I'm agnostic about aliens. But I do think they are very likely. I guess the difference for me between aliens and god is that we know aliens are possible since here we are. It was possible on this planet for life to form, so I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be possible elsewhere. And when you take into account the sheer size of the observable universe it really comes down to "just how unlikely was it for life to form on earth". It could be astronomically unlikely, and we really are the only life in the universe. Or it could be slightly less unlikely and the universe could be teeming with life. Who knows. But we certainly know life can come to exist on planets, and we can see plenty of other planets out there. that gives aliens an edge over god for me.

Well from what I have seen God is an alien, the most advanced E.T life form in the multiverse.

So IMO that kind of changes the dynamics of the whole idea of god to something more believable than the image of some old bearded guy sitting on a cloud wearing a toga or whatever.

Even if the formation of life was a ridiculously improbable thing (the abundance of life in extreme environments like volcanic vents at the ocean floor seems to argue against this)... but even if... life would still be rather plentiful when you realize just how many galaxies there are, and how long 15 billion years really is.

Of course, life in other galaxies (or even in distant parts of our own) would seem to have the formidable obstacle of extreme distances to contend with. If you are only considering material, human-ish lifeforms coming here in physical ships, this certainly does narrow the field for human/alien contact. But we can not really speculate about the technology of more advanced species with much accuracy.

I think that chimpanzees in the Congo might not be able to comprehend our own ability to circumnavigate the globe with relative ease... and certainly will have no understanding of hypersonic jet flight.

It is within reason to assume that life in the Universe could be 1000x more advanced than we are to chimps...

I believe in alien life. I also believe that the Earth has been visited... regularly. I am even leaning towards the idea that humanity has some alien genetics or influence making us at least part alien to the natural development of this planet.

Do I have solid evidence of this? NO.

But I do have anecdotal experiences which confirm this for me including what I am pretty sure are close encounters with aliens. (not including drug induced entity contact which I also feel are likely to be alien intelligences)

Thus, I am fairly well a gnostic believer on this topic.

I think it worth mentioning again that belief in aliens is itself a type of theism. This tends to get ignored, but there a number of theistic conceptions of gods as being ETs.

This doesn't just include the various UFO Religions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_religion like Scientology and Rael-ism but is a basic tenant of even Mormonism where they see G*d as a being living on a distant planet.

In my mind, nearly all religions talk about aliens whether they acknowledge it or not. The various polytheistic gods and devas, angels, demons, devils, rakshasas, djinn etc. are all, to a one, said to not originate on the Earth. Most religions claim they were created elsewhere in the Heavens. Not from Earth = Extra Terrestrial.

By this simple logic, Jehovah himself is clearly an ET. You can`t be from the Earth if you created it.

Personally, I find the Zecharia Sitchin concepts of alien gods to be compelling. He may have made some mistakes, but there is a wealth of good stuff in his books even if you toss out the idea of Nibiru as the 12th planet and all that stuff. The overwhelming fact that every "mythology" on the planet describes fairly well the same basic set of flaming chariot flying, vimana driving, powerful weapon wielding, imperfect and morally ambiguous divine beings that unanimously come from the stars... is a fairly substantial heap of circumstantial evidence.

If you follow the hit Ancient Aliens TV Show (I hate to bring it up), they at least do a decent job of invoking the Erich Von Danniken ancient astronaut theory... which has enough basis in archaeological record to be worth considering seriously. The abundance of truly ancient ruins that are unexplainable, with sheer blocks of granite and diorite weighing 200 tons or more... built deep into what we call the Stone Age... well, it makes you think.

Having visited many of the more inexplicable of these ruins myself, I will just say that being there only substantiates the wild ideas about these ruins by leaving you with the clear understanding that primitive people did not build these sites. Even the height of human megalithic civilizations pale next to those truly ancient sites. The fact is that the oldest ruins we know of are the most astounding... this is not something that lends itself to a typical learn-as-you-go progression. It smacks of an intact culture coming here fully formed, and then a gradual degeneration as the knowledge of the original people is lost over time.

