what i got from this thread: just smoalk dmt

James Kent is a rationalist.

Scientific rationalism will always fall short somewhere.

I've yet to see any empirical evidence of that presented in a peer-reviewed journal

Science deals in the way of testable hypotheses. For similar reasons why we can't point to a "hyper-color" in hyperspace and all agree on a label for it is why much of the DMT experience will fall outside the realm of testable hypotheses. When this happens, it's no longer appropriate IMO to use the scientific method as an explanatory model for a particular phenomena. I'm not trying to bash science in the slightest. I simply feel that we should recognize its limitations. I don't see a contradiction in being a science-oriented community that can acquiesce that science can't always give us the full picture. In the case of James Kent, however much we may disagree with him, it's not just cause he's a scientific rationalist, but because some of his theories just outright don't make sense.

@ people telling me to do DMT, I know, I know, but others on this site and elsewhere have suggested that it is possible to have a breakthrough experience without using DMT, though.

Now the reason I'm here in the first place is to test, not scientifically but... Well, all I can legitimately ask is that you give it a chance, it's like a theological or philosophical method I'm using... Anyway, I want to test a model of reality that I have (not what this thread is about). The content of DMT trip reports corresponds in many cases to what that model "predicts," if you will, about higher-dimensional transcendence. Since I came up with my theory independently of a breakthrough experience, though, I'm in the odd position of feeling like I have access to a transcendental world, not by use of psychedelics but through a fusion of philosophy and religion. (I'm not special, I know, for I know of many others who have stumbled upon the same curious facts.)

All this being said, I would more than gladly consent to try DMT if I had a chance to. However, this website is not the place to try to arrange for me to get that kind of chance, so I'm content basically interviewing people here for the sake of my philosophical work instead.

Here's the thing I really, really want to emphasize: I already believe in the objective validity of DMT breakthroughs. In the fantasy series The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, the protagonist constantly questions whether the "other world" in which he awakens after an accident in the "real world" is also real. He does terrible things thinking he's "just dreaming," even though there is a strange logic to the "story" in the land he keeps "dreaming" about (subsequent accidents shifting him back and forth between the two domains). Nevertheless, in the end he redeems himself by accepting that the mysterious land's metaphysical status has no priority over its moral value, and the author has tried to resolve the conceptual paradox he wrote into his series by arguing that the other world is comparable to a Platonic heaven: it is a sort of Kantian take on Jung's archetypes, a philosophically-defined plane of existence, referring to or overlapping the same Earth as ordinary life. This is creativity that Meinong abounded in playing the game of, to take the category "ontological domains" and suppose that, in addition to all the spheres of existence we know of (physical objects, possible objects, fictional objects, impossible objects, or whatever worlds of objects you think there are), there were yet another unique one?

You ought to read The One Tree from the chapter "The Questsimoon" through "The Gift of the Forestal." I lost my job recently and to keep up my spirits I started obsessively reading the Covenant novels, and I picked up on the fact that the entities and their dancing that Donaldson describes in that part of that book were awesome to read about. He talks about this strange place lit as if from nowhere or everywhere, expanding infinitely, in which these people made of living magic self-transform in these versicolor waves of forms and enact a ritual in which they emulate being devoured by the darkness beyond all starlight. The Elohim, as they are named, then try to make a complex deal with the travelers who are present in Elemesnedene (their home). When the travelers return to normal space, those of their companions who left the circle of the Elohim earlier relate that barely any time has passed, even though the interrogations before the ritual, the ritual itself, and the subsequent trade took much longer, subjectively for the main characters, than the slight span during which they have been told they were gone.

Donaldson claims to have never tried psychedelics. There is good evidence that he may be trusted in general. (Since he made his claim voluntarily on a site where he could just as well have never even posted a question by a fan of that nature, if he wanted to avoid admitting drug use, he could have saved himself the trouble of lying just by leaving the question unnoted in his computer records, one of a myriad others unanswered.) If he is not lying, then he achieved a medium-quality (or low-quality, others would probably say) DMT-like experience purely by imagining it. (Well, this follows if I'm not lying when I say that Donaldson's prose is not only exceptional but surprisingly unique.) Either that, or he used his talent as a wordsmith to contrive a series of descriptions that initially matches but ultimately exceeds the literary quality of the average DMT trip report of elves (the Elohim are denoted by of all words faery in the books).

