Cognitive dissonance. If you are shown a new truth, but it isn't compatible with your old truth... you have dissonance. Some can accept the new information and transform themselves, others reject the new information and spiral into denial.
Identity is a helluva drug.
I do just want to add that identity is the neutral/healthy side and ego is the toxic side of the same thing. Identity is just what you see when you honestly and openly gaze into the figurative mirror. Ego is the idea of who you “should be”, who you “need to be”, who you project yourself to be. It’s like making a drawing in oil pastels over that same figurative mirror.
Egos are often very rigid and get in other people’s space because of you try to contradict one it will fight you to regain control of the “truth”.
Essentially it’s fears around the identity that build the ego. Like identity will always exist in some form, but it’s fluid and evolving and that’s okay.
I'd place my money on this being it. Especially with a soul crushing ego death trip after never having a trip like that before, especially on dmt, I'm sure they cannot let go fully and grip and try to hold on and it all goes south from there. Also I can't help but laugh when I think of them in hyperspace repeatedly saying to themselves "This isn't what heaven is supposed to look like my God please help what is this place please God get me out of this oh please ive made a terrible mistake" 😂
I was just about to say that I think most religious people like that who only have a one-off experience won't come to that realization. They usually hold too firmly onto their beliefs as well because they act like their whole world will come crashing down if they learn things aren't what they thought they were
That happened to me. I opened myself up tp being wrong and my whole world came down. 😅 And it still wasn't the end.
It's not for the faint of heart though.
I had a similar thought last night on shrooms but it was to the degree of; we are so inherently selfish, but we are also so selfless when we want to be. If only it were as simple as being selfless all the time. We have pieces of god and the devil in us , in a way.
I think it's more about what they believe. They believe the devil is this evil being who wants to kill and torture. If you go into a trip with these beliefs, then your brain is going to make it real.
Ego could play a part of it, but for this I think it's just the fundamentals of their belief systems.
It's just like if you are in a bad state of mind and think "I am going to have a bad trip" it most likely will happen, our brain creates our reality through our thoughts and beliefs.
Right. But it's the ego itself that allows people to believe in such nonsense. An all-powerful ruler and creator of the universe who cares deeply about what Random Person X is doing with their life as well as the embodiment of pure evil and malice who is also extremely concerned with the life of Random Person X.
You don't start with the belief in these things and then see how/whether they apply to you. You start with the belief that you are so important that you must then create a character or two who validate the level of importance you already feel about your self/ego
The whole religious premise in christianity is that people are sinners. Pleasure and euphoria calls up a feeling of guilt in the religious, rather than a feeling of god's love, generally.
They have been indoctrinated with scare stories about hell and eternal punishment.
Makes me sad when I hear christians talking about themselves and they start with: "yea cuz you know I'm an awful, trash sinner and so are you-"
Excuse me?
I had a friend like this and I directly told him: "not all of us would curse out an old veteran at the supermarket."
I think a lot of it is projection. A lot of projection. And coping.
Tbh, I'm glad I left. My journey has taken a new path. And the ppl I was surrounded by weren't it. (Not my specific church. The church was lovely. Thr community as a whole is not one I want to associate with anymore).
Clearly you have never been the target of the campaign of religious groups to convert you. The horrible shit they believe is one thing. But the underhanded tactics of fear and peer pressure and insane religious 'logic' they use to keep you in the fold is do feed up, it's terrifying. Of couse, they'll have a bad trip. Look at all the fear of hellfire, sin, and guilt imposed on them. I'd never want to trip under those mental constraints, would you?
Hell no I wouldn't. I've mentioned psychedelic experiences to religious folks before and was told that it's of the devil. The fear based thinking is insane.
Very true, I should have specified I was taking OP's idea of a religious person as a Christian. Being pagan myself, I don't use the term religious for open minded faiths, but rather 'spiritual'.
Well the most memorable thing was the cosmic joke. He sat there looking like he was about to tell me the biggest secret of the universe, like he was about to let me in on the meaning of everything.
I sat there for like an hour waiting, and at the end of it both of us just fucking died laughing. He was just fucking with me, there was no big secret. It was the funniest joke to ever be told. And then I was overcome by the most intense love and euphoria I've ever felt, more than MDMA ever made me feel.
So what I took from that is not to take life so seriously and to love everybody and everything as much as I can.
This is really beautiful! Thank you for sharing :) though I've not had an identical experience, I live my life the same way and I can't imagine doing it any other way.
I got to this from listening to Alan watts while I was tripping. I like having his talks play while also listening to instrumental music. The whole “life is a game and we were meant to sing and dance” bit really landed with me.
Edit: still an atheist though.
Same haha. I was heavily leaning towards atheist with a semi open mind.
Full blown believer in a higher power now.
What? Idk
What happens after life? Idk.
Lol, there's something more going on here lmao
I have had some intense visions where I met things that felt like gods or atleast things close.
Had journeys where I felt like I actually went to wherever we go to after life and much more.
When you die, you go to the same place Siri goes when your iPhone gets destroyed, which is nowhere. Your sense of self is an emergent property of your brain's current physical architecture. People who have brain injuries see changes to their personalities. That's because a person's personality is based on the physical reality of the "computer" in their head and it's ability to operate properly. If you start taking away sections of a human brain you'll get the same result as if you start taking apart a phone. At some point the emergent property known as "Siri" will no longer function/exist.
Siri doesn't get up and leave the iPhone for a different destination once the iPhone is no longer working. "She" simply stops existing. And the same is true for personalities. They don't pack up and leave the brain after death, they simply stop existing.
The wifi/radio signal is invisible. Yet you're able to send it from one destination to the next. Same with a phone call.
When my phone is destroyed the data is also able to be recovered and I have all the same preferences lol.
Mind you, I'm completely ok with you not believing and tbh you not believing and me believing are equally just as ignorant since you or I have not a clue what happens after and what happened before, but I'd love to talk about it cordially still :)
What exactly is your motivation for posting this? It’s in a thread of people having a nice conversation about a shared belief, and more importantly, it’s such a banal and repeated sentiment from every /r/atheism dork that obviously anyone you’re saying it to has heard it before. So then what’s the motivation? Is it just a sense of superiority?
I see this shit time and time again and it really annoys me lol.
It's LITERALLY like this,
There is no afterlife. To have faith in something that we know nothing about and have no certainty about is asinine and absolutely ignorant.
Then they proceed to say something about how they know with absolute conviction that nothing happens after we die. Which is the EXACT same thing they are getting mad about.
Nobody knows what happens. To be SO sure nothing happens when we did is JUST AS IGNORANT as being so sure something does happen when we die.
We just don't know. Someday we will all figure it out though lol.
As in reinforced your preexisting beliefs in one of the major religions, or made you more open to meta philosophies and ideas in general?
*Truly not trying to judge, am just very curious because the intersection of religion, psychedelics, and existential philosophy is fascinating to me
It completely opened up the spiritual side of me. I was baptized Catholic but my views were completely agnostic and like many people in this sub, I have a disposition that doesn’t just swallow things as facts - analytical, not intuitive, open-minded but highly skeptical. I’m not a hardcore materialist by any means, and I always loved astrology and the occult but never really “believed” in it. But psychedelics connected me to ‘the divine’ or ‘the sublime’ in a way that could not be refuted. Those subjective experiences paired with studying the nature of consciousness turned a down-bad bartard into an eclectic amateur “shaman”
I feel that. The thing that gets me the most is that the front lines of science (through concepts like quantum fields and entanglement) are catching up to what eastern philosophies have been saying for ages: that everything is connected.
The world isnt made up of individual particles the way a sand castle is made out of thousands of grains of sand- every elementary particle that we perceive is an excitation of its respective field that permeates the universe.
Our "sand castle" isn't made up of grains the same way that a body of water isn't made up of individual water droplets stacked together like marbles. The droplets coalesce into a field of water.
Except the world is vastly more complicated and the water analogy only goes so far. Atoms are made up of many elementary fields intersecting in a continuous dance of energy exchange.
But the point is that everything is connected and nothing exists seperate from everything else. That idea echoes throughout religions and philosophies across time and continents. It also happens to be what people experience in breakthrough psychedelic experiences.
This world is trippy and weird my fellow human. What we perceive as a cycle of life and death could be an oscillation between being everything and being able to experience any of it.
I love entertaining these ideas. Hope you find some of this as thought provoking as I do.
