You can bet your bippy they can. Reality is all around if we could perceive it, and we all do to a certain degree. Psychoactives help break down the walls we have built-up around our perceptions and thus allowing the user to see their own perceptions from a differant perspective. Whew! Here's an example. I was taught(or came to believe)that a free national health care system is no good. The quality of care goes down hill,long lines at the doctors office,etc. This perception I carried for years and believed it. But, after taking a "trip" I saw this subject from a differant angle. The reality I created in my belief system was not only wrong,it was disgusting. I had become narcisstically selfish over the years. I was concerned about the quality of my health care while millions have no health care at all. There are many realities. I don't care if the grass is really blue in color. I accept that I see green only because the grass is reflecting this color of the spectrum. People make too much out of "what is" reality. I do know this: If you've become a sheeple and follow all the rules,go to work,raise a family,pay your taxes,etc.,etc., and you find yourself not content,then try something differant. There is much more to reality than what you know. There are many ways to see these differant realities. If you ever do, be careful. We sometimes have a tendency to try and define what it is that we've discovered. The problem of defining something is to create borders to contain it,put it in a book. Some things,including realty, can't be contained and defined. So,enjoy this reality we call life and take it for what it is.

Rather than through drugs DMT, dreams, or yoga, I have arrived at similar concepts through essentially pure reason. Essentially the ontology can be viewed as a hierachy of sorts:

The Dreamtime > The Tao > God > Cosmos

One can quibble about the relationships of these ideas, but this thing I call the Dreamtime, it is..very disturbing. Because it is essentially not sane. It encapsulates all possibilities and all impossibilites; it is absurd. It is the most important, and the most trivial; all realities lie within yet none are true. It both follows the tao and defies it. It is a place where god really is omnipotent, infallible and omnicient, and yet can awake to find he is but an urchin in the street. Logic does not apply. It is an infinitely nested dream; you could wake up as an angel, defy gods decree and fight his forces for millenia, only to spend eternity burning in hell, yet to awake as a mushroom in a stew.
Thus, in ultimate dreamtime, that DMT reality is both real and unreal, reality and delusion, and all possbile and *impossible* variations and permutations.
The key, anyway, that links it to this thread is that the chaos that God is dreaming away can be reached from within his dream, but he doesnt want to wake up yet.

  My hyperdimensional eyeball cloud claims to be a transport device, by means of which other realities may be apprehended. It doesn't only represent a valid reality, it is a gate to ALL the realities.
  One thing I know for sure, is that sustained use of NN DMT will result in contact phenomena. It is way past time to argue about weather or not they exist, and time to start listening to what they can teach us.
  NN DMT is only a fun thing if you are the type that enjoys being devoured by vast monsters and transported to strange topographies along it's hyperdimensional digestive tract. Every organ in it is another level of reality to be explored.
  .........yeah. I like it!

Although it is apparent by way of scientific aparatus that we as a species experience very little our environment has to offer without assistance (radio, infra red and ultra violet frequencies, scents which, to a dog, are impossible to miss, etc.) the reality in which we live is the basis for what we do sense. If someone is using a substance to go to a higher plane of reality, to see more, to expand their minds, and a large carniverous beast approaches and takes a bite out of them while they were moving amongst the stars or speaking with the divine elders, they are still going to be nibbled to death. Therefore their perception was not increased, they did not expand their mind, and watching the streetlights dance while on a "trip" did not help them in any way. It actually limited them, made them vulnerable and easy prey. Alot of this relates to that exact thing. What are you prey for? Humans have this incredible need to think of themselves as supassing the normality of existance without stopping to think how little normality there really is. The wonder of the visible, the detectable and the quantifiable is so vast and so complex that to understand it takes a great deal of time and dedication, while popping a pill or listening to drums until your mind goes numb takes nothing. From the imagination comes this great "Wisdom" that requires nothing as evidence. Oxygen deprivation, alchohol, and even too many hot peppers (well it worked for Homer Simpson) can all induce states of altered conciousness. Are these real? Who knows. If something is preceived as real then its up to the one who precieved it to determine. Basically if we think about things hard enough we can rationalize any reality to ourselves. So after this long meandering discertation the only way to answer the question is this. Be true to yourself, dont lie to yourself, and trust yourself. Because everything around you may simply be a product of your mind under the influence of a stimulant you took in your REAL reality. By the way... dont wake up, you'll kill us all.

Edited by author 01-05-2004 01:16 PM
Neuropsychologist Dr. Michael Persinger claims phenomena such as mystical
experiences and alien abductions are caused by electromagnetism
and markets headgear to induce such experiences. If they can be induced in this way does that mean they are any more or less "real"?

ahh Yes the Divine Mother Terminal is a station on
the Nirvana line..gate 5meo....NN........where elves board time travelling giant manta rays on there way back here from.....over there...
over there
well
the elves are cumming
the elves are cumming
the elves are cumming over there.,..

John: What exactly do you mean by "phenomena"... "self-dribbling machine elves" ?

Drugs like DMT allow us to alter the means by which our perceptive hardware interprets existing stimuli. The phenomena seen with DMT are always there, they just are not often seen without the assistance of DMT.

well...............having been a bit of a shamamic seeker myself .... some of the "higher states " i have achieved thru yoga and dreaming are very similiar to states experienced thru use of said substance and other psychoactives. and i am only guessing that this is due to stimulation of glands within the brain or the emulation of this stimulation by the ingestation of psychoactives.
 Rarely did i feel i was in another reality but when i did it was a profound , if not terrifying experience. such experiences did provide a completely new vantage point for looking at myself. dmt seemed to provide a state of immediate egoic dissolution and states following defy description and even memory in some cases. the metaphor of a whirling cloud of eyes comes close.
 i have never had access to the vegetable form and the elongated expereince it provides .as for whether or not it is revealing a true reality , i feel ambivalent whether the experience is a perception of another reality or a glimpse into the maze of our brain chemistry.
 However , i am convinced there is an indisputable value to the use of psychoactives and undeniable historical evidence of a nearly universal use by human cultures of these substances as tools to understand ourselves and our place here on the earth.
 Be forwarned ... dmt is powerful , unforgiving and rarely "fun" and should be used in a metered dose , a controlled setting and with specific spiritual goals in mind. It is only for the "experienced " user and people who have a proven ability to use psychedilics and reassemble their personalities without permanent disruption..delusion and psychosis.

I need more experience and research to understand how chemistry affects the human thought process, but I think we are capable of being extremely aware of how the bits and pieces of existance are inter-connected and our natural electrobiochemistry might need some food in order to bring this self-awareness to consciousness.

I believe that drugs like DMT do let us access something "real". The images and entities are just too real and detailed to be a total artifact of the mind. Someday, I think scientists will be able to communicated with entities discovered in these other realms.

Can drugs like DMT reveal a true, valid reality, or do they simply distort our perception of reality?
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