In either case, it means something to me that he has ended up conceiving his fictional world in quasi-Platonic terms (as if this world were on a plane of reality somewhere between Platonic heaven and human Earth), terms that can be philosophically validated by the very theories that Donaldson may or may not be familiar with but which nonetheless backgrounded the theorists he is inspired by. I mean Kant for one, and perhaps more obliquely Hannah Arendt, and John Rawls even more (and oddly) remotely. Others, too, but I want to point those second and third writers out because I might bring them up again later when going over some of my own conjecture/"experimentation" or at least attempted a priori argumentation. What Donaldson's conception means as applied here is that there are two viable models of the DMT breakthrough experience that conform to the following criteria:

1. Validates the feeling of objective validity that often accompanies DMT trip reports.
2. Does not do so by adding more entities to the world than are necessary (Occam's Razor).

The first model is that of the breakthrough reality as a transcendental instead of a transcendent plane of existence. The distinction depends on archaic fidelity to the idea that adding "al" to "ic" to make "ical" (as in synthetic vs. synthetical) as a suffix is subtly, yet profoundly, significant. I don't know if T. McKenna is the one who first described DMT as a "metaphysical pill," but that might be some of best shorthand for it yet. For suppose that doing DMT causes you to activate all of your imagination, all of your capacity for hallucination, all of your pattern recognition software, all of your pure mathematical intuition, and the rest at maximum output. You will imagine something, dream awake, with perfect lucidity and finesse, yet you will be devoting your imagination to the task of accurately representing, as if by illustration, the truths of the world. Like a perfect VR simulation, in a university in heaven. So the content of these representations you would experience as the truth: it is the truth. It is as if the entire world around you is set up as a statement of the ultimate reality. And that's because, while you're on DMT, it is. Your ability to deceive yourself is completely shut down. You know, and you don't do anything to stop yourself from knowing. And because you suddenly know all of this, you infer in a flash how to meditate so perfectly that you might as well have been translated to heaven. And then your DMT-wrought reasoning raptures you into that state of meditation, and...

There's another way I think DMT might work, though, similar to the above but more difficult of ascent and therefore proof. According to this theory, because of Kant's "ought-implies-can" rule, it can be shown that there is another world than the one I am using a computer in right now. This world transcends my physical life. It is where free will in itself exists, where immortality is possible in some abstract, virtually ineffable way (and this for everyone in existence), a world from which ours might have been created (not just reflected). And due in part to the logic behind the Square of Opposition in the educational history of formal reasoning, I believe that diagramming abstract relationships using concrete geometric figures is a way to show what those relationships look like, on the level of reality in which they are to be located. So if Kant says that the ultimate moral law is a threefold principle each aspect of which reciprocally implies the others, and if the Christian Trinity is conceived likewise, and if triadic conceptions recur for natural and spiritual or religious reasons throughout our lives, then I would think that, if you could directly "see" morality, it would assume a triangular form at its primordial depths. As if its particles were triangular, or its cells, maybe.

I have a slew of arguments for why and how these triangles would convert into more intricate structures, including and eclipsing something surpassingly evocative of the DMT chrysanthemum (see the first image for the entry http://mathworld.wolfram...tahedronStellations.html in the Wolfram Mathworld encyclopedia). But right now, I just want to propose that it's possible for there to be this special crystallization of ethical value on another plane of existence, because surely we don't "see" morality the same way we see physical objects, yet as Kant has persuaded me to affirm, free will is different from ordinary cause and effect and therefore is not just an attribute of physical reality, but a counterpart thereto.