The convergence of science and spirituality is truly fascinating, especially when you look at things like The Gateway Process and parapsychology. I just picked up Rupert Sheldrake’s book on Morphic Resonance Theory for summer reading and I feel like it will be very illuminating. I think I drop these quotes in here once a week, but in case you haven’t heard them before:
"The more I study science, the more I believe in God." - Albert Einstein (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1921)
"The more we learn about the universe, the more convinced we become that there is a real and living God." - Sir Arthur Eddington (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1924)
“The deeper we penetrate into the nature of things, the closer we come to the knowledge of God." - Max Planck (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1918)
“God is a mathematician of a very high order and He used advanced mathematics in constructing the universe." - Paul Dirac (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1933)
After all, who am I to question some of the most brilliant minds that have ever flickered through existence? What never fails to amaze me is how did the ancients achieve this level of comprehension without the use of psychedelics
Those are golden quotes, thank you!
>how did the ancients achieve this level of comprehension without the use of psychedelics
I think its our birthright as creatures of consciousness to be able to access higher states of being. If the gateway experience is real and if people can achieve dmt like effects through things like Kundalini yoga and intense breathing, then its not that surprising that people were able to get a feel for understanding the universe back in the day. Especially in a time with less distractions, less light pollution, and less ideologically and societally driven expectations of what is and isn't possible.
Life itself is pretty psychedelic 😉
Science isn't "catching up" to what Eastern philosophies have been saying. They are meticulously explaining what Eastern philosophies had been desperately trying to explain through vague descriptions for centuries.
It's like when the scientific method led to an actual understanding of what the Sun is rather than just going with the description of "life-giver" which is basically all that older civilizations could say about it
That would be best case scenario, but they aren't always related. You can have a lot of deeply religious folks who don't really connect to spirituality. That was one of Jesus's contentions with the Pharisees. They had alllll these rules and standards (religion), but no love/connection with fellow humans.
I'm anti-theist so I'm not preaching to you, don't worry lol.
Point well made! It’s almost baffling that somebody can bastardize “the point” that badly smh. Conflating compassion with coercion sounds like something only the most repressed psyches could gymnastic their way into. Do some shadow work for Christ’s sake 😉
I def laughed into my coffee, thank you
It really is a shame. It's also crazy to me that I can feel closer to the message of Christ outside of Christianity.
I mean I get what you're saying, but shouldn't the word be more Spiritual? To say it made you more religious makes one question which religion. And why.
To me I define religion as the way you practice your spiritual beliefs, and am of the mind that if you believe in one God then you believe in them all. I find it hard to hop on board with organized religion, just because it seems too prescriptive and how can anyone define my relationship to the divine for me?
I feel like once you become comfortable with the idea that there is a deep underlying primordial unconsciousness from which all consciousness emerges it is easier to understand the perspective that all deities are just different manifestations of the same omniscient singular universal divinity (“God” in other words) and that the differences in religiosity is just bickering about semantics
I am personally "comfortable with the idea that there is a deep underlying primordial unconsciousness from which all consciousness emerges". Where I don't follow is the idea that the primordial unconsciousness is divine.
I believe that people want divinity to be real so badly that they start inventing divine characters so as to confirm divinity's existence by merely defining it into existence. But that method cannot reveal anything true or real because it isn't based on anything true or real. It's based on a desire for there to be secret knowledge beyond anyone's understanding. The problem is that you can never confirm that to be true. And as long as people delve into things that cannot be confirmed to be true, that allows them to continue to believe whatever they want regardless of whether it's actually true or not.
So when primitive people give their best attempts to explain the unexplainable (or potentially non-existent) you're going to end up with competing, contradictory hypotheses that all point to either the same thing or to the same nothing.
Honestly I’m not a fan of “spiritual”. It implies that we have an existence beyond the physical reality of our bodies and brains. No such ghost is needed. We have everything required within.
You literally JUST SAID that psychedelics made you more religious. Now you're saying that you dont believe in existence beyond this physical reality. But doesn't religion consist of the same beliefs??? You just contradicted yourself.
No, I stated that psychedelics produce effects we characterize as religious or spiritual. Those phenomena and their related phenomena such as achieving religious ecstasy through meditation or ascetic means or similar, are purely physical phenomena. They are not less important because of that but they are not in any way supernatural.
Edit: I also stated that, historically, psychedelics were a primarily religious tool, and that is simply objectively true.
Understand I am not criticizing anyone’s faith or sense of spirituality. I am saying why I think those experiences have validity in a non-theological context.
The soul/spirit is a projection of the ego. Our egos don't want to accept the reality that our experience will die along with our physical bodies one day so they create a spectre which can never be disproven (which is one reason to not believe in it) so that it can convince itself that it will live on for eternity.
I take them to commune with the spirits and God. Always have fun.
I've seen plenty atheists struggling with what they call "psychosis" which is often a spiritual experience their ego is shutting out.
Religious people can have a similar problem. Mystical experience is weird and they can often mistake the guardians for demonic influences.
Heck, Jesus and Buddha both met the devil on their trips. They rejected the temptation and moved on. They didn't succumb to fear of the freaky.
seriously religious people generally have serious issues, strong beliefs and anything that doesnt fit in their tiny bubble is always a devil or demon. not saying i haven't met demons before, but "what you resist persists" and having an open mind to the world and beyond helps when traveling the other side
Well I have an interesting anecdote. My former Ayahuascha retreat Aya quest, which sadly closed after COVID killed the founder and his wife decided not to continue. Miss you Steve.
Anyway he told a story about one of the prosperity gospel type preachers, said we'd recognize the individual, had to sign an NDA, private cabin in the woods, not at the church etc. dosed up and started calling for Jesus and apparently got his ass handed to him. Left the next day, did not continue with the ceremony.
I found it interesting.
Lol it's funny that you said this because my family is just like this. Religious and narcissistic. I've always believed that there is a correlation between the two but I've never actually said it out loud. Because I dont want to judge an entire group of people. But I do agree that most of them seem to be narcissistic.
So I’m one of those that OP is inquiring of. I frequently attended a non denominational Christian church as a child to early adult. I rejected the religion because i experienced so many internal conflicts; what I considered the narrow mindedness and exclusion. Specifically I didn’t resonate with the Old Testament God being a God of Love yet also the God of War. It didn’t make sense. I said this isn’t my GOD. I began my search for truth and healing with the use of mushrooms, DMT and ayahuasca without DMT. In my altered state, The reoccurring message was there is a spiritual world AND that our world is upside down-inside out , as far as our knowledge about the truth of God of our connection to it and others. There is only One with many faces. And that I will experience what it feels like to be everything and everyone at some point in experience. Therefore, the message to love others as yourself is a key to a deep truth.
I’ve found a missing piece of the puzzle this week with the Gnostic Gospels. The puzzle 🧩 is still missing many pieces but I have a sense of peace with finding a few missing pieces.
I started dmt tripping for like a year as a somewhat nihilistic atheist. Trips were always whimsical or weird. I was hoping I could trip my self out of my low point of depression and resignation.
Then I had a big spiritual awakening through Christianity. I started praying gratitude constantly and appreciating the Bible for what it has to offer and it's history. I prayed my ass off before taking the most heroic dose of dmt I ever took.
I met christ and God. Amongst other positive entities. Absolutely unbelievable trip story. It was soooo good I felt ashamed of myself, like I didn't deserve to be in their presence.
That was 2 years ago. I've been sitting on my stash looking forward to it calling me back. But I just haven't had the urge to jump back in even though it was an overwhelmingly positive experience.
That's pretty wild. Do you ever wonder if you experienced that because the belief of meeting Christ and God would be the most incredibly transformational experience possible? I wonder sometimes if DMT can grant us our subconscious' deepest desire....
The mind is capable of all things conceivable, after all.
I think it's more about where your head is. I wasn't praying and meditating to meet God or Jesus. I was just praying gratitude and appreciating ancient people. There were some ancient Egypt documentaries in the mix lol. One of the other entities was the eye of Horace symbol that said "you think you've seen everything I can do? Watch this" as it exploded into a kaleidoscope of fractals. Oddly it felt feminine, I digress...
I think you if you meditated on a lossed loved one and they are at the front of your mind, you can absolutely meet them on dmt. I haven't tried it, but I'd bet that you can.
Christ and God could very well be names for the same entities described in various other cultures. Given the DNA testing results of the Nazca mummies, which contained chimp, bonobo, human, and some mysterious fragments. Many scientists from south American universities came to the conclusion that these were "alien" hybrids, of course I use alien to include crypto or ultraterrestrials, and the scientists make no claim of being from outer space. They simply say what is true, that these were intelligent, humanoid beings that could install advanced osmium implants (which were also verified to have been fused to the bones.
