atheist and pretty militant. I would enjoy going on ridiculous rants on the internet berating anyone with belief in a higher power or anything beyond our scientific knowledge, even ridiculing my close friends for religious belief.
Then I dosed up on a heavy 4ACO-DMT session and was slammed head first into God himself (aka, me, you, the whole blinkin works!) and there's no fucking way I can hold on to any sliver of atheism since. I don't have any solid belief system, more of an open acceptance of the amazing mystery we're currently engaged in.

 

[psychedelic_cloud]

I consider my views on religion to be agnostic. I don't believe that anyone can truthfully know whether there is or isn't a god. I almost feel as if attempting to confirm it one way or another takes the mystery out of life. Not knowing what is to come afterwards makes me that much more eager to live my life to the fullest and try to be the best person I can possibly be.

Despite not specifically believing in a god, I have had many spiritual experiences. However, most of what I would consider a spiritual experience involves gaining a better understanding of myself, what I can do to better my relationships with other people, and how I can use my unique qualities to improve the world that we live in. When it comes to DMT, I experience many different things. Sometimes I just experience a bunch of crazy patterns that are impossibly intricate and other times I've actually felt the presence of other beings or spirits that were most definitely not human. However, I do not believe that I am in any way inferior to these beings or that they in any way correlate to what some people call a god. I do not discount the fact that I've experienced what seems to be the presence of a spirit or a foreign being, but to me it's just another thing that I can't fully confirm during my lifetime as a human.

Peace,
psychedelic_cloud

 

[Citta]

Endlessness;

I can't really see how you actually addressed my points here, Endlessness, even though you have other valid points. We are not really talking about how absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (but I will do further down), and even less about supposing God doesn't exist. I am talking about how atheists are not convinced that God exists, and that you falsely claim that atheism is a belief on the same level that theism is. But that is wrong for reasons argued above, and a common misunderstanding and fallacious argument often used to somehow put atheists and theists on the same ground in discussions. But theism and atheism are not on equal footing, not by far.

Although "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" seems evident on first sight, it is not so under closer inspection. Let's for example consider whether or not my keys are to be found in one of the pockets on my jacket; if we do not actually go into my pockets and see if the keys are there, the evidence of absence most clearly does not amount to evidence of the lack of keys to be found there. However, if we actually go look in my pockets and the keys are not found under close inspection, then the evidence of absence in this case is fairly strong evidence that the keys are not there after all. Many more situations like this exists, and especially with many traditional and common understandings of God this applies equally well.

Now, I am certainly not talking about all conceivable types of God. You can always play with semantics and argue yourself out of this, which leads us to a place where we ultimately cannot rule anything out, but that is not really what I was interested in when addressing your claim. But generally, in the absence of any good evidence for outlandish claims, we do not suspend judgement and become totally agnostic on the matter - we rightly disbelieve them. There is no reason to treat the existence of an unseen but all-powerful god who single-handedly created the whole universe any differently, and the burden of proof is naturally not on those who disbelieve, but those who make these outlandish claims.

As for the other scenarios you are talking about, ala "brain in a vat" stuff and so on, I don't see the immideate relevance this has for theism contra atheism, but I agree that such perspectives are compatible with science (of course). But one can always make up metaphysical scenarios that are compatible with whatever you wish, but it really proves nothing in the end.

But I guess we're flying off on a tangent here, as far as the OP's intent goes.

 

[SnozzleBerry]

I am talking about how atheists are not convinced that God exists

This seems like some semantic massaging, to me.

Would you (or would you not) say that this statement is really just a way of massaging the statement "Atheists are convinced there is no god" into something that sounds less certain than the usual definition of atheism?

As defined by Merriam-Webster:

1
archaic: ungodliness, wickedness
2
a: a disbelief in the existence of deity
b: the doctrine that there is no deity

Origin of ATHEISM
Middle French athéisme, from athée atheist, from Greek atheos godless, from a- + theos god
First Known Use: 1546

 

[Citta]

I am talking about how atheists are not convinced that God exists

This seems like some semantic massaging, to me.

