by theadvancedapes

I've been doing some research on Ayuhuasca spiritual practices, as well as reading about personal testimonies to the general experiences had while using the drug (and other drugs with the DMT compound). If anyone here has taken this drug, can you describe the experience?

UPDATED:

From anthropologist Thomas Roberts book review of "The Antipodes of Mind":

Shannon identifies 11 structural parameters of consciousness and some of the unusual values they can take:

- Agenthood — experiencing thoughts as not being one's own

• Personal identity — personal identification with whatever one is looking at, a sense of unity with the other

• Unity — being oneself at the same time being someone or something else

• Boundaries — erasing the boundary between inner and outer reality

• Individuation — self transcendence but with consciousness still maintained

• Calibration—change in perceptions of one's size, weight, posture, etc.

• Locus of consciousness —consciousness located outside one's physical body

• Time—variations in time, including itsspeed or even feelings of eternity

• Self-consciousness—a "residue"of the normal self after other facets of consciousness are completely altered

• Intentionality — no object to which thought is being directed and no content entertained by the mind, often leading to a sense o f t h e Void" or"pure consciousness."

• Connectedness, Knowledge, and the Conferral of Reality — a noetic feeling that one is privy to true knowledge.

Interesting notes from William Benzon in his review of Antipodes:

This is the kind of question that drove Des-cartes: How can you tell that the scene before you is real, rather than being a phantasm placed in your mind by a malignant being? The prob-lem is that there is nothing in the visual field that serves as a reality indicator. You cannot, for example, look to the lower left visual field and see flashing lights indicating reality status: one light indicating real perception, two lights indicating a dream, or three lights indicating a hallucination. Perception is not like that. One just knows that things are real, immediately and surely – and sometimes wrongly as well. Simi-larly, the ayahuasca voyager knows that the world of her visions is real, immediately and surely. Thus the sense of reality would seem to be an elementary sensation rather than the out-come of a sophisticated inferential process. Of what could such a sensation possibly consist?

And from Gregory Nixon's review:

ʻAyahuasca leads people to the conclusion that the world contains both good and evil, that the two are intertwined, and that the ultimate reality is beyond good and evilʼ, but that, ʻFinally, there are visions in which one feels one is encountering the Supreme Goodʼ (p. 174). I realize Iʼm probably not getting the mystical paradox here, but elsewhere itʼs said that Ayahuasca has a cosmic sense of humor (not always benign), that it lies or hides as much as it reveals. Is the Supreme Light without shadow, or what?