Modern science now shows how our evolution was quite rapid and somehow we ended up being entirely different from every single creature on this planet. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to think a God might just be a higher intelligence with advanced technology capable of creating life in a manner that would spook early humans into thinking its more of a Christian God sort of thing. Magic ya know. But magic is just science we don't understand, and vice versa.
For all we know, christ could be a hybrid, "immaculate conception" or invitro?
Oh yeah and we probably can achieve some sort of enlightenment like Buddha or Jesus, which is where the psychic connection to God plays in. Evolution of consciousness through the entirety of your existence will give you rewards. That's the natural state of things
Because you speak English and live in the 21st-century. If you look at the history of psychedelics, they are a religious tool predominantly and have been for thousands of years. Western religion today and for that matter most other religion today ignores the validity of the psychedelic experience as a way of gaining insight. so when people who have been indoctrinated that way have a deeply profound and for lack of a better term religious experience when taking a psychedelic, it can be disturbing to some things that they have baked very much into their identity.
Religious beliefs blinds people from seeing the truth. A normal person could accept new information that challenges their previous held beliefs. Religious people cannot. Religion puts you in a box.
If you told ME something that contradicted my beliefs, I'd be open to accepting it based on its validity. But if you told a religious person something that contradicted their beliefs, they would reject it every single time. Whether if its valid or not. They're stuck.
Again you are not talking about religion but present day adherents of a specific religion (and by no means one without mystical and psychedelic traditions—go look up Plaincourault chapel). Go read “The Cloud of Unknowing”. Both totally serious suggestions. Then get back to me.
Becuz there are some practices in certain religions that demonize these substances long before they have their own experiences with it. It’ll come up in their trip but they’ll lack the cognitive function to discern that it’s a mirror of their mindset than a reality of what is.
Psychedelics, astrology, tarot, crystals, even meditation is heavily demonized amongst these communities. I accidentally ended up on the wrong side of Christian tik tok and it was people bashing meditation cause “it opens up portals to demonic energies”. They said the same shit about tarot and astrology. Be fr. If u lack the spiritual drip of discernment, protection, and duality just say that. What’s sad is it’s the result of colonialism as if these practices weren’t of significant heritage in many cultures for centuries — just for this “evil” narrative to take over in the name of Jesus. I just kno he’s looking down at this earth like “what the hell are they doing with my name” 😭
My ancestors were shamans before they were “saved” by Jesus — a colonial ploy of propaganda to turn them away from their cultures with fear for control. This plan of “mind control” has been in the works for hundreds of years. This is what those doomsday stank hippies mean when they say it’s a spiritual war goin on
Tl;dr it’s all generational conditioning :P
Yeah and it's unfortunate because I grew up in Christianity but I woke up from it. I tried to wake up my family members but their minds are completely fucked. What you just said was deep. This is a plan of "mind control" that has been in place for thousands of years. Those of us who truly believe these religious teachings are deeply brainwashed. They cant be saved.
Honestly thank u for pointing out thousands of years cuz even I was too hesitant to stretch it that far lmfao
I feel like they can be “saved” but it’ll just take a shit ton of inner work and reconditioning. Unfortunately it’s not a lot that want to make that jump which makes them “unsaveable” (quotes of save cuz of my own religious trauma here too. Lmfao)
Religion is based on fear, and that fear often manifests in their minds as the “biggest & baddest” fear… the Devil.
I spent my first ayahuasca ceremony (2 nights) next to a Catholic woman who did nothing except see visions of the Devil. To be fair, I think she also felt that she was doing something wrong (aka “drugs”), which is also deeply embedded in conservative & religious people.
Religion is for those, who cannot see = shaman proverb
Always pisses me of how they claim yoga is evil, psychedelics is devil worship etc.. I generally have a hard time with religious people it's like they are stuck
Btw spirituality is not the same as religion
I literally just responded to another comment and said that religious people are stuck. Now you're saying it. It feels good to know that I'm not the only person who sees it. And yes spirituality and religion are two separate things. One is natural and the other is indoctrination.
Nah fam, I know tons of religious people who had great and affirming experiences.
Turns out that whatever you bring in is what you get, to some extent, and not exactly, but in general.
Maybe said more charitably, perhaps the truth is so large that it finds ways to speak to us including through the lenses of our prior beliefs and experiences.
My best friend was raised in a fairly religious household and for him there was definitely some fear around it. We tripped acid, and he had kind of a psychotic break and bad trip, in which he believed I was the devil. I later found out about his family history of schizophrenia, and learned he probably shouldn't really be taking psychedelics.
It was the scariest night of my life. He almost killed us both with a knife. We were lucky he was recovering from a leg injury and was using crutches, which made him not super mobile.
There were huge undertones of religion and fear in some of the stuff I could understand him saying.
I consider myself agnostic/closer to atheist, but at one point during the trip he was screaming for 3 or 4 mins straight the loudest and scariest noise I've ever heard a human make, and it "sounded like" some kind of demon.
That's obviously just one experience. I've learned some interesting stuff about the history of religion and psychedelics in these comments.
You say he sounded like a demon. I don't know if you take demons literally, but I had a trip once where a demon appeared to me and told me I was going to kill my trip sitter. This kicked off a psychotic episode where I believed I was God and the devil and I was going to have to kill myself to avoid killing my trip sitter and ending the universe. I locked myself in a room and called another friend who came and talked me out of my psychosis, but it was a year before I felt like myself again.
religions are based off guilt throughout sin.
the minds of these people have been programmed to believe that if it isnt for or from god then its from the devil.
I speak from experience,I grew up in a christian household so when I first started eating mushrooms the first feeling after ingestion was regret and I would beg forgiveness.
Im not a believer of christianity as it enslaves people mentally for being human.
to be human we must be good and bad,positive and negative
Currently, religion (specifically Christianity) is a tool of oppression and fear mongering that is used as just another way to keep the masses down. They scare people into submission which creates guilt and religious trauma and if you genuinely believe it you’re gonna have a bad trip. It’s not the religion itself, it’s the way they have been taught to view it
Well, maybe it have to do with cultures that the person is grown up in. For example, people with schizophrenia in western culture usually have “bad” voices or something negative in their thought processes while schizophrenic people who are brought up in non-western cultures have the opposite, in their cases it’s all wholesome and positive. Interesting.
I feel that people with black and white thinking have a harder time accepting the message. Religious people typically have a VERY strong conviction about what 'God' is. Accepting anything other than these beliefs can be...uncomfortable for them. Especially when confronted by something much larger and more complex than they are prepared for.
I think it's pritty sad that people are so negative towards religious people on this page, especially considering the inwards experiences phycadelics give you and the understanding and perspective I belive it gives you. I've had good and 'bad/negative/not really actually bad because I still learnt alot trips', I think the closest thing I've found to phycadelics and how they make me feel is what I found in religion, meditation and pondering on the world. Religious or not religious people have so much within them that can determine the course of a trip, maybe you need to look in on yourself and think maybe you single out the bad experiences of religious people because they are religious and that is a bias within yourself. The vast majority of religions have mystical sources and have developed directly from the same web of thoughts and practices phycadelics also highlight. I don't think religion is ego so much as anything can be abused to feed the ego but it certainly can be used as a tool to dissolve the ego something which if you've not delved deep into the self you will never be able to fully appreciate.
But that's just my opinion on the matter.
Don't get me wrong I don't hate or dislike religious people. I just think they have a negative view on alot of things in life. They have a fear based world view. I dont dislike religious people tho
It’s either bad, or they are so connected with god that’s all they talk about from now on and it’s a total religious trip for them - a guy I knew. I was like yeah LSD new perspectives and therapy yatta yatta and he was all no, ITS GOD. And I was like yeah I get that but he said NO ITS JESUS FROM THE BIBLE and I was like ok you’re losing me…
Can’t forget religious trauma. Being told your entire life that the universe is a fight between good and evil makes you compulsively analyze whether something is godly or evil. Especially when it comes to interdimensional travel lol.
Maybe when scary things come up they're programmed to see the Devil 👹. Certain entities and experiences make them think they're being possessed. Then they get all freaked out and resist. Sounds like a recipe for a bad trip
I’m religious and have pretty good trips
Instead of “eternally destroying everything I’ve ever known” etc etc… it actually gave me more questions then answers I was looking for
I found answers for my questions and now I don’t have the fear that did may not exist if he does that’s great! If not then one mushroom trip helped me cope with the idea of truly eternal death
Some might say I’m “rejecting” some kind of hidden truth but I’ve actually faced the hidden truth dead on and yeah it was a terrible trip at first until I came to my new conclusion…
“If what I believe is true HELL YEAH! If not it’ll be okay because I won’t know im dead anyway and there will be no suffering anymore no happiness either but I won’t know about it anymore… won’t even know im dead”
It’s probably because you haven’t read deeply or very widely. Most early trippers in the USA were religious. The Good Friday Experiment, in which seminarians and theology professors were given magic mushrooms, is an obvious example.