Our best stone masons stand awed when presented with the intricate perfection of the blocks at Puma Punku. The perfect angles and "still sharp enough to cut you" 90 degree edges of inlaid designs that fit together like leggos, and are identical to each other down to the millimeter... suggest that whoever built those modular diorite blocks could melt the stone down to a liquid, pour it into a mold, and crank out a large number of identical building blocks... in a time when cavemen were still hunting mammoth with wooden spears tipped with chipped rock.

As usual, I seem to have rambled on a bit. I guess I will stop here, and let you all have your says on this fascinating topic.

HYPERSPACE FOOL...

In the immortal words of led zepplin....

"Ramble on baby."
---
I dig your ramblin' ways

Life existing in extreme conditions doesn't really help when discussing the likelyhood of life arising on a planet. All it tells us is that once life exists it can survive/adapt in extreme conditions. But that doesn't help us with how probable it was for it to have came to exist in the first place. Our best theory on it just now seems to be that life arose from non-living material through abiogenesis (another theory would be "god placed life here". I'm inclined to think it is not all that unlikely in the grand scheme of things, since experiments have already been done showing that the building blocks of life can be synthesized in situations somewhat similar to how earth was billions of years ago (I'm not particularly well versed in the theory of abiogenesis tbh).

I know how big the universe is, or rather I know in as much as anyone can know since when it gets to sizes like that our brains generally have difficulty visualizing it in any meaningful way. But I've looked in awe at the Hubble ultra deep field pictures, those are quite a good humbling reminder of how big it is out there. Then of course there is a lot of work that seems to point to there being more than one universe, so really even our universe could just be a speck within a larger scale similar to how Earth is just a speck in the universe. I find the proposition "there are no aliens" would require much more justification than "there are aliens". Seems ludicrous that we would be all there is.

As for aliens having visited Earth. I'm more sceptical about that. I have seen some of the ruins you are talking about, and they are baffling. I can't remember which specific one it was, but it was mammoth pieces of rock perfectly cut. It made absolutely no sense that it had been done by people from that time. If there is no explanation for these things then I guess aliens is as good a guess as any, but I don't think I'm convinced that's the case. Would it not make sense that if these aliens were happy to leave baffling things like that they would also have left other traces of themselves or of their technology, instead of just coming down and cutting a bunch of rocks and then buggering off again

Still, it only took us a few billion years to get from single celled organisms to the self-aware apes that we are now. And it seems quite likely that if interstellar travel is ever going to be achieved by our race that it could very well happen in the next century or two (I believe we recently found out that there are things that travel faster than the speed of light?). So it's not that much of a push to believe that somewhere else in the universe there are other races that followed a somewhat similar (or even completely different) path to us and arrived at interstellar travel before the time we had even reached single celled organisms.

Would you feel like going into your non-drug induced anecdotal evidence? If you do I won't treat it as something to try and refute, I'll just treat it as an interesting story and leave it at that

Life existing in extreme conditions is not proof that it could arise in such conditions, but it certainly doesn't do the idea any disservice. In fact, there is a branch of abiogenesis theory that holds that deep sea vents, or alkaline hydrothermal vents, are the source and origin of life on Earth.

Personally, I find the idea of abiogenesis or biopoiesis to be a ludicrous concept. If life existing in extreme conditions is no proof that it could arise in the extreme conditions of other planets... how much less credible is the idea that it "spontaneously generated from amino acids?" This is not science IMHO. It is rank speculation sprinkled with some scientific sounding concepts. Just because we can conceive of conditions on the Earth that might create amino acids, it is a leap to proto-cells or RNA, and a huge leap from that to life.

Since nothing of this sort has been able to be replicated in a laboratory, I consider this theory to be about as scientific as any Sci-Fi novel I have read... less so maybe because a lot of sci-fi stuff does eventually become real in laboratory experiments, and abiogenesis is still extremely unlikely to be proven. Geo-synchronus Orbit Satellites, Robots, A.I., The Space Station, Deep Sea Submersibles, Walking On the Moon... etc etc. These all started out as science fiction. And yet, with laboratories capable of replicating conditions well beyond the Eoarchean era of the Earth, as far as I know, no one is even claiming to be close to recreating life. Like you, this is not my field of expertise, but I am relatively sure something along these lines would be international news of the highest order... and not something only so-called experts would be aware of.

