Before I get into this, most areas in which there was some dispute were fairly subjective, a definitive "right" or "wrong" doesn't really apply to these murky areas of discussion, and personal opinion plays a large role, I'm not trying to say "you are wrong" about anything, I'm simply elucidating my stance on these matters, if there's any disagreement I would happily engage in constructive conversation on the matter.
I'll start with some selected quotes from terence mckenna and occasionally others that are relevant to my position, and while I may not fully agree with mckenna or the others in every area, I more or less support the notions portrayed in these selected excerpts:
As the esoteric traditions say, life is an opportunity to prepare for death
ND: You have said that an important part of the mystical quest is to face up to death and recognize it as a rhythm of life. Would you like to enlarge on your view on the implications of the dying process?
TM: I take seriously the notion that these psychedelic states are an anticipation of the dying process-or, as the Tibetans refer to it, the Bardo level beyond physical death. It seems likely that our physical lives are a type of launching pad for the soul. As the esoteric traditions say, life is an opportunity to prepare for death, and we should learn to recognize the signposts along the way, so that when death comes, we can make the transition smoothly. I think the psychedelics show you the transcendental nature of reality. It would be hard to die gracefully as an atheist or existentialist. Why should you? Why not rage against the dying of the light? But if in fact this is not the dying of the light but the Dawning of the Great Light, then one should certainly not rage against that. There's a tendency in the New Age to deny death. We have people pursuing physical immortality and freezing their heads until the fifth millennium, when they can be thawed out. All of this indicates a lack of balance or equilibrium. The Tao flows through the realms of life and nonlife with equal ease. -terence mckenna
*David Flattery and Martin Schwartz*
In discussing the ordinarily invisible spiritual world of the after-death state, called menog existence in the Avestan religion, Flattery says this:
The consumption of sauma [Soma] may have been the only means recognized in Iranian religion of seeing into menog existence before death; at all events, it is the only means acknowledged in Zoroastrian literature . . . . and, as we have seen, is the means used by Ohrmazd when he wishes to make the menog existence visible to living persons. In ancient Iranian religion there is little evidence of concern with meditative practice which might foster development of alternative, non-pharmacological means to such vision. In Iran, vision into the spirit world was not thought to come about simply by divine grace or as a reward for saintliness. From the apparent role of sauma in initiation rites, experience of the effects of sauma, which is to say vision of menog existence, must have at one time been required of all priests (or the shamans antecedent to them).10
10. David Flattery and Martin Schwartz, Haoma and Harmaline, Near Eastern Studies, vol. 21 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989)
We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism.
At death, the thing that casts the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases. Material form breaks down; it ceases to be a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustained against entropy by cycling material in, extracting energy, and expelling waste. But the form that ordered it is not affected. These declarative statements are made from the point of view of the shamanic tradition, which touches all higher religions. Both the psychedelic dream state and the waking psychedelic state acquire great import because they reveal to life a task: to become familiar with this dimension that is causing being, in order to be familiar with it at the moment of passing from life.
The metaphor of a vehicle--an after-death vehicle, an astral body--is used by several traditions. Shamanism and certain yogas, including Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. One will recognize what is happening. One will know what to do and one will make a clean break. Yet there does seem to be the possibility of a problem in dying. It is not the case that one is condemned to eternal life. One can muff it through ignorance.
Apparently at the moment of death there is a kind of separation, like birth--the metaphor is trivial, but perfect. There is a possibility of damage or of incorrect activity. The English poet-mystic William Blake said that as one starts into the spiral there is the possibility of falling from the golden track into eternal death. Yet it is only a crisis of a moment--a crisis of passage--and the whole purpose of shamanism and of life correctly lived is to strengthen the soul and to strengthen the ego's relationship to the soul so that this passage can be cleanly made. This is the traditional position...
Psychedelics may do more than model this state;
they may reveal the nature of it.
What psychedelics encourage, and where I hope attention will focus once hallucinogens are culturally integrated to the point where large groups of people can plan research programs without fear of persecution, is the modeling of the after-death state. Psychedelics may do more than model this state; they may reveal the nature of it. Psychedelics will show us that the modalities of appearance and understanding can be shifted so that we can know mind within the context of the One Mind. The One Mind contains all experiences of the Other. There is no dichotomy between the Newtonian universe, deployed throughout light-years of three-dimensional space, and the interior mental universe. They are adumbrations of the same thing.
We perceive them as unresolvable dualisms because of the low quality of the code we customarily use. The language we use to discuss this problem has built-in dualisms. This is a problem of language. All codes have relative code qualities, except the Logos. The Logos is perfect and, therefore, partakes of no quality other than itself. I am here using the word Logos in the sense in which Philo Judaeus uses it--that of the Divine Reason that embraces the archetypal complex of Platonic ideas that serve as the models of creation. As long as one maps with something other than the Logos, there will be problems of code quality. The dualism built into our language makes the death of the species and the death of the individual appear to be opposed things.
From a talk given at the invitation of Ruth and Arthur Young of the Berkeley Institute for the Study of Consciousness, 1984. New Maps of Hyperspace is chapter 7 of The Archaic Revival by Terence McKenna.