Would you (or would you not) say that this statement is really just a way of massaging the statement "Atheists are convinced there is no god" into something that sounds less certain than the usual definition of atheism?

Semantic massaging or not, this is true. My intent was, however, not to massage anything, but to accurately describe what it means to be one. Saying that "They are not convinced God exists" is essentially the same as saying "They don't believe in God", or "They are convinced God doesn't exist". Furthermore, I can't see how the one statement seems more or less certain than the other. If you don't believe in God, you are not convinced he exists. If you are not convinced he exist, then you are convinced he does not exist - and you don't believe he exists. It's different ways of saying the same damn thing, and I don't understand your intent of bringing this up (?) at all. It seems completely irrelevant to me, and it would be far better if you addressed my overall points than to go nitty-picking on how I formulated myself, akin to getting caught up in me saying "That house is blue" instead of me saying "The color of that house is blue".

 

[SnozzleBerry]

I am talking about how atheists are not convinced that God exists

This seems like some semantic massaging, to me.

Would you (or would you not) say that this statement is really just a way of massaging the statement "Atheists are convinced there is no god" into something that sounds less certain than the usual definition of atheism?

Semantic massaging or not, this is true. My intent was, however, not to massage anything, but to accurately describe what it means to be one. Saying that "They are not convinced God exists" is essentially the same as saying "They don't believe in God", or "They are convinced God doesn't exist". Furthermore, I can't see how the one statement seems more or less certain than the other. If you don't believe in God, you are not convinced he exists. If you are not convinced he doesn't exist, than you are convinced he does not exist - and you don't believe he exists. It's different ways of saying the same damn thing, and I don't understand your intent of bringing this up (?) at all. It seems completely irrelevant to me, and it would be far better if you addressed my overall points than to go nitty-picking on how I formulated myself.

I don't mean to be nit-picking, I apologize if it came off that way...and I'll happily admit that I merely skimmed your posts.

To say (with certainty) that god does not exist is, imo, no different than to say (with certainty) that god does not exist. Both are beliefs that have, afaik, no basis for proof.

To say atheism is not a belief strikes me as odd...it is a belief that something is false, untrue or non-existent.

 

[Citta]

I don't mean to be nit-picking, I apologize if it came off that way...and I'll happily admit that I merely skimmed your posts.

To say (with certainty) that god does not exist is, imo, no different than to say (with certainty) that god does not exist. Both are beliefs that have, afaik, no basis for proof.

To say atheism is not a belief strikes me as odd...it is a belief that something is false, untrue or non-existent.

It's okay, Snozzle

It's true that many atheists with absolute certainty say "God doesn't exist". For the record, I completely agree that this perhaps is arrogant (and I hope you have noticed from my many posts that I generally don't talk in absolutes like this). However, atheism is not in and on itself asserting the complete certainty of God's nonexistence. It is a nonbelief. In fact, it shouldn't have had a name at all, just as not believing in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy or the Lochness-monster doesn't have a name for it.

It's just that not believing in something is principally very different than actually believing in something. I ask again with examples from the other post above; is it the same to not believe in Santa Clause and to actually believe in Santa Claus? Absolutely not. Is it the same not to believe in pink unicorns and to actually believe in pink unicorns? Absolutely not.

There is no evidence that Santa Claus or pink unicorns doesn't exist, but it doesn't change the matter. Is it the same to not believe in God and to actually believe in God? For the same reasons for the other examples, absolutely not.

This is why atheism and theism does not stand on equal footing, and shouldn't be equated.

As I said before; atheism is no more a belief than not playing golf is a hobby.

 

[jamie]

Being an atheist is as pointless as being religious. Both reqire some dogmatic belief that you can not back up. You can not prove there is a god, and you certainly cant prove there is no god either..so why not just be a gnostic?

I mean sure I believe that the univserse at some level is "god" but that is more about how I define the word god than anything else..it is semantics. I dont care to go beyond that. It is a concept that cannot be properly languaged nor grapsed in it's full complexity while in a sober state of mind IMO so discussing it too much is pointless and there is no need to form dogmatic beliefs surrounding it's existance or lack of existance.

