The Zero-Point, a few Molecules and a LOT of Novelty

Many extra-ordinary people, with all their idiosyncrasies, quirks, obsessive drives for knowledge and systemic questioning, repress and hide their true selves, because it's not valued and doesn't fit in with the normal assumptions of society. It throws a wrench into the otherwise harmonious society. Harmonious being a euphemism for what I would say is a complacent, purposeless society, content with sweeping untold millions of assumptions under the rug, locking them in the closet, and pretending they don't exist. Have you ever been in a social environment where it seems like everyone agrees and proselytizes that such and such is the way things are, but you silently disagree and could topple their entire edifice of assumptions with the simple question of why? It is situations like this that I have silently and passively experienced - letting my fellow man be content in his drool of dogma.

It was finally in classes like Modern European History in high school that my talents for critical evaluation were recognized. It was finally a social structure that encouraged and rewarded independent thinking and meaningful debate. Seldom have other classes lived up to that standard. I think the epitome of my disgust with mainstream people and organization can be seen in my classes at UNH such as "Politics and Society." It was rote memorization of facts to be regurgitated on fill in the bubble tests. There was no learning involved at all. It was an egregious waste of life for the people (barely) present. It was a slumber so deep that the professor could have said something challenging or meaningful, and the students would have barely raised an eyelid.

These experiences were the necessary precursors to my first mushroom trip in July 2007. I found that what is at my core must be expressed to the fullest, not repressed as if it doesn't exist. I had the transcendent experience that tells one that life and the time one experiences it in, is not something to be gotten through, used up or wasted. I remembered that being is a very precious and mysterious thing. It confirmed to me all the questions I had surrounding my peers' assumptions - that experience is far more mysterious than you can ever wrap your conceptual mind around. It proved to me, like Socrates, that I know that I don't know, and that's one thing more than everyone else knows. I think this is a primary attribute of extra-ordinary people - they are not comfortable taking on or making hard and fast assumptions - mainly that what they think they know is the unquestionable truth (dogma). It is well known that Albert Einstein questioned everything around him from an early age, especially how and why things worked the way they did. It is the mind of the engineer or physicist, testing the limits and nature of reality. It is precisely by testing these perceived boundaries of what is possible, that they are overcome.

This tension between believing that something is unquestionably true, seeing the effects of such a world view, and then eventually questioning it and seeing it to be a disastrous, limiting, and narrow perspective, is also the process of history itself. Terrence McKenna's Timewave relates this through the tension of habit and novelty. In this light, history has seen a steady building up of conformist perspectives, but then always cresting and dropping into their relentless obliteration, and descent into unknown novelty. It is as if someone says, "Ah ha! I've fit the vast mystery of existence into this neat little equation and this is how it is - no more searching for the truth, this is it!" And society follows and believes that guy for a while, but then someone else comes along and shows everybody an extraordinary and precious (and psychedelic) gem, and says, "But look! Your equation does not begin to describe this mind boggling thing!"

It is by challenging the conformist, boundary laden assumptions all around us that novelty is revealed and boundaries are overcome. While the Wright Brothers were testing their flying machines, expert physicists said it could never be done. In the 1950s well respected scientists said it would take hundreds of years for man to make it to the moon. If history is any guide, there is nothing that can't be done, and the ability to do it is mostly a function of the belief that it can or cannot be done.

This topic reminds me of dinner with X, Y and Z, when I was suggesting that matter is an illusion and that the mind can influence so called "matter". Neither X nor Y could accept this, and understandably so, for it brings into question the most basic assumptions of their upbringing in society and their experience. They were not willing to give up the assumption of a material world so easily. X's response, as it generally is, was to the effect of, "So you believe that bullshit?" This is the ever so common reaction of deny and relegate to a to the bin of "this stuff is so far from the accepted version of reality that no rational debate is necessary to discard it." Indeed, rational debate would give it a legitimacy that we can't allow, for the very consideration of the assumption of a material world brings up for consideration everything that we hold dear - our political and scientific beliefs, but more importantly, it makes us question the nature of Self, for if my thought can influence and play a role in the creation of the "outside" world, then the line between Self and Other is blurred and there is nowhere to hide! (see "Evidence for Consciousness-related Anomalies in Random Physical Systems")
http://www.springerlink.com/content/n0576p6352g84158/

Consider how the black and white world of George W. Bush appealed to so many Americans, "You're either with us or with the terrorists!" Ya! Lets not examine ourselves, let's dogmatically accept us as the unquestionable good guys, and them as the unquestionably evil guys. George was the perfect cheerleader for this, however I think many Americans eventually had some cognitive dissonance happen when the evidence of our own similarities to (and actions as) the terrorists forced a confrontation with our patriotic beliefs that my country is unquestionably right and good. We confronted our shadow. What we once saw as holey other, we now see as a repressed aspect of ourselves. If experiences like these teach us anything, it's that beliefs are traps that blind us from the true nature of reality. They are necessary and useful, but only to the extent that they facilitate their own transcendence. We must not be so complacent. Nothing is so sacred that it is beyond question, even the visible, sense-able world itself.

Who guessed this would inevitably lead to "The Matrix"? Many see it as a fanciful story, but what happens if you take it seriously? Can we really know for sure that all the electrical impulses we receive from our nerves, translated into experience as "chocolate ice cream" or "birds singing" in our brains, is not the input from a sufficiently powerful computer? It all feels very real, but what if it is merely a simulation, like one of the multitudes of virtual realities that millions of people today spend their time in? Perhaps we don't believe this because we find the power of mind to be so limited in our everyday experience. However, with the increasing "realness" of virtual reality, with greater computing power and more dynamic interfacing with the human mind, maybe we will question our assumption of the power of mind limited to manipulating our hands and lips, and in the realization of our thoughts and our Self expanding infinitely outward, we will realize that all the power to create the world rests inward, waiting to be discovered.

Now who guessed this would all lead to DMT? I have found that DMT has the power to create hallucinatory experiences that are real in every way. It is impossible to say that it is merely a hallucination and therefore not real, anymore than it is possible to say that everyday reality is not a hallucination. In other words, DMT is a technology capable of creating a virtual reality that is entirely convincing. Would it surprise anyone to learn that DMT is found in our very own blood, brain, lungs, spinal fluid and exists on the tips of each of our nerves? This means that our normal waking reality is already, in some way, mediated by the most powerful tryptamine hallucinogen(s) known to man. This suggests that there is no fundamental difference between our normal reality and the psychedelic, mind manifesting, infinitely malleable DMT world - it is only a matter of a few extra molecules in addition to the ones that are already there.

Here is the message: if we could see the world through clear eyes, without the blinders of belief that narrow the world and collapse it into something that seems very solid and black and white and already created, we would see the constant and ever flowing flux of the NOW, where all of creation is happening, in the present moment. We would see the immediate influence of our consciousness on our surroundings. Instead we believe things to be solid, and so they magically become. It is the very act of looking through a certain conceptual filter of how you think something should be, that makes it manifest as the way it is. If you look for a particle, you find a particle. If you believe that all people from the Middle East are terrorists, then look at that person from the Middle East - he looks like a terrorist! It is in the release, the giving up of all preconceived concepts of what is real and what is not, of what is possible and what isn't, of what is self and what is other, of past and future - it is in the dissolution of all boundaries that we realize the true nature of reality - the infinite mind of God.

From someone who has visited these realms, it is in truth, a most beautiful, wondrously powerful, and above all, an intelligent universe.

http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/dmt/dmt.shtml