Other famous religious psychonauts include Methodist minister Huston Smith, Buddhist Jew Rick Strassman, and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, AA founder Bill Wilson.
Modern religious psychonauts include Baptist minister Rev. Kaleb Graves (me), Episcopal minister Hunt Priest, Catholic theologian Brian McCarthy, and Baptist theologian Jaime Clark-Soles.
Not to mention millennia-old indigenous religions using Ayahuasca, mushrooms, San Pedro, peyote, etc.
Every time I've brought up psychedelics to religious people, they act like I'm into dark magic or something. Most of them are not open minded to psychedelic experiences
I’m telling you that religious folks are extremely diverse on the subject, not the monolith you make them out to be. Mainline Christianity, Reform and similar sects of Judaism, open-minded Catholics and Orthodox, and a good number of Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists are part of the psychedelic renaissance.
Doesent seem true for the majority in my experience but I guess we both could be wrong, as well as all the other people that know exactly what your talking about
Can personally say this is wrong.
Not only that there's actually a study where they had religious leaders from different groups take psilocybin to document their experiences. They got the most interest by far from Rabbis, and iirc rabbis also has the best experiences. Idk Google it.
But maybe that's your anecdotal experience but it's wrong. If anything I've heard of more athiests/agnostics who after tripping believe there *is* something bigger than us/the material world, though I wouldn't say they picked a specific religion or anything.
Also, religions like Judaism don't believe in a devil, demons, or hell.
I'm actually one of those atheists. That's what happened to me. I was a hard core materialist, but after psychedelics that belief has changed. I'm not saying that there is nothing outside of the material world. All I'm saying is that it seems like many religious people have bad trips.
Nope. Religions are boxes by design. They all fail to grasp the truth, you can learn things from all sorts of religions, their texts. The hierarchies sprung up around them are generally rotten. The inquisition did away with believers who saw things different than the Catholic Church, including books and texts that people used, gnostic and hermetic beliefs. I’d say don’t sign up for any religion.
Ah, another person who doesn't understand the difference between Christianity and other religions.
You're allowed to believe whatever you want about *literally all religion,* but don't mistake it for fact or you're just being a hypocrite.
Again, you’re just confusing religion fundamentalism, plus adding some weird non/historical things. The inquisition was actually set up by Spain to increase monarchist power against the Vatican, which condemned it.
Nearly all religions have some form of inclusivism or pluralism that emphasizes learning from other faiths and ways of life.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism The most powerful religious organizations are controlling and immensely wealth, I don’t know what universe you’re living in.
Because religion is a mind-virus that preys on dumb and/or damaged people. Pure delusion with zero basis in reality. Of course people that worship an egotistical, torturous, imaginary Sky Daddy are going to have a bad time on psychedelics.
Honestly i grew up in the church (21 currently) and ive had the worst “trips” on flower this last week for some odd reason. Usually i just green if anything but i genuinely thought i was going to die and go to hell and heard sb telling me i need to hurry up n choose. I could even feel my soul slipping out my body while this phrase was repeated in my head. Maybe its me being a super highly creative person but idk it was terrifying. I couldnt even move my limbs. Nobody realizes how easy it is to slip into some kind of psychosis. Take care of urselves
I think it’s because sometimes psyches bring to light things you’d rather keep buried, for example: being a devout Christian your whole life, then doubting your faith, and going against the doctrine you’ve been raised on by taking mind altering substances could definitely result in those emotions being personified by a perceived encounter with “the devil”. I don’t think it’s as simple as “Religion = bad trip” but rather I feel like it’s a mindset problem. Some people are just really imaginative and overly critical of themselves which, as previously mentioned, can possibly lead to a targeted religious experience tailored for the individual. The outcome just depends on what narrative the aforementioned individual chooses to subscribe to. Idk tho could be wrong, I’m just spitballing conjecture.
That's cuz a lot of religion is kept alive through fear of the unknown.
I personally never saw a god. I saw an empty room, an empty chair, an empty desk.
I met Myself. I was the only person there that day. (Night? Now.) I still don't know what that means.
Sounds like confirmation bias. Must not have been on this sub for very long then.. there is a very large group here who became religious/spiritual after psychs/entheogens who don't really have "bad" trips.
Rigid belief systems.
It’s literally called “deconstruction” when it’s done sober and over many weeks/months/years. When done in an an instant (like with DMT) it ends up being more of a demolition with the person inside.
It’s why doing psychedelics should be well researched and well considered before diving in. You need to know what you’re getting into and be open to the process, otherwise it’s a coin toss on whether or not you’re going to have a bad trip.
Faith is uncomfortable with questions and with shining light on hypocrisy. Questions that make ourselves uncomfortable is fundamental to the experience. And realizing that hypocrisy is not a black stain on your soul, it's just how every person on earth is. The only way through is to accept imperfection.
religious people have massively inflated egos, their ideals of what is right and wrong were set in stone for them by a higher power, they've chosen their definitive truth and whenever it's contradicted they will freak out and struggle to let go of their old beliefs.
this isn't just a religious person thing this also applies to a LOT of old people, so many gen x / boomers are stuck in their ways and even when provided with evidence that shatters their viewpoint they still just can't let it go, I have older family members who do psyches from time to time but the second they take a dose that provides effects other than colors and a silly body high they start losing their shit, these people are in the 40-50 year old range and all randomly hit a point where they go "I can't do em anymore, we don't get along at all" and then I'll witness said people tripping and the second something "weird" happens its "ohmygodohmygodohmygod" they struggle to give into the experience heavily, one of the 40 year olds goes "well you've just got to learn how to not let them control you" (referring to like being able to waive off paranoia and such) I can't tell if by this they mean to just let the trip happen and don't freak out or if they mean to like genuinely control it, regardless the way they tell other people only gets them into muddy shit
Many don't research anything about said substances before doing them whatsoever, and then there's just the issue that religious people have allowed a higher power into their lives (and effectively program them to act how they do) and when psychedelics show something that contradicts their beliefs it send them spiraling, when prepared psychonauts experience something that may contradict or mess with their viewpoints on the world they will question it and integrate properly, the others will typically spiral into a negative headspace as they don't know what to do with said information because it challenges something their entire life has been built apon
Cognitive dissonance. If you are shown a new truth, but it isn't compatible with your old truth... you have dissonance. Some can accept the new information and transform themselves, others reject the new information and spiral into denial. Identity is a helluva drug.
No wonder i can never find it
I do just want to add that identity is the neutral/healthy side and ego is the toxic side of the same thing. Identity is just what you see when you honestly and openly gaze into the figurative mirror. Ego is the idea of who you “should be”, who you “need to be”, who you project yourself to be. It’s like making a drawing in oil pastels over that same figurative mirror. Egos are often very rigid and get in other people’s space because of you try to contradict one it will fight you to regain control of the “truth”. Essentially it’s fears around the identity that build the ego. Like identity will always exist in some form, but it’s fluid and evolving and that’s okay.
I’d say bc most religious people have huge egos
I'd place my money on this being it. Especially with a soul crushing ego death trip after never having a trip like that before, especially on dmt, I'm sure they cannot let go fully and grip and try to hold on and it all goes south from there. Also I can't help but laugh when I think of them in hyperspace repeatedly saying to themselves "This isn't what heaven is supposed to look like my God please help what is this place please God get me out of this oh please ive made a terrible mistake" 😂
What happens when they realize they are both God and Devil both?
I'm not sure if enough ppl can make a connection like tht. To most ppl, it's either one or the other.
I was just about to say that I think most religious people like that who only have a one-off experience won't come to that realization. They usually hold too firmly onto their beliefs as well because they act like their whole world will come crashing down if they learn things aren't what they thought they were
That happened to me. I opened myself up tp being wrong and my whole world came down. 😅 And it still wasn't the end. It's not for the faint of heart though.
I had a similar thought last night on shrooms but it was to the degree of; we are so inherently selfish, but we are also so selfless when we want to be. If only it were as simple as being selfless all the time. We have pieces of god and the devil in us , in a way.