I think that the idea of panspermia has more evidence to back it up than abiogenesis. Panspermia is the concept that life (or the catalyst for it) arrived here on Earth from somewhere else. This is not all that speculative really, as we know that spores can survive in space and survive reentry... as can such little animals as the Tardigrades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade (the first animal to survive in the vacuum of space). Furthermore, we have found fungi and spores in samples of asteroids that came to Earth as meteorites.

As for the aliens buggering off thing... I can only speculate. But I can think of a number of very plausible scenarios. Off the top of my head, I would say they might have come here to mine for something they needed (gold, tin, platinum) and built their mining and processing sites as efficiently as possible from the materials in the region. When they had what they came for, they left and didn't bother to destroy their sites, but took all their tools and valuables with them. It is also possible that they (or another group of aliens) decided to create humanity as a genetic hybrid experiment, and even later chose to share certain knowledge like building, agriculture and such as they felt we were ready for it.

I could just as easily come up with a dozen other plausible answers to the mystery.

BTW I believe the current line on the FTL particles is that it was a calculation error on the part of the scientists. Who knows? Maybe it is a cover up... I don't know which would be worse, though, the idea that the highest paid scientists and brightest minds of our generation are clumsy morons who can't do simple math & chose to call a press conference about something they didn't even bother to proof... or the idea that some people don't want the world to know about certain scientific advances. (This situation gave me a flashback to the Cold Fusion hoopla back over 20 years ago.)

As far as my sharing my experiences with ETs... I may or may not. Things like this tend to just be fanciful tales to be judged by people who can only remain skeptical. I would never expect anyone to take my word on anything... especially not something that will sound more far fetched to them than anything in any Hollywood film. If I decide to share such experiences, though, it wouldn't be nearly 300 posts into a thread that was supposed to be about the Atheist DMT experience. I would probably need to start a new thread... and in the Nexus, this stuff would definitely be put in the TTLG section (through the looking glass) an area of the Nexus that most of the die-hards here view with open scorn. It was made into an area that doesn't show up in search engines or even active threads so as to keep it from attracting any attention. A lot of threads that were bothering people were shoved there, and any new ones that cross a certain line get moved there as well. Occasionally, people like me will actually start a thread there on purpose and manage to get a few people to engage... but it is basically a ghetto for freaks and weirdos. (not derogatory terms for me)

In all likelihood, I will keep my stories to myself and only share them with people who I know in person and can look into their eyes while explaining it. Even still, I usually don't talk about it... as such stories are a quick way to get people to question your sanity. People who take entheogens generally don't need any other strikes against them in the old "does he need professional help" ledger.

HF.....


I can understand your hesitation with sharing your experiences. Believe it or not at one time in my life I vowed to tell no one of my experiences because I knew that only the people who actually were there with me would ever truly understand....

I was however very directly instructed by what ever it is that I commune with during my psychdelic experiences whether it be God, Aliens or my own higher self/ sub conciousness.

They told me to "Write down everything you have seen"

I tried to ignore the command for years but the phrase and the theme of being a writer just kept repeating and repeating until one day I decided to start writing.


I would wager HF that if you wrote a trip report or something abuot E.Ts the MODS would really enjoy it and it would not end up in the "looking glass" section. I think your wise enough to avoid any offensive or CT verbage..

It's one thing when someone starts spouting off about aliens but it's quite another thing for someone to have acually seen aliens first hand, especially in relation to psychedelics...IMO

Just food for thought, I would love to read some of your alien stories. Of course I understand your reluctance as I said.


Also----Good to see the thread is back to it's magical old self again...


