Yeah, I saw the original post, "The case against DMT elves", and had similar feelings as you. While I agree that the user brings a lot of their own baggage & preconceptions to the experience, it is indeed sadly limiting to believe that even the most numinous and transcendent experiences are little more than chemical self-delusion. Kent seems to be trying to explain his own lack of enlightenment by belittling the profound experiences of so many others. And ultimately, does it really matter? If I come down believing I've experienced the core eternity of a vast loving intelligence, feeling enriched and revitalized, isn't that better than thinking about how fucked up I got deranging my senses with chemicals?

I agree. My position is that more people need to touch these transcendent spaces in order to see they, and in turn we as a species have choices. Currently the collective programming of our species doesn't seem well equiped to survive the coming changes. Like you and Flemming I remain hopeful that there will be a paradigm shift in consciousness that will smooth this transition.

I actually don't see a fundamental contradiction between Kent and most psychonauts. The DMT experience can be explained in largely neurological terms, but that's only part of the story. Even Kent acknowledged as much toward the end of "The case against DMT elves".

Perhaps it's because I'm not a dualist. I think the division between mind and body is not clearcut at all.

I'm not a dualist either, and I think that is one of my points. Kent is definitely siding with consciousness as epi-phenomona. But if you are a true non-dualist then you have to be open to the idea that matter might be an epi-phenomona of consciousness. Which is it? Can it be proved one way or another? Until those questions can be answered, siding with a reductionist-materialist explanation is definitely biased.

However, Kent doesn't stop there. He goes on to say that all of these experiences can be confined to one of his three categories, which precludes transcendent experience entirely. If that is not a major oversight I don't know what is! Worse, he continues to say that consensus reality is more real than these "imaginary realms". Not only does this contradict the basic foundations of Buddhist thought, that all of what we know of is actually samsara (illusion), but actually goes against almost all major ideas of the consciousness movement.

It doesn't take a genius to realize that consensus reality is as much an arbitrary construct as any other. And if we want to be all scientific-reductionsist about it, it's self-evident to any neuroscientist or physicist that consensus reality is an entirely arbitray construct of specific genetically inherited neurostransmitter functioning, and an extremely limited sensory apparatus, not to mention all the societal and cultural conditioning.

Who is to say that the psychedelic expereince is enabled precisely because these molecules actually loosen rather than program? In other words, psychedelic states are not caused so much as they are freed up from a trick of chemistry that unhinders?

Maybe psychedelic drugs are inhibiting certain otherwise natural brain neurotransmitter states, freeing consciousness. All the different types and diversity of expansiveness that one expereinces with entheogens occuring, thereby allowing consciousness to be freed from its normal boundaries. Consciousness freed from its normal limitations - like water released from a blocking dam. For example, emotional resolution occurs when suppressed energy is released, and the feeling is allowed to flow freely - giving a feeling of bliss. Less inhibition, more bliss.

Therefore it is just as easy to see consciousness as either within a container or outside of one. Outside of a container (of programmed states), of a conditioned behavior, consciounsess is freed to do other things, at least while the drug is acting to prevent normal "squeezing" neurotransmitter activity from occuring. When looking at the cornucopia of all drugs, most tend to close consciousness down, to clog it up in some way. This is why the family of drugs that actually expand consciousness are fairly narrow - either of the phenylamine or trytamine branch with a few exceptions - K, DXM and Salvia. Why are these so narrow? From a set of all possible chemical states, it would strike me that those molecules that actually free up consciosness, rather than actually do something would be relatively rare in the space of all possible chemical configurations.