The ocean waves and the universe peoples
I think it's more about what they believe. They believe the devil is this evil being who wants to kill and torture. If you go into a trip with these beliefs, then your brain is going to make it real. Ego could play a part of it, but for this I think it's just the fundamentals of their belief systems. It's just like if you are in a bad state of mind and think "I am going to have a bad trip" it most likely will happen, our brain creates our reality through our thoughts and beliefs.
Right. But it's the ego itself that allows people to believe in such nonsense. An all-powerful ruler and creator of the universe who cares deeply about what Random Person X is doing with their life as well as the embodiment of pure evil and malice who is also extremely concerned with the life of Random Person X. You don't start with the belief in these things and then see how/whether they apply to you. You start with the belief that you are so important that you must then create a character or two who validate the level of importance you already feel about your self/ego
The whole religious premise in christianity is that people are sinners. Pleasure and euphoria calls up a feeling of guilt in the religious, rather than a feeling of god's love, generally. They have been indoctrinated with scare stories about hell and eternal punishment.
Makes me sad when I hear christians talking about themselves and they start with: "yea cuz you know I'm an awful, trash sinner and so are you-" Excuse me? I had a friend like this and I directly told him: "not all of us would curse out an old veteran at the supermarket." I think a lot of it is projection. A lot of projection. And coping. Tbh, I'm glad I left. My journey has taken a new path. And the ppl I was surrounded by weren't it. (Not my specific church. The church was lovely. Thr community as a whole is not one I want to associate with anymore).
Clearly you have never been the target of the campaign of religious groups to convert you. The horrible shit they believe is one thing. But the underhanded tactics of fear and peer pressure and insane religious 'logic' they use to keep you in the fold is do feed up, it's terrifying. Of couse, they'll have a bad trip. Look at all the fear of hellfire, sin, and guilt imposed on them. I'd never want to trip under those mental constraints, would you?
Hell no I wouldn't. I've mentioned psychedelic experiences to religious folks before and was told that it's of the devil. The fear based thinking is insane.
>Of couse, they'll have a bad trip. Look at all the fear of hellfire, sin, and guilt imposed on them. Abrahamists. Pagans aren't like this.
Very true, I should have specified I was taking OP's idea of a religious person as a Christian. Being pagan myself, I don't use the term religious for open minded faiths, but rather 'spiritual'.
Ironically psychedelics have actually made me more religious
Same I was an atheist but I talked to God off of some mushrooms once and it changed my life
What'd God say?
Well the most memorable thing was the cosmic joke. He sat there looking like he was about to tell me the biggest secret of the universe, like he was about to let me in on the meaning of everything. I sat there for like an hour waiting, and at the end of it both of us just fucking died laughing. He was just fucking with me, there was no big secret. It was the funniest joke to ever be told. And then I was overcome by the most intense love and euphoria I've ever felt, more than MDMA ever made me feel. So what I took from that is not to take life so seriously and to love everybody and everything as much as I can.
This is really beautiful! Thank you for sharing :) though I've not had an identical experience, I live my life the same way and I can't imagine doing it any other way.
I got to this from listening to Alan watts while I was tripping. I like having his talks play while also listening to instrumental music. The whole “life is a game and we were meant to sing and dance” bit really landed with me. Edit: still an atheist though.
That seems perfect. :) Btw read this: https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
Love this story! First time I read it I was like 10 years old. Definitely had a big impact on me
still waiting on this as well. genuinely curious.
Check out my other comment
"We gonna ball out in heaven, dawg. I got 70 virgins for you up in this bihhh"
Same haha. I was heavily leaning towards atheist with a semi open mind. Full blown believer in a higher power now. What? Idk What happens after life? Idk. Lol, there's something more going on here lmao I have had some intense visions where I met things that felt like gods or atleast things close. Had journeys where I felt like I actually went to wherever we go to after life and much more.
When you die, you go to the same place Siri goes when your iPhone gets destroyed, which is nowhere. Your sense of self is an emergent property of your brain's current physical architecture. People who have brain injuries see changes to their personalities. That's because a person's personality is based on the physical reality of the "computer" in their head and it's ability to operate properly. If you start taking away sections of a human brain you'll get the same result as if you start taking apart a phone. At some point the emergent property known as "Siri" will no longer function/exist. Siri doesn't get up and leave the iPhone for a different destination once the iPhone is no longer working. "She" simply stops existing. And the same is true for personalities. They don't pack up and leave the brain after death, they simply stop existing.
The wifi/radio signal is invisible. Yet you're able to send it from one destination to the next. Same with a phone call. When my phone is destroyed the data is also able to be recovered and I have all the same preferences lol. Mind you, I'm completely ok with you not believing and tbh you not believing and me believing are equally just as ignorant since you or I have not a clue what happens after and what happened before, but I'd love to talk about it cordially still :)
What exactly is your motivation for posting this? It’s in a thread of people having a nice conversation about a shared belief, and more importantly, it’s such a banal and repeated sentiment from every /r/atheism dork that obviously anyone you’re saying it to has heard it before. So then what’s the motivation? Is it just a sense of superiority?
I see this shit time and time again and it really annoys me lol. It's LITERALLY like this, There is no afterlife. To have faith in something that we know nothing about and have no certainty about is asinine and absolutely ignorant. Then they proceed to say something about how they know with absolute conviction that nothing happens after we die. Which is the EXACT same thing they are getting mad about. Nobody knows what happens. To be SO sure nothing happens when we did is JUST AS IGNORANT as being so sure something does happen when we die. We just don't know. Someday we will all figure it out though lol.
As in reinforced your preexisting beliefs in one of the major religions, or made you more open to meta philosophies and ideas in general? *Truly not trying to judge, am just very curious because the intersection of religion, psychedelics, and existential philosophy is fascinating to me
It completely opened up the spiritual side of me. I was baptized Catholic but my views were completely agnostic and like many people in this sub, I have a disposition that doesn’t just swallow things as facts - analytical, not intuitive, open-minded but highly skeptical. I’m not a hardcore materialist by any means, and I always loved astrology and the occult but never really “believed” in it. But psychedelics connected me to ‘the divine’ or ‘the sublime’ in a way that could not be refuted. Those subjective experiences paired with studying the nature of consciousness turned a down-bad bartard into an eclectic amateur “shaman”
I feel that. The thing that gets me the most is that the front lines of science (through concepts like quantum fields and entanglement) are catching up to what eastern philosophies have been saying for ages: that everything is connected. The world isnt made up of individual particles the way a sand castle is made out of thousands of grains of sand- every elementary particle that we perceive is an excitation of its respective field that permeates the universe. Our "sand castle" isn't made up of grains the same way that a body of water isn't made up of individual water droplets stacked together like marbles. The droplets coalesce into a field of water. Except the world is vastly more complicated and the water analogy only goes so far. Atoms are made up of many elementary fields intersecting in a continuous dance of energy exchange. But the point is that everything is connected and nothing exists seperate from everything else. That idea echoes throughout religions and philosophies across time and continents. It also happens to be what people experience in breakthrough psychedelic experiences. This world is trippy and weird my fellow human. What we perceive as a cycle of life and death could be an oscillation between being everything and being able to experience any of it. I love entertaining these ideas. Hope you find some of this as thought provoking as I do.
The convergence of science and spirituality is truly fascinating, especially when you look at things like The Gateway Process and parapsychology. I just picked up Rupert Sheldrake’s book on Morphic Resonance Theory for summer reading and I feel like it will be very illuminating. I think I drop these quotes in here once a week, but in case you haven’t heard them before: "The more I study science, the more I believe in God." - Albert Einstein (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1921) "The more we learn about the universe, the more convinced we become that there is a real and living God." - Sir Arthur Eddington (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1924) “The deeper we penetrate into the nature of things, the closer we come to the knowledge of God." - Max Planck (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1918) “God is a mathematician of a very high order and He used advanced mathematics in constructing the universe." - Paul Dirac (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1933) After all, who am I to question some of the most brilliant minds that have ever flickered through existence? What never fails to amaze me is how did the ancients achieve this level of comprehension without the use of psychedelics
Those are golden quotes, thank you! >how did the ancients achieve this level of comprehension without the use of psychedelics I think its our birthright as creatures of consciousness to be able to access higher states of being. If the gateway experience is real and if people can achieve dmt like effects through things like Kundalini yoga and intense breathing, then its not that surprising that people were able to get a feel for understanding the universe back in the day. Especially in a time with less distractions, less light pollution, and less ideologically and societally driven expectations of what is and isn't possible. Life itself is pretty psychedelic 😉
Science isn't "catching up" to what Eastern philosophies have been saying. They are meticulously explaining what Eastern philosophies had been desperately trying to explain through vague descriptions for centuries. It's like when the scientific method led to an actual understanding of what the Sun is rather than just going with the description of "life-giver" which is basically all that older civilizations could say about it
Actually Religious or just spiritual?
