I think as far as meeting them on their own terms, we have to keep in perspective that though they are hive minded, we are profoundly, NOT. As human beings our greatest potential lies in the individuation process, not absorption into a collective. The "we are all one" is just as likely to become "we aren't anybody"
at the risk of coming off thread, here's a passage from
Homo Serpiens that i am currently working on, tying together DNA, DMT, the Alien, and the "loss" of personal self (NOT the same as individuality!)
“I am convinced that for man to survive now, his perception must change at its social base. . . . Everything is energy. The whole universe is energy. The social base of our perception should be the physical certainty that energy is all there is. A mighty effort should be made to guide us to perceive energy as energy.”
—Carlos Castaneda, The Art of
Dreaming
Besides death or alien abduction, perhaps the most direct and immediate method for tapping into the secret archives of our DNA is via the ingestion of psychedelic substances such as LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, ibogaine, and peyote. In order to extend the present treatise beyond the realms of theoretical speculation, then, I will venture briefly into more personal (hence verifiable) experiences. In my own researches, probably the most powerful of the hallucinogenic aids to “transpersonal” or multidimensional consciousness is DMT, and to a lesser extent, salvia divinorum (as “extract,” up to ten times more powerful than in its natural form).
Since DMT is found in abundance within the human body itself (with an especially large reserve in the pineal gland or “third eye”), it has been speculated that it acts as a “vehicle” for accessing other-dimensional realms—kept in reserve, as it were, for times of need (e.g., the moment of death). In Etheogens and the Future of Religion, Rick Strassman asks the question: “Why do we all have DMT in our brains? Why is there a compound . . . that generates experience of ‘alien contact,’ death, space-travel, and other extraordinary effects? . . . [W]e have DMT in our brains because it works. It’s the best molecule for the function needed, to retune the perceiving abilities of the brain to different levels.”
If this is the case, then DMT functions as a primary survival mechanism, much as adrenalin assists us with our “fight or flight” program—the difference being that DMT relates not to the body’s but the soul’s survival. It is there to facilitate shamanic journeys, out of body experiences, and all manner of otherworldly “close encounters” with beings and realities otherwise inaccessible, even unimaginable, to us. Since these realities appear to be “hidden” in our DNA (and might even be called “memories”), the DMT compound within the human body may act as a conduit to the deeper reserves of DNA, in other words, as a sort of “decoding agent” to read the occult language of our secret lives.
In which case, the DMT experience is not a product of DMT itself, any more than consciousness is a product of the brain, or outer space the creation of a rocket ship. Rather, DMT allows us to access states of consciousness otherwise beyond our reach. It would be a huge (potentially fatal) mistake, then, to think of DMT as simply a “drug.” Since it opens doors to realms that already exist—both within us and around us—it may be best understood, in shamanic terms, as a vehicle for “spirits” to possess us and carry us into their “realm.” Certainly, once you have smoked the stuff, there can be little doubt that this is the case, nor can there be any argument about subjective vs. objective reality. Such questions as whether the brain (under the influence of the “drug”) is “creating” all this become academic, because the new model for reality is incalculably greater—both more all-encompassing and more real—than the old one. For the duration of the experience, at least, one simply knows.
For the rational mind, however, it is all but impossible to accept the idea that there is another world, a world that is hidden from this one and yet at the same time so much greater than it. From the point of view of the DMT experience, our everyday life becomes a shadowy reflection of this greater reality—perhaps even a side effect of it, and of the forces that dwell within it. At the same time, the two worlds seem to have almost nothing in common, so utterly unfamiliar is the strange new reality which DMT presents to us.
Undoubtedly the most powerful of my experiences of smoking DMT was a synthesized batch (rather than the natural resin) which I ingested under the guidance of a Mayan shaman, in a small lakeside village in Central America. Since I had had several prior experiences of DMT in resin form, I knew more or less what to expect. Nonetheless, I had agreed to smoke only with the utmost reluctance. To this day, I remain unable to remember large chunks of the experience.
The experience was like being struck by lightning—the DMT hit so fast it was almost as though I had been hit before smoking. I was actually still in the act of putting the pipe down on the table when the substance hit, and my last rational thought, as everything came unravelled, related to a fear of dropping the pipe. The thought wasn’t important, what counted was the feeling behind the thought, and this feeling mushroomed into a whirlwind of panic and despair in which I was hopelessly attempting to fit whatever was happening into a rational framework.