Conclusion? It's possible that chemicals, and therfor matter confines consciousnes, and that once freed from their grasp, consciousness experiences all the different states of bliss and transcendence that goes along with it. In other words the natural ground state of consciosness in the void is expansive, the great white light that Buddhist describe or that people peaking on a psychedlic experience. When mental states are coming and going at the speed of light, consciousness that doesn't identify with those arbitrary chemical factors is free.

i agree that 'the case against dmt elves' represents a biased, incomplete perspective on psychedelic experience, but what worries me most is how arguments like these serve to polarize this topic of discourse.

by characterizing consciousness as "merely" some elaborate biochemical process, we are left with the two misleading alternatives: (1) that 'all there is' is a system of neurotransmitters and that spiritual experiences are nothing more than figments of the imagination; and (2) that religious experiences reflect a 'greater truth' that transcends the physical confines of our being.

i tend to think that both perspectives miss the point. i think that while spiritual experiences (psychedelically induced or otherwise) are by no means "merely" figments of the imagination, they are nonetheless a product of our consitution, our environment, and our history. our condition (physical, structural, conceptual) constrains the ways we can interact with what's around us.

drugs manipulate our chemistry, causing us to interact with different features of our perceptual environment. but because our environment is as much a product of our own makeup as it is a product of what's "out there", there's really no way of saying whether something that's experienced under the influence of drugs (or while sober for that matter) really reflects some intersubjectively true fact of the universe.

so, in a way, psychotropic chemicals cause our brains to 'create' new environments, but there's little reason to doubt that what's 'new' about these environments reflects something that was already 'out there' to which we were previously unable to key in. so what i find dubious is whether our *descriptions* of what's out there (e.g. hearing the name of god, communing with the elves) can ever be separated from the particularities (conceptual, neurochemical, etc.) of the individual mind that had the experience. thus, while i think spiritual experiences often do reflect something happening outside the subject of the experience, i am dubious that any particular description of what the subject claims to have been going on "out there" should be taken as fact.

does this make sense? i am trying to be charitable here. i'm of the opinion that we really are keying into something 'out there' when experiencing a DMT trance, but anything beyond this kind of general claim is i think a product of unwarranted speculation and the projection of one's own subjective take on the world.

Yes, I can go with that. Actually, this entire subject is one I find very difficult to discus because, as Paul points out, there is a large degree of polarization.

On the one hand, you have the pure mechanistic perspective that the DMT experience is just another drug state and carries no deeper significance than that. On the other, you have the spiritualist perspective of the body as the container of consciousness, and DMT allows it to escape the body.

My perspective is that this is a false division. In my view, our bodies are simply one aspect of ourselves. They don't contain consciousness, they are a manifestation of consciousness, like standing waves in a body of water.

I think that Kent's view is valid. It's undeniably reductionist -- and therefore incomplete -- but his fundamental message contains some truth that can be discerned once you correct for the bias.

When I was reading the exchange between Pickover and Kent, and the criticism here, I don't quite understand. Perhaps I read something into the essay that wasn't there, but I didn't take it as a "debunking" of the DMT experience at all -- I took it as an exploration of one narrow aspect of the experience. The error I see in the essay is Ken presents it as if that was all there is to the story.

As an interesting side-point, for years I was a research assistant in a neuroscience lab, and when I talked with the principal investigators in casual, unguarded conversations it became quite clear to me that most of them leaned toward the idea of the mind as an interface to the universe in a very deep, not merely sensory or computational, manner. Their research results inevitably led them there, even though they would never phrase it so boldly when speaking on the record.

I want to thank everyone for bringing up very good points. I agree with John, talking about this subject has been both my greatest facination and greatest challenge. It's very difficult to discuss.

For me it boils down to what I think in the end is a false dualism - subjectivity vs objectivity. What makes consensus reality? As far I can tell it's nothing more than something that is AGREED upon. I doubt the dolphins would have anything close to the same consensus reality as ours. Imagine how different the consensus reality would be for any extraterrestrial intelligence.

Therefore, regardless of the 'reality' of these psychedelic expereinces, they are real for the user. For Kent, he has never been able to establish a consensus with this "other", while many, MANY others claim to have done so. Perhaps Kent is simply not ready to receive this higher order level of information.

I like John Lilly's approch, he always maintains his metabelief operator - sometimes taking this other seriously, sometimes not, but never discounting the possiblity of either. For example, can we discount the possibility that something akin to John Lillys ECCO is playing with Kent's sychronicities - that it wants him to go through this phase of extreme doubt? Either way, Kent's skepticism is new and refreshing if nothing else.

Afterall, we are talking about what is ultimately the greatest frontier of all - innerspace. A frontier I suspect has no limits whatsoever.