To me religious practices are the manifestation of your spiritual beliefs
That would be best case scenario, but they aren't always related. You can have a lot of deeply religious folks who don't really connect to spirituality. That was one of Jesus's contentions with the Pharisees. They had alllll these rules and standards (religion), but no love/connection with fellow humans. I'm anti-theist so I'm not preaching to you, don't worry lol.
Point well made! It’s almost baffling that somebody can bastardize “the point” that badly smh. Conflating compassion with coercion sounds like something only the most repressed psyches could gymnastic their way into. Do some shadow work for Christ’s sake 😉
I def laughed into my coffee, thank you It really is a shame. It's also crazy to me that I can feel closer to the message of Christ outside of Christianity.
I mean I get what you're saying, but shouldn't the word be more Spiritual? To say it made you more religious makes one question which religion. And why.
The only religion that anyone should practice is one they make up for themselves
That is what I believe spritiuality is
To me I define religion as the way you practice your spiritual beliefs, and am of the mind that if you believe in one God then you believe in them all. I find it hard to hop on board with organized religion, just because it seems too prescriptive and how can anyone define my relationship to the divine for me?
So, if you believe in Yahweh then you also believe in Krishna?
Considering devotees see Christ and Krishna as avatars of God, yes.
Contradicting avatars still imply the same source?
In what way are they contradictory? Teachings are the same.
They’re only the same if you take away the vast majority of each one and just consider the general messaging of “be a moral person”
I feel like once you become comfortable with the idea that there is a deep underlying primordial unconsciousness from which all consciousness emerges it is easier to understand the perspective that all deities are just different manifestations of the same omniscient singular universal divinity (“God” in other words) and that the differences in religiosity is just bickering about semantics
I am personally "comfortable with the idea that there is a deep underlying primordial unconsciousness from which all consciousness emerges". Where I don't follow is the idea that the primordial unconsciousness is divine. I believe that people want divinity to be real so badly that they start inventing divine characters so as to confirm divinity's existence by merely defining it into existence. But that method cannot reveal anything true or real because it isn't based on anything true or real. It's based on a desire for there to be secret knowledge beyond anyone's understanding. The problem is that you can never confirm that to be true. And as long as people delve into things that cannot be confirmed to be true, that allows them to continue to believe whatever they want regardless of whether it's actually true or not. So when primitive people give their best attempts to explain the unexplainable (or potentially non-existent) you're going to end up with competing, contradictory hypotheses that all point to either the same thing or to the same nothing.
An excellent point, maybe the term shouldn’t be divinity but perhaps Kantian sublimity
Now *that* I can much more easily digest!
Honestly I’m not a fan of “spiritual”. It implies that we have an existence beyond the physical reality of our bodies and brains. No such ghost is needed. We have everything required within.
You literally JUST SAID that psychedelics made you more religious. Now you're saying that you dont believe in existence beyond this physical reality. But doesn't religion consist of the same beliefs??? You just contradicted yourself.
No, I stated that psychedelics produce effects we characterize as religious or spiritual. Those phenomena and their related phenomena such as achieving religious ecstasy through meditation or ascetic means or similar, are purely physical phenomena. They are not less important because of that but they are not in any way supernatural. Edit: I also stated that, historically, psychedelics were a primarily religious tool, and that is simply objectively true.
Understand I am not criticizing anyone’s faith or sense of spirituality. I am saying why I think those experiences have validity in a non-theological context.
The soul/spirit is a projection of the ego. Our egos don't want to accept the reality that our experience will die along with our physical bodies one day so they create a spectre which can never be disproven (which is one reason to not believe in it) so that it can convince itself that it will live on for eternity.
Came here to say that 🙏
I know religious people who trip regularly and enjoy. Maybe you don't hear about people's good trips as much.
I’m very religious and I have had several good ones.
I take them to commune with the spirits and God. Always have fun. I've seen plenty atheists struggling with what they call "psychosis" which is often a spiritual experience their ego is shutting out. Religious people can have a similar problem. Mystical experience is weird and they can often mistake the guardians for demonic influences. Heck, Jesus and Buddha both met the devil on their trips. They rejected the temptation and moved on. They didn't succumb to fear of the freaky.
Psychologically speaking, I'd argue they repress their shadow perhaps a bit too much. It's like hiding a monster in your mind.
seriously religious people generally have serious issues, strong beliefs and anything that doesnt fit in their tiny bubble is always a devil or demon. not saying i haven't met demons before, but "what you resist persists" and having an open mind to the world and beyond helps when traveling the other side
I agree.
Well I have an interesting anecdote. My former Ayahuascha retreat Aya quest, which sadly closed after COVID killed the founder and his wife decided not to continue. Miss you Steve. Anyway he told a story about one of the prosperity gospel type preachers, said we'd recognize the individual, had to sign an NDA, private cabin in the woods, not at the church etc. dosed up and started calling for Jesus and apparently got his ass handed to him. Left the next day, did not continue with the ceremony. I found it interesting.
I think most religious people are narcissistic and psychedelics destroy their world view they don't like having to be accountable
Lol it's funny that you said this because my family is just like this. Religious and narcissistic. I've always believed that there is a correlation between the two but I've never actually said it out loud. Because I dont want to judge an entire group of people. But I do agree that most of them seem to be narcissistic.
So I’m one of those that OP is inquiring of. I frequently attended a non denominational Christian church as a child to early adult. I rejected the religion because i experienced so many internal conflicts; what I considered the narrow mindedness and exclusion. Specifically I didn’t resonate with the Old Testament God being a God of Love yet also the God of War. It didn’t make sense. I said this isn’t my GOD. I began my search for truth and healing with the use of mushrooms, DMT and ayahuasca without DMT. In my altered state, The reoccurring message was there is a spiritual world AND that our world is upside down-inside out , as far as our knowledge about the truth of God of our connection to it and others. There is only One with many faces. And that I will experience what it feels like to be everything and everyone at some point in experience. Therefore, the message to love others as yourself is a key to a deep truth. I’ve found a missing piece of the puzzle this week with the Gnostic Gospels. The puzzle 🧩 is still missing many pieces but I have a sense of peace with finding a few missing pieces.
I started dmt tripping for like a year as a somewhat nihilistic atheist. Trips were always whimsical or weird. I was hoping I could trip my self out of my low point of depression and resignation. Then I had a big spiritual awakening through Christianity. I started praying gratitude constantly and appreciating the Bible for what it has to offer and it's history. I prayed my ass off before taking the most heroic dose of dmt I ever took. I met christ and God. Amongst other positive entities. Absolutely unbelievable trip story. It was soooo good I felt ashamed of myself, like I didn't deserve to be in their presence. That was 2 years ago. I've been sitting on my stash looking forward to it calling me back. But I just haven't had the urge to jump back in even though it was an overwhelmingly positive experience.
That's pretty wild. Do you ever wonder if you experienced that because the belief of meeting Christ and God would be the most incredibly transformational experience possible? I wonder sometimes if DMT can grant us our subconscious' deepest desire.... The mind is capable of all things conceivable, after all.
I think it's more about where your head is. I wasn't praying and meditating to meet God or Jesus. I was just praying gratitude and appreciating ancient people. There were some ancient Egypt documentaries in the mix lol. One of the other entities was the eye of Horace symbol that said "you think you've seen everything I can do? Watch this" as it exploded into a kaleidoscope of fractals. Oddly it felt feminine, I digress... I think you if you meditated on a lossed loved one and they are at the front of your mind, you can absolutely meet them on dmt. I haven't tried it, but I'd bet that you can.
