What Am I

@Tristan12 Gotcha. Your situation may be beyond my abilities to give helpful, applicable advice. I think you're correct to practice extreme caution if your mental health is generally precarious. If you do pick up some DMT in its pure form, it could be nice to use pharmahuasca. Just make sure you keep the doses low and only inch higher as you feel comfortable. Here's a thread that goes into some detail. Feel free to ask any questions if it's unclear.

Yes, those would be more effective for diving into your own psyche, in my opinion. Though they come with their own risks, because you may not always like what you find, and things can quickly spiral out of control on a high dose. It can be tough to directionally point a psychedelic trip exactly where you want it. You're usually more of a passenger. Or more specifically, a higher form of yourself guides what you experience, and your illusory individuality goes along for the ride. An amazing amount of lessons are learned, but they're not always the ones you intended to investigate. Though it's likely the case that they're the lessons you actually needed.

I just realized we may all be working with a different definition of contemplation here, lol. Personally, I consider it the reception of transcendental knowledge via the process of insight while in the midst of a heightened state. Like I mentioned above, it happens mostly by itself on something like DMT.

I've had my most profound subtle-level insights on DMT, and more specifically, on pharmahuasca. There's really no trick to the contemplative aspect, at least at a beginner level. As long as you're under the influence and you're relatively relaxed/receptive, transcendental knowledge flows into you all by itself. If you're a meditator and you're able to deliberately deepen your state, that skill can be used within the trip to accelerate the flow of insight. For me, 5-MeO-DMT and 5-MeO-MALT essentially blow past the subtle and dip right into the causal, so I've always received fewer insights in terms of raw numbers. But it can also be argued that this class of psychedelics gives you the greatest insight of all, which is your oneness with all things and your true identity as the Self.

Actually, that is an interesting parallel to Leo's recent blog post where he mentioned drawing blood due to the intensity of awakening. Martin also cuts his nose in this one.

This is a follow-up episode to the last. In this one, Martin takes a ride using my favorite ROA.

Whatever works for you is great. Radical non-duality isn't my first choice, but maybe that's a fault on my part in not having enough faith in the obviousness of the truth.

Good deal, I've heard of something similar. It's almost as if our success is dependent on the purity of our intention rather than our specific methods. It's very mysterious how the process can be approached from different angles. For all my talk about it, I don't meditate in the strict sense either. For me, it's all about a continuous paying of attention in the moment to "what is," which creates a very subtle sensation of presence. If one can just lock in and develop that, the rest seems to fall in place all by itself.

No problem. Right, it's good to keep in context that when using psychedelics, the molecules being ingested are either analogs of endogenous neurotransmitters, or in the case of DMT and 5-MeO-DMT, they're endogenous neurotransmitters themselves. There are many stories of dedicated sober meditation practitioners who experience morphing multicolored geometric shapes along with all other manner of psychedelia. If you can make a significant amount of progress without a psychedelic, then I salute you.

5-MeO-DMT is radically different from DMT in my experience. Much more classically cosmic and less bizarrely strange. My favorite ROA has been subcutaneous injection. The effects and duration are nearly identical to plugging. Both are great ROAs for this chemical.

If you're a little hesitant about psychedelics, ayahuasca may scare the holy shit out of you, lol. It's so unbelievably crazy, with its weirdness being beyond what you could ever imagine. Give that 5-MeO-DMT another thought. And make sure your dose is reasonable and not excessive. It's worlds apart from DMT. Almost like a different class of psychedelic altogether.

If you do use psychedelics again, try getting your hands on 5-MeO-DMT. Despite it producing the most intense effects, it's also often the least scary, especially at sub-breakthrough doses. This particular psychedelic has way less of a propensity to produce that terrifying "evil" effect that they're sometimes known for. Rather, it's just raw intensity. As a confidence booster, it could also be wise to have a trip killer on hand, like a small dose of a benzodiazepine.

I can see what you're saying, in the sense that mysterious phenomena such as higher states of consciousness are fertile ground for people to make up their own mythologies around their experiences. I'm sure it happens all the time, and I'm sure their assumptions are often inaccurate. I guess I can't pretend to be excluded from this affliction either. My most profound insights, which were induced from direct experience via psychedelics and meditation, fall in line with those from all the consciousness-based traditions. On a breakthrough dose of 5-MeO-DMT, you have an ego death and are transported to a blinding hyperdimensional white light where it's experienced that you're both everything and nothing, and the singular omnipresent being in all of existence. I would call that the most profound, but there are plenty of others that are of a lower order. I'm of the opinion that the entities and dimensions experienced on a DMT breakthrough have an independent existence. An obscene amount of knowledge is seemingly crammed into your mind when in those states, but similar to a dream, it's as if it's difficult to retain it upon returning to ordinary bodily existence.

Nice, not bad. I was just trying to figure out what compelled you to post on the forum over 5,000 times, but it does sound like you at least have an interest in reality, even if you're currently convinced it's a pretty shallow reality. Did the hyperdimensional nature of your psychedelic trips ever make you question whether you may be witnessing something beyond just an experience occurring in your brain? Experiences of that type are so unbelievably intense, it can sometimes be a doorway into more uncommon beliefs.