why thank you. I'm only posted up at a coffee shop @ the moment, and I wanted to share this with you guys. my jaw dropped when I read that...!
holy guacamole, i'll be damned. gotta delve into this one... back with findings and happy early birthday mister stalk.
i havn't read his new book but i read the first one and His whole contention that the beings /things we encounter while tripping on dmt are real is pretty questionable. there is just as a good a chance that its all your brain and the drug creating everything you imagine in a trip and none of it is real. just like a dream is not real. now reality that you perceive is something that exists outside of your head but not as your brain perceives to be, nevertheless the stimuli is external. So what do you guys say? internal or external stimuli while you are tripping? are you really perceiving something that is not just made up by your brain?
to the nervous system and the perspective of the dreamer, it is reality. for the time being that dream is it's own place and time. unless the person is lucid dreaming, they mistakenly perceive it exactly as they would their normal reality. i had a dream last night that i was floating around in my room, and i went to the door and touched it and knocked on it and it felt just as solid and real as anything. just because dream states are only temporal doesn't mean they are less 'real'. by the same token, our normal waking reality isn't real because it is temporal too, and ends in dream, and death. until liberation, we are constantly in some "between" consciousness or bardo as the tibetans call it.
hmm.. but i suppose this all depends on the definition of reality. some would say that the spiritual reality of dreams and such is more "real" than the physical reality we experience day-to-day as it is more universal and eternal. you know how they say "life is but a dream"? many people see unconsciousness, death, and trips as a sort of returning to a larger and wholly perfect reality. it's hard to say that what you experience on dmt isn't important if this is your perspective. but of course, i understand the validity of your argument.
wow you guys are taking some of my words too literally, they are just words...thats all I have to communicate to you with. Omcanti (sp)....a dream is a mental phenomena it isn't being generated by your brain by the result of external stimuli. it isn't real and I use the term real very loosely. when you see blue in waking life its because some radiation that was outside of you actually hit your eye and set off a chain reaction of molecular dynamics that your brain recognizes as blue. when you see blue in a dream your brain just re-does that response that it has memorized without the external radiation causing it. big difference between the internal mental world and the outside "reality" even though they are perceived exactly the same by your brain.
also im not saying that a dmt trip isn't real, something real thats not all in your head...im sort of agnostic about the whole thing but im leaning more towards its all just in your head and not external. but shit maybe there is no internal and external i just have to think in those parameters b/c im human
of course its all in your head. reality is all in your head, filtered through sensory devices. With our limited ability to apprehend reality in its totality, we only get a tiny picture. in effect what we perceive on a day to day basis is only within the limitations of the senses. DMT is allowing access to a reality without the filters and is perception beyond sensory limitation. It's too easy to dismiss it as a hallucination. in my opinion that doesn't make it any more of a hallucination than our every day existence dependent on the plays and illusion of sensory experience.
dmt is a reality without filters? and its perception with out limitations? your brain is the filter and its only letting you see what its capable of making up when it has dmt in it. If you gave dmt to a snake It would see different colors and hear different sounds than a person does because the brain that is creating the picture is different. I agree that its no more of an illusion than our daily existence I mean you are on your own endogenous drugs all day. whether you have serotonin or dmt in your 5ht receptors its still subject to how that receptor changes and transmits a signal, you can't get away from that now matter how many psychedelics you take you are still limited by your brains machinery.