-E

HF -

Yeah I really don't know much about the state of the theories about abiogenesis so it's not something I'm going to debate. I certainly don't accept that it is definitely what happened, but any brief time I've spent trying to find out where science is with the origin of life on Earth, I end up finding myself being directed towards abiogenesis. I really have no idea how life got to be here, it's not even a big issue for me. One way or another life got here as something less complex than us, and now here we are. Panspermia sounds very plausible to me. I had never heard that we had found fungi in asteroids. I'll google that, but a link could save me the hassle. Presumably they would have been of a species (if species the right word for fungi) that didn't already exist in the areas surround the meteors landing point? Wouldn't be particularly compelling evidence if the meteor landed in a field of cubes and then they found cubensis spores on it

As far as your experiences with ET's. I don't think subjective experiences would get thrown into TTLG (I hadn't even noticed that section til you mentioned it). If you experience something then you experienced it. That's why I said I wouldn't treat it as something to refute, since I think my views on accepting subjective experiences as veridical are already known. I will say though, my experiences with DMT have often felt like I am literally communicating with real aliens, beings from another dimension, gods or whatever. And I have told friends that I don't necessarily think these are just hallucinations. So it's not like I'm wanting to pounce on your shit and tell you you're crazy I don't believe disbelief is the default position when confronted with these kind of experiences, they feel real to me and I have no real reason to think that they are not possible so it would be naive of me to write them off. But on the flip side, I have no way of verifying or falsifying any of it, so my mind is not entirely convinced. But yeah I understand your position on posting about them and thought that's probably what you'd say.

Oh, I write stuff down endlessly. I concur with the advice from your wise entities (of whatever sort they may be). I am just discerning about how and where and to whom I share my most treasured memories.

I have stacks of journals filled with trip reports, dreams (lucid and not), as well as my ostensibly "real" experiences that are even more mind-blowing by virtue of not having ingested anything or having been asleep and dreaming.



They do, and the fact that you hadn't noticed it is kind of my point. It is designed not to be noticed.

My reticence is not a slight against you guys, or anyone else on the Nexus. I am sure if the active players on this thread were gathered in a room waiting for some aya to brew... I would happily regale you all with tales that might make the hardiest psychonaut shake their head in frank disbelief.

Alas, this is not a private space. The bulk of the people who read these words are not even members here... let alone comment enough that I could judge their character.

As it is, I feel I contribute a lot to this lovely place. My nearly 1,200 posts tend to be long and thoughtful. I rarely contribute one liners and never put up gibberish. I have made substantial contributions to the Hyperspace Lexicon among other projects, and even shared a number of tips, secrets, and hard won info about things that had not been discussed previously. (posting experiments with novel extraction recipes, methods of insufflating spice without the burn etc.) People may disagree with me here, some of them regularly, but there are no members who know me that think overly poorly of me. Most of my finest dueling partners here I consider to be my friends. TBH, many of you fine people are very near and dear to my heart.

That said, I feel no obligation to share my deepest secrets, open myself publicly, present my fanciful experiences as subjective anecdotes for others to be entertained by or whatever. For, in my experience, that is all they can ever be for other people. The likelihood that anything I say, however intelligently written, will be more than some wild story for the vast majority of readers... is basically nil. I do realize that many of you have your own wild stories, and generally as long as they are phrased as trip reports... people will leave you be or even cheer you on. The waters get murkier when you make claims around here that can not be attributed to chemical reactions in your brain, though.

I have occasionally mentioned some portion of my experience that dealt with sober but incredible subject matter here. Reactions have been mixed, and it never seemed worthwhile to me in the end.

The paranormal is discouraged here. The purely spiritual is tolerated. Philosophy and speculation are encouraged... but actually claiming to have met "real" aliens (or spirits even) without copious disclaimers and a stance that basically denies the veracity of your experience, is beyond frowned upon. I remember threads where defensive and angry materialists came out of the woodwork to unabashedly belittle, denigrate and ridicule whatever poor sap decided to share something of this nature.

