I haven’t tried DMT, but I did consume LSD and magic mushrooms a number of times when I was younger. Very powerful experiences. Before writing this post, I read a few articles about DMT and its effects. It does sound very similar to LSD to me, except maybe more intense.Avolith wrote: ↑Sat Nov 30, 2019 7:44 am Thanks for the replies, I was looking for some clarifications. I'll type more brain dumps, I don't know if they're true.
I've been reading about DMT trips. There's threads full of people saying they experienced things that are completely indescribable by language. They pile on the superlatives and say the words still fall completely short of a faithful description. What is the relation between that and enlightenment? Can you smoke a plant and 'get there' just like that? Notwithstanding all kinds of dangers and risks.
What these sorts of drugs do is fire up various parts of the brain that aren’t normally fired up. This results in your consciousness leaving behind the normal everyday neural pathways and visiting some of the more exotic ones. It looks like with DMT, and also with high doses of LSD, the brain gets so fired up that it loses contact with ordinary life, together with all of the basic feelings and notions that underpin it, such as one's normal sense of self. Untethered in this way, the brains experiences each moment in a very fluid, wild and unfamiliar manner.
These sorts of drugs can also re-fire old pathways and networks that have long been abandoned - including the networks and pathways that one’s consciousness used to occupy as a very young child when the world was experienced in a far more magical manner. I’m thinking here of the period between when a child begins to become conscious (around 2 or 3 years of age, depends on the individual) and when he begins to become overladen with adult concepts and rigid conventions (around 4 or 5). When an adult drug user re-experiences these magical childhood states, it can seem to him that he has reentered a timeless paradise that he once knew and that he has “come home again".
Their connection to enlightenment is indirect at best. On the one hand, enlightenment and altered states are similar in that they both use neural pathways that are very different from the normal ones that adults habitually use in their daily lives. As such, both consist of non-ordinary experiences. But the key difference, and it is a big one, is the presence or absence of illusion. If a person is a long way from enlightenment, the altered states he experiences are likely to be distorted by strong delusions and mirages and will likely trigger strong emotions. He will almost invariably become, as a result of these experiences, even more ignorant than before.
It all depends on how spiritually developed a person is. When a person is enlightened, or close to being enlightened, the relative lack of illusions in his mind will flow through to a relative lack of illusions in whatever altered states he happens to experience. His altered states will more closely resemble the enlightenment experience and they can, in these circumstances, trigger genuine insight into the nature of nature of reality, the spiritual path, human egotism, and so on.
My advice is, if you want to experiment with these sorts of drugs, do it sensibly and treat any insight you gain from them with a large pinch of salt.
Unfortunately, we live in a very ignorant world that habitually extinguishes any flickering awareness of the spiritual path that an individual might happen to have. As such, hardly anyone is encouraged to think or talk about it. The flickerings tend to die away as soon as they appear.
Hehe. Only mad people and sane philosophers talk to themselves....
Writing is an effective way to sort out your thoughts, so it's a good habit to get into.