My senses were flooded by light and I was enveloped by whiteness. Superimposed upon the endless white I could see thinly sketched squares, “boxes” that appeared to represent my mind’s desperate attempt to grapple with the blinding new reality. The whiteness was perhaps the visual equivalent of internal silence—the void which the DMT had created within me; if so, the boxes signified the puny residue of rational thought, and since their only function was to distort the silence, they were intrusive, futile, and finally tormenting to me.
As my ego-mind wrestled with this overwhelming new consciousness, the whiteness gradually gave over to something difficult to remember or describe. I was dimly aware of being “on trial,” of being processed—of passing through some sort of ordeal in which I wrestled with my “conscience” while unknown Forces or Intelligences negotiated my passage. The thoughts and deeds of my life were being weighed, one by one, while I was forced to look upon them. All the baggage of my past, my personal self, was being mercilessly scrutinized by unknown intelligences. I felt a terrible burden holding me back, keeping me trapped, in despair. By the intercession of these “beings,” I was being compelled to cast it all away. The “trial” was less a matter of my being judged, however (much less punished), than of being slowly and painfully purged—unburdened—of personal history.
This cosmic purification process constituted the majority of my ten-minute DMT experience. It began with anguish and despair and ended with euphoria; in between was a steady progression from one state to the other, as the “trial” proceeded through a series of stages or levels. It might be simplest to describe this process (similar to a musical progression) as moving from negative to positive expression, from an unequivocal “No” to a final, all-affirming “Yes” by which I embraced (or remembered) my cosmic nature. The entire journey seemed, on returning, to be have lasted seconds—it was both an instant and an eternity.
I said that the progression was a musical one, and I experienced the various “levels” as much aurally as visually—as “harmonics” sounded within my consciousness. It was a symphony that began as a dirge and ended in rapture. The gods were playing pinball with my soul, using my ego-self as the ball. My consciousness was apparently being tuned to increasingly “wider” bandwidths of awareness, and these bandwidths extended outward, like threads of a giant web, until I was tuned into the full spectrum of consciousness: I became aware of everything. I was a pulsing sphere of energy that extended outward in every direction, to Infinity, and that embraced the totality of creation.
For several nights after this experience, I found myself entering instantly into the DMT experience each time I fell “asleep.” I experienced the equivalent to a nuclear whiteout inside my skull: a deafening explosion accompanied by blinding whiteness; total, explosive silence, cessation of thought, as the world stopped. These experiences continued day after day (not only in sleep), and I had no doubt I was undergoing a process of adaptation to new and “alien” energy fields. Was this untapped data in the DNA which the DMT had unleashed? Whatever it was, I was undergoing rapid (though not permanent) transition from third to fourth dimensional consciousness, and so far as I could tell, I was learning to measure the divide, to map it, for future reference.
For much of this time, I was on the edge of madness. The movement of the assemblage point is like dying, deranging in the most total sense. As the physicist F. David Peat put it, “the self lives on but as one aspect of the more subtle movement that involves the order of the whole of consciousness.” The personal identity relinquishes its reality, but not its being. It comes back intact, with full awareness that, having been destroyed and reformed, it has no independent existence at all. The self’s very lack of reality is what allows it to exist, and for existence itself to exist. For without this point of view, there is only the vast unfathomable emptiness of the Unmanifest, the implicate order.
After smoking DMT, most people will agree that it is inconceivable that any mere substance could be powerful enough to wipe out utterly all traces of personal or rational consciousness and replace it with a fourth dimensional awareness that entails, finally, all that exists (starting with all kinds of entities that, to the rational mind, never were at all). The DMT experience is like being turned inside out and finding out that this world is just a veneer, a reflecting surface that hides and obscures unimaginable depths beneath. To be hurled down the rabbit hole into a whole new world of visions, sensations, beings, ordeals and wonders, makes not only for the ultimate psychedelic experience but for the ultimate life experience. The challenge is to face this horrifying passage from third- to fourth-dimensional consciousness, overcome our fear of it, and grow accustomed to the transition. Only then can we become adepts at navigating Infinity.
