When I first started out wanting to try DMT, I had the intention to integrate the sub-conscious and conscious minds. A form of enlightenment is to arrive at a place inside ones self where you can see the totality of self, and other self as well as attaining an innate understanding of physiological and mental processes. DMT has delivered in these realms, but I can't help but imagine the DMT experience has more to do with bringing to a head the culmination of paths towards enlightenment you have set yourself upon before hand.
In other words, If you have been hard at work with:
Out of Body Experience
Near Death Experience
Fighting in the Astral Realm,
Attaining a Kundalini State Either Tantric or Solo
Directly Experiencing the Tree of Life
Psychokinesis
Developing Psychic Abilities
Telepathy
Concentration Meditation
Experiencing the Blue Lotus as Buddhists have (or simply a state of unification with the universe, yourself, the all)
Attaining Inner Peace Within Yourself
Contact the Right Hemisphere of your Brain
Experience a Sensed Presence (Of god, or your higher self)
Working on Sensory Deprivation
Channeling Beings or your Higher Self
Train Yourself in Energy Healing
Transcendence from this Material Plane
Ritualistic Magic
Subduing Egoistic Tendencies
Grounding Yourself in Nature
Learning to Listen to Silence and Attain a Stateless State
These all make contemplation of enlightenment easier after a DMT experience where you directly experience you.
Imagine you as a construct has nothing to do with the whole of your neurological existence. Imagine you have a car, and you are always looking out the window and driving it, but you have never actually became the vehicle intimately in order to truly understand the mechanized existence of what goes into each manipulation you make to the instrumentation in the drivers seat. The seat of the soul, the jeweled vehicle of existence exists partly in direct observation of what's going on in the DMT experience.
On the other hand it can be argued that multiple facets and modalities of your sum totality of self also arise under a DMT experience as entities. I know for myself I have a female entity that I have imagined every time I contemplate a feminine presence either romantically, or in casual conversation. This contemplation of feminine exists wholly inside of me, and it is the same fantasy lover I dream about in idle daydreams over the summation of my lifetime, and that intelligent construct is a being which I interact with in hyperspace.
It is a modality that comes to me as an expression of the right hemisphere of my brain under the ruse of an entity I would be most trusting and find acceptance of in order that I can simply remember, observe, and accept what it (my higher self) has to show me. Part of enlightenment is to accept both masculine and feminine aspects from yourself, and to glean what you can insight wise from either one, as the god form some cultures have revered it to have no gender, possesses both, or neither independently or at the same time.
Enlightenment is an unstable construct each time we have temporary enlightenment as an experience coming from an unenlightened state. The goal is to open ones self up to a point in which you surrender your previous character, to see you have been playing a character for your self, to accept you are one thousand times more intelligent, more capable than this character supposes, and to embrace the path of least resistance in order to become conscious, and breathe that consciousness which flows throughout the sum of your whole being opposed to taking the limited construct of separate self which has been wholly an illusion since you were born.
Pure control over how your nervous system and idle thoughts distract you from this awesome potential inside of you requires years of meditation according to some thoughts, where psychedelics can definitely shortcut this process if the motive, correct approach, and correct acceptance and understanding of your limitations, and lack there of are on place.
It can be argued those who are supposed gurus have nothing out of the ordinary, and I would not recommend you go about chasing gurus however I see that to listen/watch and drink from the place from which their consciousness flows can in some cases give you modalities from which to contemplate what enlightenment feels like, where it originates from, etc. I can only imagine in a holistic sense of the word the psychedelic phenomenon purportedly helps aid us in attaining a state of expanded consciousness. Some states of expanded awareness can lead to permanent altered states in consciousness. Some of these states are desirable, others not so much.
It is up to each seeker to ask themselves if they could change any one aspect within themselves what that might be, and further more what becoming an advanced being could lead to. To embrace everything's impermanent and transitory as well as static, true and false, the bright and the void. If you were enlightened tomorrow you may decree your intention to give up all materialism, need for a significant other, and begin a quest in spreading your message throughout the land. Otherwise one might be inclined to write books to change the world, isolate yourself from all beings, start a new life, or any number of different things. Sometimes you simply cannot get past the cosmic joke, or have trouble letting go and become stuck in self disillusionment, depersonalization, or existential angst that all is reflection. Other times someone simply cross references every thought inside their mind with every other one to find a lack of a need to ask a question in the first place equalizing the need to seek. The choice is yours. Sometimes knowing the proper questions on the path to unfoldment are prerequisites to attaining enlightenment.
If one does not know their true identity, how are they then to tear down the scaffolding inside their minds? DMT helps you to directly experience that true identity often times ripping away conventional memes, world views, and fertilizing the minds soil for a greater archetype to take place. Hopefully for one which allows infinite expansion.
The reflection after DMT is so deep. You will be more thirsty for understanding than before you partook in the first place.
If you want the answer to what is beyond our current reality, first you must look at the mechanized machine behind the construction of conscious awareness. DMT helps you to experience the world within. If you want understanding of what is outside of yourself spiritually I hear mescaline, and magic mushrooms can help, but nothing replaces integration afterwards. Honestly the breaking through experience is different for everybody. It is less of a sensation, and more of an experience.
Ayahuasca can be quite the ordeal being drug through lesson after lesson with the ability to interact and have more introspection throughout, where smoking freebase is intense, intense, intense, and then back to normal where one might ask "What was the point?".
People seem to glean more from harmalas and oral DMT fumerate than they do with smoking freebase. I have found smoking freebase allows me to bring everything back, but that is the exception opposed to the norm from what I read. I smoked 50mg freebase my first time & I'm grateful, but I cannot recommend another person start out with such a large dose. There is no reason to not micro-dose say 5mg at a time at first to get used to the dieing feeling, however even micro-dosing might be so intense as to persuade you to not take the plunge for say 20mg, and if you stopped there at micro-dosing you would be missing worlds of experience in the larger dosage plains.
There are hundreds of different states in relation to enlightenment I have not touched upon. Being in the now, finding the place where love flows, remaining undisturbed by the accepted impressions of others, remaining altruistic without self deception, I could go on endlessly & each persons version of what enlightenment is differs so there is no one right answer. There is only self, and how far you can evolve from where you are.
DMT helps to dispel falsehoods as well as expose truths behind all mystical states / neuro-scientific principles widening unknown aspects all relative to your prior level of knowledge and understanding.
I= SWIM = Not Me. The I AM I Does Not Exist, and is Referenced to SWIM Who Is Not A Friend I Never Met, Nor Hallucinated While Imagining The Is-ness of Suchness That Is SWIM Who Is Not Me, Myself, Nor I As The Expression Of Non Dual Aspect of Non-Dual Reality Subjectively Denied By Swim, or accompanying Me-Anti-ness'es. =) All Credit Goes To The ANTI-SWIM'ness of SWIM's cousin's room-mate's uncle's deceased cat's in-law's second removed nephew's aunt WHOM authored SWIM's 2000 Year Old Desert Scribblings from a drunk rabbit in the Serengeti desert found in an insane asylum under water, on Easter eggs, crucified by the on fire pagan music listening christian maniac from India running around believing he was Jesus repenting this bush he called the Acacia tree; So I Heard from a bum who claims to be SWIM, But I Forgot... And Again, "I" Refers To Someone Who Is Not Me.