A Brief Conversation About DMT

I have read a good deal about DMT and I'm eager to try it and frightened of its intensity at the same time. The only psychoactives I have used with a view to intoxication of any kind are alcohol, caffeine and marijuana. I'm partly concerned that my underlying fears about such a powerful experience will feed on themselves and make a possibly scary experience even worse. Do you think this is worth worrying about?

DMT is best used after you know, by experience, that you can handle less-intense psychedelics.

Is there nausea associated with smoking DMT?

I did not experience any nausea, and I think it is uncommon, but not unheard of.

Have there been significant shifts in your behavior or worldview since your experiences with DMT?

Not in behavior. But my DMT experiences strongly indicated that the world of everyday experience is not the only reality, and is probably an island of stability in a much larger hyperdimensional — and very weird — universe.

In these encounters with the "elves" — or whatever term you use — clearly your consciousness is altered. But your descriptions make it seem like it was fairly lucid, just like you're sitting at a terminal reading this right now? Is it more of a dream-like state or is it quite lucid?

It's fairly lucid. You retain ego-awareness.

You retain ego-awareness, and your experience makes you feel that our perception is a limited case of what can be perceived in our universe ...

It's not "our" universe. What's out there, in the farther reaches, goes completely beyond human understanding.

This makes it seem that you feel that your experiences are "real", rather than the result of overstimulated neurons firing away and producing these patterns in your conscious mind.

You write that, I think, from the standard materialist view of the world — space-time, atoms, molecules, tissues, brains, minds — which works to some extent, but the DMT state will show you it's false.

When I dream, it often seems quite real, and I can remember my dreams after I wake up, but there's no tendency to think that I was in a different state perceiving a valid reality other than the one my brain was manufacturing at that time. So you really feel that you were experiencing something "real"?

In some non-Western cultures dreams are regarded as a brief glimpse into another reality. Again, you're assuming that the standard Western conception of reality simply is "true". Psychedelics will cause you to reconsider that assumption. There is no substitute for experience.

As you guessed, I view the world on the standard post-Enlightenment materialist way, though it's not the exclusive province of the West any longer.

That's because people whose spiritual awareness has been closed off are easier to control and manipulate, so those who wish to enslave all of humanity have been trying for quite some time to disseminate this materialist worldview, with quite a bit of success, as you see.

My worldview is based on empirical data, so your statement that "There is no substitute for experience" is one I wholly agree with.

It is a shamanic attitude. And "experience" should be interpreted in the widest possible sense. Terence McKenna's advice as to how to do psychedelics was: "At night, alone, in darkness and silence." And indoors, for safety. What you experience then comes from within, which is a doorway to what is beyond. All you have to do is to observe.

Perhaps, as you suggest, I better try climbing an easier mountain first.

Think of it simply as new territory, not yet well-explored.

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