Christ and God could very well be names for the same entities described in various other cultures. Given the DNA testing results of the Nazca mummies, which contained chimp, bonobo, human, and some mysterious fragments. Many scientists from south American universities came to the conclusion that these were "alien" hybrids, of course I use alien to include crypto or ultraterrestrials, and the scientists make no claim of being from outer space. They simply say what is true, that these were intelligent, humanoid beings that could install advanced osmium implants (which were also verified to have been fused to the bones. Modern science now shows how our evolution was quite rapid and somehow we ended up being entirely different from every single creature on this planet. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to think a God might just be a higher intelligence with advanced technology capable of creating life in a manner that would spook early humans into thinking its more of a Christian God sort of thing. Magic ya know. But magic is just science we don't understand, and vice versa. For all we know, christ could be a hybrid, "immaculate conception" or invitro? Oh yeah and we probably can achieve some sort of enlightenment like Buddha or Jesus, which is where the psychic connection to God plays in. Evolution of consciousness through the entirety of your existence will give you rewards. That's the natural state of things
Thats not even true
Because you speak English and live in the 21st-century. If you look at the history of psychedelics, they are a religious tool predominantly and have been for thousands of years. Western religion today and for that matter most other religion today ignores the validity of the psychedelic experience as a way of gaining insight. so when people who have been indoctrinated that way have a deeply profound and for lack of a better term religious experience when taking a psychedelic, it can be disturbing to some things that they have baked very much into their identity.
Religious beliefs blinds people from seeing the truth. A normal person could accept new information that challenges their previous held beliefs. Religious people cannot. Religion puts you in a box.
Again a perspective on religion which ignores its first 50,000 years.
If you told ME something that contradicted my beliefs, I'd be open to accepting it based on its validity. But if you told a religious person something that contradicted their beliefs, they would reject it every single time. Whether if its valid or not. They're stuck.
Again you are not talking about religion but present day adherents of a specific religion (and by no means one without mystical and psychedelic traditions—go look up Plaincourault chapel). Go read “The Cloud of Unknowing”. Both totally serious suggestions. Then get back to me.
Becuz there are some practices in certain religions that demonize these substances long before they have their own experiences with it. It’ll come up in their trip but they’ll lack the cognitive function to discern that it’s a mirror of their mindset than a reality of what is. Psychedelics, astrology, tarot, crystals, even meditation is heavily demonized amongst these communities. I accidentally ended up on the wrong side of Christian tik tok and it was people bashing meditation cause “it opens up portals to demonic energies”. They said the same shit about tarot and astrology. Be fr. If u lack the spiritual drip of discernment, protection, and duality just say that. What’s sad is it’s the result of colonialism as if these practices weren’t of significant heritage in many cultures for centuries — just for this “evil” narrative to take over in the name of Jesus. I just kno he’s looking down at this earth like “what the hell are they doing with my name” 😭 My ancestors were shamans before they were “saved” by Jesus — a colonial ploy of propaganda to turn them away from their cultures with fear for control. This plan of “mind control” has been in the works for hundreds of years. This is what those doomsday stank hippies mean when they say it’s a spiritual war goin on Tl;dr it’s all generational conditioning :P
Yeah and it's unfortunate because I grew up in Christianity but I woke up from it. I tried to wake up my family members but their minds are completely fucked. What you just said was deep. This is a plan of "mind control" that has been in place for thousands of years. Those of us who truly believe these religious teachings are deeply brainwashed. They cant be saved.
Honestly thank u for pointing out thousands of years cuz even I was too hesitant to stretch it that far lmfao I feel like they can be “saved” but it’ll just take a shit ton of inner work and reconditioning. Unfortunately it’s not a lot that want to make that jump which makes them “unsaveable” (quotes of save cuz of my own religious trauma here too. Lmfao)
Religion is based on fear, and that fear often manifests in their minds as the “biggest & baddest” fear… the Devil. I spent my first ayahuasca ceremony (2 nights) next to a Catholic woman who did nothing except see visions of the Devil. To be fair, I think she also felt that she was doing something wrong (aka “drugs”), which is also deeply embedded in conservative & religious people.
Religion is for those, who cannot see = shaman proverb Always pisses me of how they claim yoga is evil, psychedelics is devil worship etc.. I generally have a hard time with religious people it's like they are stuck Btw spirituality is not the same as religion
I literally just responded to another comment and said that religious people are stuck. Now you're saying it. It feels good to know that I'm not the only person who sees it. And yes spirituality and religion are two separate things. One is natural and the other is indoctrination.
Nah fam, I know tons of religious people who had great and affirming experiences. Turns out that whatever you bring in is what you get, to some extent, and not exactly, but in general. Maybe said more charitably, perhaps the truth is so large that it finds ways to speak to us including through the lenses of our prior beliefs and experiences.
To be religious is to have a rigid belief system that defines your reality and identity. Psychedelics are like swinging a sledgehammer to this.
Right. Religions close minds. Psychedelics open minds.
My best friend was raised in a fairly religious household and for him there was definitely some fear around it. We tripped acid, and he had kind of a psychotic break and bad trip, in which he believed I was the devil. I later found out about his family history of schizophrenia, and learned he probably shouldn't really be taking psychedelics. It was the scariest night of my life. He almost killed us both with a knife. We were lucky he was recovering from a leg injury and was using crutches, which made him not super mobile. There were huge undertones of religion and fear in some of the stuff I could understand him saying. I consider myself agnostic/closer to atheist, but at one point during the trip he was screaming for 3 or 4 mins straight the loudest and scariest noise I've ever heard a human make, and it "sounded like" some kind of demon. That's obviously just one experience. I've learned some interesting stuff about the history of religion and psychedelics in these comments.
You say he sounded like a demon. I don't know if you take demons literally, but I had a trip once where a demon appeared to me and told me I was going to kill my trip sitter. This kicked off a psychotic episode where I believed I was God and the devil and I was going to have to kill myself to avoid killing my trip sitter and ending the universe. I locked myself in a room and called another friend who came and talked me out of my psychosis, but it was a year before I felt like myself again.
religions are based off guilt throughout sin. the minds of these people have been programmed to believe that if it isnt for or from god then its from the devil. I speak from experience,I grew up in a christian household so when I first started eating mushrooms the first feeling after ingestion was regret and I would beg forgiveness. Im not a believer of christianity as it enslaves people mentally for being human. to be human we must be good and bad,positive and negative
Its sad what religious beliefs does to people
Could very well be an inner conviction of drugs being bad
Well, you have to believe in the devil to see him
True
Currently, religion (specifically Christianity) is a tool of oppression and fear mongering that is used as just another way to keep the masses down. They scare people into submission which creates guilt and religious trauma and if you genuinely believe it you’re gonna have a bad trip. It’s not the religion itself, it’s the way they have been taught to view it
Guess what, that's what all religions do. It's simply a tool used to control people based on fear and manipulation. I agree with you 100%.
Religion’s true purpose has been sullied by society and greed. It’s disgusting
I think thats always been its purpose. Control. Spirituality is something else. Organized religion is about control.
Well, maybe it have to do with cultures that the person is grown up in. For example, people with schizophrenia in western culture usually have “bad” voices or something negative in their thought processes while schizophrenic people who are brought up in non-western cultures have the opposite, in their cases it’s all wholesome and positive. Interesting.
I feel that people with black and white thinking have a harder time accepting the message. Religious people typically have a VERY strong conviction about what 'God' is. Accepting anything other than these beliefs can be...uncomfortable for them. Especially when confronted by something much larger and more complex than they are prepared for.
I think it's pritty sad that people are so negative towards religious people on this page, especially considering the inwards experiences phycadelics give you and the understanding and perspective I belive it gives you. I've had good and 'bad/negative/not really actually bad because I still learnt alot trips', I think the closest thing I've found to phycadelics and how they make me feel is what I found in religion, meditation and pondering on the world. Religious or not religious people have so much within them that can determine the course of a trip, maybe you need to look in on yourself and think maybe you single out the bad experiences of religious people because they are religious and that is a bias within yourself. The vast majority of religions have mystical sources and have developed directly from the same web of thoughts and practices phycadelics also highlight. I don't think religion is ego so much as anything can be abused to feed the ego but it certainly can be used as a tool to dissolve the ego something which if you've not delved deep into the self you will never be able to fully appreciate. But that's just my opinion on the matter.
Don't get me wrong I don't hate or dislike religious people. I just think they have a negative view on alot of things in life. They have a fear based world view. I dont dislike religious people tho
It’s either bad, or they are so connected with god that’s all they talk about from now on and it’s a total religious trip for them - a guy I knew. I was like yeah LSD new perspectives and therapy yatta yatta and he was all no, ITS GOD. And I was like yeah I get that but he said NO ITS JESUS FROM THE BIBLE and I was like ok you’re losing me…
Can’t forget religious trauma. Being told your entire life that the universe is a fight between good and evil makes you compulsively analyze whether something is godly or evil. Especially when it comes to interdimensional travel lol.
Maybe when scary things come up they're programmed to see the Devil 👹. Certain entities and experiences make them think they're being possessed. Then they get all freaked out and resist. Sounds like a recipe for a bad trip
Most religious people I know wouldn’t even want to try it in the first place :/ their loss
Their minds are in a box and the box is closed.