It seems odd and counter-intuitive for a bunch of people who purportedly claim to engage in regular use of DMT to be so incredibly closed to things they don't understand. I don't think that anyone who tells such stories expects anyone to take their word for it. And yet, the relentless mocking (especially of posters who don't have such verbal skills to defend themselves) has been known to be extreme. A kind of running mantra here is that if you make fantastic or absurd claims... the burden of proof is on the one making claims. This means that they actually expect you to prove your conjectures or shut up.

I respect that the Nexus is envisioned primarily as a place of rational and reasonable exploration of entheogens with a very pronounced scientific bent... it is a place that prides itself on safety, accurate information, and cogent verifiable TEKs for extracting alkaloids. This is not an area where we want fuzzy headed thinking, or dangerous errors to creep in. It just is also not the ideal venue for explorations of those truly paradigm shattering experiences that some of us have. I am okay with this. I use the Nexus for what it is, and am not interested in pushing the envelope any more than I already do.

In the end, I tend to, as a rule, refrain from telling people things that are too far outside their range of life experience... even in person. I find that this is subconsciously taken as a challenge to their worldview, and that most people react defensively. I have seen enough violent defenses of people's sense of reality to know that if you want to reach people and bring them to the wondrous, you have to A) start from where they are B) take baby steps towards the edge of their comfort zone C) lead them by the hand into realms that they would not enter alone & D) spend a good amount of time helping them to integrate the experience.

Most of those things are impossible on a forum. Even in person, there is only so much you can do. With alien encounters... you can't really call one up on-demand for them. So I find it better to just let it alone. If someone I like comes up to me and is clearly interested in the topic, I might share with them... but even there it is risky, as people tend to talk. And a story like the ones I have are of the sort that people will not be able to keep to themselves. This creates a ripple of perception about you throughout your friend circles... usually not one you would choose to have either.

In the end, there is rarely a good reason to share these things with the uninitiated. If another person has had similar experiences, it is always good to compare notes... but posting this stuff on the Nexus frankly holds no appeal for me. There can be no real benefit for me to do so... and it just might start up an annoying hullabaloo.

Besides, as a writer... I reserve the right to save my best experiences for my own "fiction."

HF..... I hear you.


Obviously I am someone who has gone way, way out on a limb here.

However... for every 20 people who despise me their is possibly one person who can relate to what I am saying and my message becomes a message of hope for those people.

For example the band Tool was very heavily criticized for the song rosetta stoned. This was only because those people had NO IDEA what maynard was talking about.

For me and a few other people though....that song hits the nail on the head..he EXACTLY described the type of DMT and LSD experiences I have had.

And that for me was hope,

If I am the laughing stock of 100 but the insperation of hope to 1 person then I have done my job and I am well pleased.

Definitely not trying to convince you to tread the water I'm treading but I just want to further explain my motivation for saying so much "out there" stuff

Plus I gotta follow orders.

-E

I stand at Elijah's side.

---

E,
I have a small series of things to tell you,

... .. .......

I am fully aprriciative of your support however....
The last thing I want to do is create any type of division.

An us against them situation is not a progressive situation and is not productive in any way.

An ideal situation in my mind would be one were the scientific minded people take the visionary experiences of non-scietific people as a serious consideration.

IMO visionary people should look to science as a reference point and scientists should consider visionaries to be their inspiration point.

Many of the modern scientific advancements of today were at one time nothing more than mere sci-fi fantasy. Had it not been for visions of popular science fiction in the 1950's we may not today have some of the technology that we now take for granted.

IMO a society that is afraid to dream is a society that is in danger of becoming obsolete.

Visionaries are meant to give direction and soul to science and science is meant to be the backbone and driving force of technological progression.

I did not intend to imply there were differing sides. I argue nothing with that statement.

---

What an excellent proposition of a relationship between two frames of reference. To that notion I ask:

We have allowed the technology of science fiction to manifest, why not everything else?

Sorry to jump backwards so far but I just wanted to clarify that by bibe code I was talking about a pop cultural phenomena that took place about ten years ago when an ex goverment codes expert thought he discovered a hidden code in the bible that revealed the future and they were finding words like bin laden in there and what not...

I don't think that's what you were talking about when you said bible code...