There is only direct experience, anything else is just unprovable belief systems.

I never understood why atheists attack religion so much when they come off just as dogmatic at times.

Many atheists come to psychedelics and chance their opinions after..Some dont. That is just how it is. I cant say how an atheist experiences DMT, but I would imagine the same way everyone else does concidering they too have a human brain. It is the interpretation afterwords that defines how they feel about it later.

 

[olio]

I don't mean to be nit-picking, I apologize if it came off that way...and I'll happily admit that I merely skimmed your posts.

To say (with certainty) that god does not exist is, imo, no different than to say (with certainty) that god does not exist. Both are beliefs that have, afaik, no basis for proof.

To say atheism is not a belief strikes me as odd...it is a belief that something is false, untrue or non-existent.

It's okay, Snozzle

It's true that many atheists with absolute certainty say "God doesn't exist". For the record, I completely agree that this perhaps is arrogant (and I hope you have noticed from my many posts that I generally don't talk in absolutes like this). However, atheism is not in and on itself asserting the complete certainty of God's nonexistence. It is a nonbelief. In fact, it shouldn't have had a name at all, just as not believing in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy or the Lochness-monster doesn't have a name for it.

It's just that not believing in something is principally very different than actually believing in something. I ask again with examples from the other post above; is it the same to not believe in Santa Clause and to actually believe in Santa Claus? Absolutely not. Is it the same not to believe in pink unicorns and to actually believe in pink unicorns? Absolutely not.

There is no evidence that Santa Claus or pink unicorns doesn't exist, but it doesn't change the matter. Is it the same to not believe in God and to actually believe in God? For the same reasons for the other examples, absolutely not.

This is why atheism and theism does not stand on equal footing, and shouldn't be equated.

As I said before; atheism is no more a belief than not playing golf is a hobby.

This definitely makes sense but if, for example, you were just walking through a meadow one day and a glorious pink unicorn charged towards you, knocked you down and fucked you, don't you think your attitude towards the existence (or non-existence) of pink unicorns would be altered? I don't mean to be crude but a real religious experience is basically a spiritual ass-fucking, in my humble opinion at least.

 

[Citta]

This definitely makes sense but if, for example, you were just walking through a meadow one day and a glorious pink unicorn charged towards you, knocked you down and fucked you, don't you think your attitude towards the existence (or non-existence) of pink unicorns would be altered? I don't mean to be crude but a real religious experience is basically a spiritual ass-fucking, in my humble opinion at least.

Hehe, I had this coming in for me I guess. I've been asked similar questions before. Let's transfer the situation to DMT first; I have had spiritual ass kickings and gotten fucked over pretty good by crazy DMT-entities, merged with the "Godhead", merged with the universe and so on. I have experienced this while being an atheist, but I am still one nevertheless. How is that?

As jamie said, it all comes down to how you interpretate certain types of experience. While you may interpretate these experiences as evidence and/or a result of that a Godhead actually exists, that DMT-entities are autonomously real and so on, I simply don't. I just don't draw such conclusions on the basis of my own experiences, because anecdotes simply are bad evidence for matters like this, and that there are far more plausible explanations for this available.

Similarly, if I were to get charged by a pink unicorn the experience would certainly shock me, but I would be very careful to believe that I actually and objectively was charged by one. To believe that I would need more evidence than my own personal experience, such as witnesses, clear traces of the attack and/or solid evidence of some other kind - simply because such an event is pretty groundbreaking and a clear violation of what we know about our universe. Incredible events/claims/experience requires incredible evidence to be passed on, if not we would be justified in believing anything and say everyone is right; a dangerous and unproductive situation indeed.

Furthermore, as a physicist this attitude is simply essential for me to have in order to do any scientific work, and it is this attitude, together with the scientific method as a whole, that have landed rovers on Mars, sent satellites into orbit, given us medicines, secular values, secular legal systems and a civilized society (not to say everything is perfect of course!) based on rational values with a high degree of knowledge about the universe.