This abstraction of a transcendental world you have access to is simply too abstract. You've put a lot of thought and effort to it, and may be right on a handful of accounts. It will always end there, no matter how far and accurately you manage to extrapolate because we undergo the formality of experiencing the transcendental in such a concrete fashion with the use and cross-use of all the senses (along with some you might not have known you had), and the experience, be it in your head or otherwise, is so undeniably present, that to compare it to a thought experiment seems a bit absurd. When you came up with your theories or realized the mathematical logic behind the transcendental, did you fall to your knees crying? Were you laughing and bustling with unmerciful joy? Was the experience of infinity that you extrapolated so overwhelmingly powerful that your entire soul exploded with rapture? If not, then you may be mistaking transcendence for lucidity.

I went to a concert one time, wasn't on anything (not even drunk or stoned), and during the climax of my favorite song of any that I have ever been graced with, I saw myself inside become this infinitely bright structure, somehow tangible within its own overwhelming radiance. This lasted for only a few seconds, but it resonated within me as if I had glimpsed some crucial fact about life within the light, something that I was to draw inspiration from.

My theory didn't come into existence all at once, it's been pieced together over years of reflection. If I had spontaneously become convinced of the entire doctrine as it now stands... But even so, there have been many conclusions in my argumentation that, when I came to them, blitzed me not just with a, "Eureka!" feeling but renewed self-confidence, a sense of being involved in the dynamics of a sacred force, gratitude to reality for giving me the chance to learn, even purification enough at times, love for the world and through the concept of redemption. I did laugh like I had gotten the Joke Itself once or twice, if not more than that. To this day, the model I have of how physical reality might have been created (supposing it is a creation) makes me feel like the universe is living in the presence of infinite might.

You know saudade? The mysterious emotion, the one better than any other. Like joy and sorrow and déjà vu fused together, or something else even. Premature nostalgia, what a lot of people are drawn to sunsets for. That is what my theories give me, in spades. Only they also give me the feeling of having the answer to saudade, the answer to that mystery, perfect justification for my faith in love's true power. Because the theory starts from basic enough, philosophically established (if not universally or even by a strict majority agreed upon) premises, premises the evidence for which is as clear to me as the clarity of DMT is said to be (direct intuition), I feel like what DMT users are reporting is the equivalent to direct perception of the world where morality exists in itself, and that it is possible to prove, then, that DMT breakthroughs are legitimate representations of another form of reality (because we can know this world a priori also), and this because the world of morality would, as the source of free will, be absolutely infinite.

... The deeper thing is, I've not even exhausted the details of my model yet. The relationship between the dimensionality of time and the philosophy of music, imagination as 3D time, the nature of déjà vu, the Jewish and others' mystical concept of True Words, love as a structure emanated from the erotetic core of reality (because love is the answer to saudade, which is the emotion of pure mystery, mysteries being questions and erotetic the description for interrogative structures), the interplay of the concepts of forgiveness, apologies, punishment, and redemption, and a host of other points that can be made, comprehensively add up to a picture of reality with the implication that all things are infinitely meaningful, that Jungian synchronicity is the truth in an eternal number of ways.

I might, of course, be off in my reasoning. Maybe there's a premise I haven't made sure is sound, or there's an inference rule that I've misapplied or failed to apply altogether at some point, contradictions unresolved. I've yet to commit the entire idea to paper (or computer) in step-by-step order. But if doing so yields at least a plausible attempt at proof, or even moreso at least a great deal of evidence, for the objective validity of DMT trip reports, I really want to render that service to my country.

There are few things more unreasonable in my eyes than my government's drug policies. I know I'm in this with a lot of people, so my reason for emphasizing this judgment of mine right now is that I am very, very dedicated to winning the intellectual debate about drug use in favor of decriminalization. I don't download music without paying for it, I didn't steal food when I worked at a fast food restaurant, but I sure don't care whether I break antidrug laws. I've even considered civil disobedience for the sake of the cause (and went to Hempfest without being under the influence). But if I could instead show that DMT has potential applications in cognitive science, well... And if I had never done the drug, that might make me seem more credible, maybe.

I remember Terence McKenna somewhere saying that he keeps DMT as the "ultimate convincer" for all those sceptical / ´stubborn´ critiques

He would put it something like this (I paraphrase): "Do you have 10 minutes to spare...?"