It just sorta comes to my mind though when the phrse bible code is mentioned..

Maybe it's just not time yet....but it's gettin' there

I have a very close friend who is an atheist, and from what I understand atheists do not believe in a spirit/soul, so it would technically be impossible for an atheist to have a " spiritual " experience. Profound and mystical yes, but to say spiritual would IMO be the wrong term for an atheist, being that atheists believe we are just a skin bag of meat and bones with some chemical reactions going on. In the traditional use of the word spirit or spiritual, it implies that we have a spirit/soul that transcends our physical body. I don't think that really coincides with atheist beliefs.

They can easily have a "spiritual" experience, it would just mean that what they previously believed is wrong.

@ Eliyahu & URBY

I appreciate where you guys are coming from. I really do. I am also not afraid to push the envelope... I do it all the time. A great deal of what I post on the Nexus goes right up to the edge and leans heavily on the borderline.

I suppose it is just that I know how things go here. This is not the first or even tenth thread I have been involved with that was a button pusher. I was a rebellious sort in my youth, and I am still willing and able to take unpopular or confrontational stances if I think there is good enough reason to do so.

For me, your statistic about reaching 1 while alienating 100 is just not a worthwhile endeavor, considering that I already reach dozens and alienate a tiny few perhaps. (just judging from comments and PMs... actual numbers are probably exponentially higher if you factor in guests.) In general I think reaching 100 and alienating 1 is better than the other way around. Different strokes I suppose.

At any rate, nothing I would say here about my experiences would actually be of much help to anyone compared to, say, a new grass TEK or talking down someone who's having a freak out. The most I could hope for in this situation is to 1) Entertain people 2) Spark a burning curiosity that won't easily be fulfilled & 3) Confirm for others out there that they are not the only one to have had such an experience.

1 & 2 I tend to do anyway & 3 gets touched on from time to time... I just feel there are other forums for discussions like that. And even on those forums, I am still of the opinion that somethings are just better left unsaid.

The only way for me to talk about my experiences with aliens, telepathy, prophecy and other currently unexplainable phenomena here is to couch it as speculation and leave open the idea that I might be deranged, a provocateur, trolling for attention... or worse. No thank you. I know what I know. Nothing anyone can say about these things will sway me. I am well beyond the room for doubt.

I will stick to the subjects I tend to get some traction on... subjects that are somewhat easier to transmit useful information on like Lucid Dreaming, Yogic arts, combining meditation with entheogen use, and toss in some relatively objective information about mystical and occult subject matter from time to time. As it is, these things still get me in hot water upon occasion. (like the epic thread where I mentioned that my Sifu coult throw me across the room without touching me...)

Considering that I don't want to have those "debates" (generally just angry name calling) I should probably not even mention these things at all... I know I must come across as a horrible tease. Oh well.

liquidglass,

I'm an agnostic atheist and I have quite profound "spiritual" experiences quite often.

Spirituality is something internal for me, though, it isn't magic to me, it isn't some external force. It's me completely stripped of everything and experiencing myself at my core, it's me looking straight into the mirror, my inner self being viewed as an externalization for a few brief moments before eternity dissipates and I find myself in a room, staring at the wall in complete wonder and gratitude, tears tumbling down my face and eventually soaking my lips which are always definitely wholeheartedly grinning in sincere appreciation.

Then I take the dog out and pay my bills.

Korey, kinda sounds like when I get back to my room, except I have a cat. I was just on another forum in a thread about the meaning of the word spirituality and my take on it is this,

I happen to see being spiritual as believing that we have a spirit/soul, and that maybe that energy force exists and persists beyond our physical body. And that things we do in this life may affect the quality of our experience in other planes of existence.

I feel you on the fact that DMT puts you deeply in touch with yourself and your subconscious , but I don't feel like that light energy force that makes me is confined to this plane of existence.

I grew up going to a baptist church, and was baptized and saved and all that, and actually believed in it, but as I became an adolescent and began to form my own ideas about our universe it lost all meaning for me. Then I found psychedelics and alan watts and my whole perspective transformed.