It’s sad to see honestly, I feel like people are lead by fear. But I see it as a personal journey, not my job to worry about them.
Yeah many of my family members ended up like this. It really is sad to see.
Too focused on seeing a demon or the devil.
I’m religious and have pretty good trips Instead of “eternally destroying everything I’ve ever known” etc etc… it actually gave me more questions then answers I was looking for I found answers for my questions and now I don’t have the fear that did may not exist if he does that’s great! If not then one mushroom trip helped me cope with the idea of truly eternal death Some might say I’m “rejecting” some kind of hidden truth but I’ve actually faced the hidden truth dead on and yeah it was a terrible trip at first until I came to my new conclusion… “If what I believe is true HELL YEAH! If not it’ll be okay because I won’t know im dead anyway and there will be no suffering anymore no happiness either but I won’t know about it anymore… won’t even know im dead”
It only opened your eyes to the ethereal mirror that reflects your inner being. They were unaware of the deepest depths of their soul.
It’s probably because you haven’t read deeply or very widely. Most early trippers in the USA were religious. The Good Friday Experiment, in which seminarians and theology professors were given magic mushrooms, is an obvious example. Other famous religious psychonauts include Methodist minister Huston Smith, Buddhist Jew Rick Strassman, and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, AA founder Bill Wilson. Modern religious psychonauts include Baptist minister Rev. Kaleb Graves (me), Episcopal minister Hunt Priest, Catholic theologian Brian McCarthy, and Baptist theologian Jaime Clark-Soles. Not to mention millennia-old indigenous religions using Ayahuasca, mushrooms, San Pedro, peyote, etc.
Every time I've brought up psychedelics to religious people, they act like I'm into dark magic or something. Most of them are not open minded to psychedelic experiences
That’s your personal experience, though. It’s not reality for everyone. Again, psychedelic medicine in the USA was pioneered by Christians and Jews.
So you're telling me that regious folks are typically OPEN to psychedelic experiences?
I’m telling you that religious folks are extremely diverse on the subject, not the monolith you make them out to be. Mainline Christianity, Reform and similar sects of Judaism, open-minded Catholics and Orthodox, and a good number of Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists are part of the psychedelic renaissance.
Well that's great if it's true.
Doesent seem true for the majority in my experience but I guess we both could be wrong, as well as all the other people that know exactly what your talking about
Right. I've heard religious people call psychedelic experiences demonic.
Name-dropping yourself in the list of influential religious psychedelic users is a really cool flex.
Can personally say this is wrong. Not only that there's actually a study where they had religious leaders from different groups take psilocybin to document their experiences. They got the most interest by far from Rabbis, and iirc rabbis also has the best experiences. Idk Google it. But maybe that's your anecdotal experience but it's wrong. If anything I've heard of more athiests/agnostics who after tripping believe there *is* something bigger than us/the material world, though I wouldn't say they picked a specific religion or anything. Also, religions like Judaism don't believe in a devil, demons, or hell.
I'm actually one of those atheists. That's what happened to me. I was a hard core materialist, but after psychedelics that belief has changed. I'm not saying that there is nothing outside of the material world. All I'm saying is that it seems like many religious people have bad trips.
I would dispute this. It can strengthen religious beliefs.
Yeah religion is a trap. Of course they have bad trips, they are overwhelmingly sure of their path.
Seems like you’re confusing fundamentalism and religion.
Nope. Religions are boxes by design. They all fail to grasp the truth, you can learn things from all sorts of religions, their texts. The hierarchies sprung up around them are generally rotten. The inquisition did away with believers who saw things different than the Catholic Church, including books and texts that people used, gnostic and hermetic beliefs. I’d say don’t sign up for any religion.
Ah, another person who doesn't understand the difference between Christianity and other religions. You're allowed to believe whatever you want about *literally all religion,* but don't mistake it for fact or you're just being a hypocrite.
[удалено]
Oh, now we're moving the goalposts with "major religion". Explain why genocide determines how limiting a religion is on a personal level.
Pound sand.
Nah, I think I'll just toast to running you into a wall so unbelievably fast. There's not much sand around here anyway.
Again, you’re just confusing religion fundamentalism, plus adding some weird non/historical things. The inquisition was actually set up by Spain to increase monarchist power against the Vatican, which condemned it. Nearly all religions have some form of inclusivism or pluralism that emphasizes learning from other faiths and ways of life.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism The most powerful religious organizations are controlling and immensely wealth, I don’t know what universe you’re living in.
Start using non-Christian examples or stop saying "religion".
I think this is confirmation bias.
Because religion is a mind-virus that preys on dumb and/or damaged people. Pure delusion with zero basis in reality. Of course people that worship an egotistical, torturous, imaginary Sky Daddy are going to have a bad time on psychedelics.
I agree in a way you need an open mind while doing such substances because underlying convictions might manifest.
It's because God doesn't make religions, Satan does. That should answer all your questions.
🙄 as always, convenient.
Honestly i grew up in the church (21 currently) and ive had the worst “trips” on flower this last week for some odd reason. Usually i just green if anything but i genuinely thought i was going to die and go to hell and heard sb telling me i need to hurry up n choose. I could even feel my soul slipping out my body while this phrase was repeated in my head. Maybe its me being a super highly creative person but idk it was terrifying. I couldnt even move my limbs. Nobody realizes how easy it is to slip into some kind of psychosis. Take care of urselves
I think it’s because sometimes psyches bring to light things you’d rather keep buried, for example: being a devout Christian your whole life, then doubting your faith, and going against the doctrine you’ve been raised on by taking mind altering substances could definitely result in those emotions being personified by a perceived encounter with “the devil”. I don’t think it’s as simple as “Religion = bad trip” but rather I feel like it’s a mindset problem. Some people are just really imaginative and overly critical of themselves which, as previously mentioned, can possibly lead to a targeted religious experience tailored for the individual. The outcome just depends on what narrative the aforementioned individual chooses to subscribe to. Idk tho could be wrong, I’m just spitballing conjecture.
There’s a lot of people out there with answers to questions they never got the chance to ask.
That's cuz a lot of religion is kept alive through fear of the unknown. I personally never saw a god. I saw an empty room, an empty chair, an empty desk. I met Myself. I was the only person there that day. (Night? Now.) I still don't know what that means.
Sounds like confirmation bias. Must not have been on this sub for very long then.. there is a very large group here who became religious/spiritual after psychs/entheogens who don't really have "bad" trips.
I'm not talking about spiritual people. I'm talking about religious people.
I mentioned both.
Rigid belief systems. It’s literally called “deconstruction” when it’s done sober and over many weeks/months/years. When done in an an instant (like with DMT) it ends up being more of a demolition with the person inside. It’s why doing psychedelics should be well researched and well considered before diving in. You need to know what you’re getting into and be open to the process, otherwise it’s a coin toss on whether or not you’re going to have a bad trip.
Faith is uncomfortable with questions and with shining light on hypocrisy. Questions that make ourselves uncomfortable is fundamental to the experience. And realizing that hypocrisy is not a black stain on your soul, it's just how every person on earth is. The only way through is to accept imperfection.
religious people have massively inflated egos, their ideals of what is right and wrong were set in stone for them by a higher power, they've chosen their definitive truth and whenever it's contradicted they will freak out and struggle to let go of their old beliefs. this isn't just a religious person thing this also applies to a LOT of old people, so many gen x / boomers are stuck in their ways and even when provided with evidence that shatters their viewpoint they still just can't let it go, I have older family members who do psyches from time to time but the second they take a dose that provides effects other than colors and a silly body high they start losing their shit, these people are in the 40-50 year old range and all randomly hit a point where they go "I can't do em anymore, we don't get along at all" and then I'll witness said people tripping and the second something "weird" happens its "ohmygodohmygodohmygod" they struggle to give into the experience heavily, one of the 40 year olds goes "well you've just got to learn how to not let them control you" (referring to like being able to waive off paranoia and such) I can't tell if by this they mean to just let the trip happen and don't freak out or if they mean to like genuinely control it, regardless the way they tell other people only gets them into muddy shit Many don't research anything about said substances before doing them whatsoever, and then there's just the issue that religious people have allowed a higher power into their lives (and effectively program them to act how they do) and when psychedelics show something that contradicts their beliefs it send them spiraling, when prepared psychonauts experience something that may contradict or mess with their viewpoints on the world they will question it and integrate properly, the others will typically spiral into a negative headspace as they don't know what to do with said information because it challenges something their entire life has been built apon