I think he had in mind that we can truly study psychedelics only by ingesting them in large enough doses, not by talking or reading about them. "Direct experience" and reading/talking/listening to music are just different orders of reality/representation IMO...

agreed

the blind have to see for themselves , just a description of sight will not suffice
the deaf have to hear for themselves , just a description of what hearing is will not do

and also those who never experienced dmt , to them i suppose they will rarely understand trip reports ,

its just like people can read loads of info on spiritual topics yet not know God

direct experience is everything

To me, this reads as empty intellectualizing that has little to do with the concrete subjective realities of people experiencing DMT. Of course you're off in your reasoning...everyone is! The thought that you could verify or prove "the objective validity of DMT trip reports" strikes me as absurd, to say the least. You can no more prove the "objective reality" of the DMT experience than you can prove the "objective reality" of the life experience. It's all subjective....at most it's consensus...but even that consensus is malleable based on cultural frameworks and understandings (to say nothing about individual perceptions within a consensus model).

See: The Improbability of Hyperspace


Drugs aren't illegal because someone lost "the intellectual debate about drug use." Drugs are illegal because of a myriad of factors including profits, racism, and social controls. Intellectual sparring won't end prohibition any more than it will end the Prison or Military Industrial Complexes. In a system governed by profit, sound logic does not defeat the profit motive. Ever.

Whatever you decide to do privately is your choice. There's nothing that says you have to divulge that you smoked DMT just because you want to research it. If you have reasons for choosing not to try it, that's fine, but as has been stated and restated, until you do, none of this has any meaning...and even after that, your beliefs are just one more conjecture to throw on the mountain, not some objective truth about the experience.

Relativism is not the only, or even the most well-supported, I don't know what you'd call it... Theory of reality? Anyway, I'm no relativist. You have a lot of evidence for your position, but I have a lot of evidence for mine as well, and I can't decide to trust someone else over myself on a count like this. I know what I mean by the words "objective validity," and others know what those can be used to refer to as well, and in our language-game of "objectivity," if you will, I'm trying to make the moves from starting points to "proof."



History is much more complicated than this. Logic doesn't always or even usually "make the difference," but there are times that it does. "Ivory Tower" debates trickle down into political debates, etc. and sometimes this changes things. To take a non-moral example, philosophical abstractions are what resulted in modern computing via Alan Turing.

Well, I'm not saying that my apprehension of "the other world" has been limited to speculation. My theories are heavily informed by some of my dreams, for example.

It's like love, I guess. I both (a) have a direct experience of feeling this way, but also (b) a complex theory as to why/how I feel it, and I've never thought that my experience was so inexplicable that theorizing about it was out of place, even before I fell in love for the first time. In fact, the hardest I've fallen for someone was after I had achieved a significant amount of insight into the philosophy of romantic affection, and these insights helped me to realize how deeply I was in love with the guy.

I have to say that I agree with Snozzleberry. I'm all in favor of man's search for meaning and everything, but this really is just so much empty and pointless circular chatter.

Dante's description of "weak as pure deception" sums up every trip report you've ever read, will ever read or write yourself. That doesn't mean that attempts to capture it (whether with words, paint, music or whatever) are somehow not worthwhile; it just means that they are doomed to failure EVERYTIME. What they are chasing cannot be expressed. It can't even be held onto afterwards. It is in our natures to want to validate our experiences through some kind of storytelling, but we'll none of us ever get this one right. We're like monkeys strapped to a rocket ship.

Put it this way:

I can't fathom a DMT breakthrough the second after it's over. The two planes of existence (this one and that) just don't intersect in a way that lends to comprehension of the other. They're too disparate, and that one is all too alien to put into words or reconstruct. Now, if I can't even visualize with any degree of accuracy where (and what) I've been, how am I supposed to be able to honestly sum it up in words? And how are you who has NO IDEA WHATSOEVER what that space entails supposed to form an accurate picture from a story I've reconstructed for you out of well intentioned bullshit? There is no linear narrative you can write because it just doesn't unfold in that way. People try, but they're full of shit. They're fooling themselves as much as they are you (just as perhaps was Dante).