Mckenna feels most psychedelics have the potential to aid in experiencing after death consciousness, however I feel that DMT does this most effectively, psilocin can be quite effective as well, provided your willing to consume around 30mgs or more, which most people are not.
...5-meo-DMT can be just as effective, though for me 5-meo-DMT is a more of a "feeling", it's mentally "fuzzy", it's more obvious that I consumed a substance, where with DMT I can't distinguish the experience from actual death, I actually believe I've died, where with 5-meo-DMT it's more obvious that I ingested a compound. plus it isn't necessarily visual, there's ego death, and you "dissolve", but it's not "psychedelic" in some sense, its also lacking something crucial despite its intensity, I also feel it's lacking the clarity and most of the authenticity of the DMT flash. I acknowledge that it may be effective in generating after death states, though my personal standing is that DMT itself is far more effective in doing this.
Also, 5-methoxy-DMT carries potential risks which DMT does not, I'll post an excerpt from TIHKAL as an example, anecdotes similar to this are very common as well:
(with an unknown but large amount, smoked) I observed the subject pass very quickly into an almost coma-like state. Within seconds his face became purple and his breathing stopped. I pounded his chest, and breathed for him, and he seemed to emerge in consciousness, with the comment, "This is absolute ecstasy." He stopped breathing a second time, and both heart massage and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was provided. Again, he recovered and managed to maintain a continuing consciousness and achieve a partial recovery. In the awake condition he was increasingly lucid, but on closing his eyes he became possessed with, what he called, "The energy of terror." He could not sleep, as upon closing his eyes he felt threatened in a way he could not tolerate. Three days later, medical intervention with antipsychotic medication was provided, which allowed the recovery of an acceptable behavior pattern in a few more days. -TIHKAL;shulgin
(As for the LSD, I'm sure you could safely consume quite a bit, though it's really not necessary, it's pushing the limits with out any real need to do so in my oppinion, I'm fairly hard-headed, yet I almost never venture over 500ugs, hell, 250ugs will level most people, even those with fairly resistant egos, and while physically you will probably be safe when taking massive doses, I still think there's a level of un-mindfulness involved with telling others that it's ok to eat LSD in doses of milligrams, but again this is just my thoughts on the matter, like Buddha said "1000 people 1000 paths"
Here was a description of an accidental LSD over-dose, though in this case it's assumed that only "a few score" micrograms were consumed:
PiHKAL Chapter 3 Burt
One morning, a couple of weeks later, I took a small, double-ended vial to Burt in his analytical lab down the hall, and asked him to please weigh out for me a small quantity of material into a separate container. The actual amount was not important, a few milligrams; what was important was that I wanted the weight accurate to four places. He disappeared for a few minutes, then reappeared with the vial I had given him and also a weighing container holding a small amount of an almost white powder. "Here is 3.032 milligrams, exactly," he said, adding, "And it's slightly bitter." "How do you know?" asked I. "After I weighed out the psilocybin, there was a trace of dust on the spatula, so I licked it off. Slightly bitter." I asked him, "Did you read the label carefully?" "It's the vial of psilocybin you just received, isn't it?" he asked, looking at the funny-shaped tube still in his hand. He read the label. It said Lysergide. He said, "Oh." We spent the next several minutes trying to reconstruct just how much LSD might have been on the end of the spatula, and decided that it was probably not more than a few score micrograms. But a few score micrograms can be pretty effective, especially in a curious but conservative analytical chemist who is totally drug naive. "Well," I said to him, "This should damned well be a fascinating day." And indeed it was. The first effects were clearly noted in about twenty minutes, and during the transition stage that took place over the following minutes, we wandered outside and walked around the pilot plant behind the main laboratory building. It was a completely joyful day for Burt. Every trivial thing had a magical quality. The stainless steel Pfaudler reactors were giant ripe melons about to be harvested; the brightly colored steam and chemical pipes were avant-garde spaghetti with appropriate smells, and the engineers wandering about were chefs preparing a royal banquet. No threats anywhere, simply hilarious entertainment. We wandered everywhere else on the grounds, but the theme of food and its sensory rewards continued to be the leitmotif of the day. In the late afternoon, Burt said he was substantially back to the real world, but when I asked him if he thought he could drive, he admitted that it would probably be wise to wait a bit longer. By 5:00 PM, he seemed to be happily back together again, and after a trial run -- a sort of figure-eight in the almost empty parking lot -- he embarked on his short drive home. Burt never again, to my knowledge, participated in any form of personal drug investigation, but he maintained a close and intimate interest in my research and was always appreciative of the slowly evolving picture of the delicate balance between chemical structure and pharmacological action, which I continued to share with him while I remained at Dole. One periodically hears some lecturer holding forth on the subject of psychedelic drugs, and you may hear him give voice to that old rubric that LSD is an odorless, colorless and tasteless drug. Don't believe it. Odorless yes, and colorless when completely pure, yes, but tasteless, no. It is slightly bitter.
Shulgin;PIHKAL;chapter3
-eg