A philosophy degree doesn't mean jack shit once you manage that third toke. It just won't help you make sense of your surroundings - and in fact, may make it that much tougher. What this all comes down to is SMOALK IT AND SEE. Until you do, you can jabber on til the end of time and you won't be any closer to the truth. SMOALK IT AND SEE. SMOALK IT AND SEE.

SMOALK. IT. AND. SEE.

I would have to interview everyone who (a) has a philosophy degree, (b) got it before trying DMT, and then (c) tried DMT, to know this. What is your philosophical background? Have you wasted (or rewarded) your time reading the entire Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, all of Kant's major works, etc.? Are you sure there's no philosophical point of view that can cohere with DMT hyperspace?

Part of the thing is, a lot of people are wildly unfamiliar with the expressive power of the English language. They don't know the words there are out there for details of categorization and relation that can be used to outline transcendence. They don't realize that format (text layout, use of color/shading, calligrams, page numbers and what you can do with them, etc.) can be used to convey transcendent meaning. This is not the language's fault, it's the fault of a society that doesn't respect reading enough.

For example, suppose you had a sentence fade into pure white paper, each letter in the sentence lighter than the previous one. Then suppose you left a bunch of pages blank between the end of that sentence and the fade-in for the next one. Suppose the page number for the first was 201, and then you write down 598,201,092 after the text fades back in. By doing this, you can give the reader the concrete sense of having encountered an ocean of information. Ineffable? In almost every way. Outside of the ability of English to concretely denote? No way.



As I've said, this is not possible for me right now, and this website is not the place for me to try to get a hold of the stuff.

If we're able to say things like "direct experience" about a breakthrough trip, as in, "I directly experienced something there," doesn't that show that we can make a completely accurate, English-language statement about the trip, viz. that it was a matter of direct experience?

Where does this certainty come from? You are talking to a forum filled with individuals who have, as a community, an incredible amount of experience with this substance. We are telling you that "moving to proof" makes zero sense with regards to DMT, something you have never tried.


This example has, as far as I can tell, nothing to do with prohibition and the structures that keep it in place.

I'm sorry. I can't engage any further here. This is just too tiresome a topic.

I agree with this. Coming back from a breakthrough I feel as if I've been smushed back into this reality and as that happens I can feel my sense of "how" hyperspace "is" going out with whatever extra I felt.

You can certainly bring the experience back with you but not in terms of specific terms that describe the experience, much more on a personal level in my experience.

As to language being limited, I believe it is. At a minimum an entirely new vocabulary would be necessary. The fundamentals of reality are different, how do you explain that with language based off of this reality? I think some one mentioned this already. Even my senses act differently.

For some recollections the best I can describe is the most vibrant, colorful rainbow of plasma pulsing through columns lining the temple which had a mandala/gate that "Donnie Darko'd" out towards my awareness, etc.... no matter how many words I feel I could add. It wouldn't describe what I experienced because 5 minutes after the trip, with it still vividly imprinted in my memory, could not even understand what had just happened.

Okay, but there are other users of DMT who come to different conclusions. No one in this thread has anything favorable to say of James Kent. But why would I, personally, judge Kent's account of DMT as inferior to other users'? Someone in this thread said that Kent never "broke through" all the way or something. I don't know that, though. I don't want this to be a Book of Mormon-like Catch 22: if the trip is not totally ineffable, you didn't break through (if you didn't get confirmation of the Book, you didn't pray sincerely enough), and if you claim you broke through and that it wasn't totally ineffable, you're lying (if you claim to have prayed sincerely enough without getting confirmation, you're wrong).

Ripheus all of your analogies are simply poor ones. They're overly simplistic and you make assumptions that they are fitting analogies even though they couldn't be farther from. This thread is going no where, and I don't mean to be abrupt, but it doesn't look like you're going to find much sympathy from anyone around here on this topic.

Well, tbh I'm not sure I know what I'm arguing for anymore in this thread.

I guess, maybe, my inner protest is: if DMT trips are inexpressible in the way everyone else in this thread seems to be saying they are, then they can't be important, because even the word "important" wouldn't really express their nature.