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Part I: A Psychonaut’s Guide to the Invisible Landscape: Joining the Hive Mind, Seeing Your Dreams, Crushing the Ego and… Meeting the Dead?

In A Psychonaut’s Guide to the Invisible Landscape: The Topography of the Psychedelic Experience, author Dan Carpenter makes many startling claims based on his experiences with the dissociative psychedelic DXM. (Yep, dextromethorphan – the stuff of cough syrup!)

He’s not simply having a subjective journey inside his mind; DXM actually takes him to an objective realm with other beings – some of which are the souls of recently departed friends and associates!

Yes – he’s talking about meeting the dead!

Along the way, he has out of body experiences, witnesses the seat of dreaming and memory, interacts with strange beings, lost souls, and other characters, and of course, has some seriously ego-crushing experiences, forever messing with the idea of the “I”.

Dan writes that DXM takes him to the Hive Mind.

What is this place? Who is there? What’s going on in here?

Dan likens the term Hive Mind to Terrence McKenna’s idea of the OverMind, which is a living Super Mind created through pooling the consciousness of the dead into one group mind. (I find it interesting that he does not see the Hive Mind as an omnipotent God, stating that although it is self-aware, it has problems, learns, grows and changes.)

Once inside, he met with a friend who had recently died. He also saw a friends father who had died in “real life” – yet this fact was unknown to Dan while he was tripping. He sees this as proof to the idea that he is visiting the same realm of the dead.

Within the Hive Mind, he also met Buddhist Monks, who he believes were dead or possibly alive and meditating (!!), and Native Americans. He met people who seemed confused, trapped, unable to move or grown on – hinting at the idea of purgatory.

And he also met the infamous “elves” that also pop up in other psychedelic literature.

….

It’s a bit hard to pin down the more abstract run-ins he had in the hive mind, but Dan describes an amazing encounters with dreams, or, a he describes it, the seat of dreaming.

After seeing what he calls The Dream Chamber, Dan recorded the following into a tape recorder:

“I’m flying over a scene that looks like an elaborate model train set. Amazing… what it is is a dream landscape. It’s a three-dimensional scene of every dream I’ve ever had. I can at this point remember/see every dream I’ve ever had. Now I’m drifting down into it. People, animals, archetypes, childhood monsters…they’re all here! And this is not a memory, but a place! Everything still happening – alive – a living hologram.”

Reflecting on this, he later writes: “It seems I was looking at a sentient world of thought – my thoughts! – being the dreams “thought up” by me over a lifetime. I must emphasize: everything in this place was ALIVE still…moving, happening.” What would it mean if our dreams actually existed in some place? And more than that, they permanently existed, living in three dimensions and existing forever?

The only way I could take in something like this would be with the perspective of parallel universes and a holographic universe.

And even then, the idea is baffling and far out.

…..

Psychedelics are known for the ego-crushing properties, and Dan’s experiences with DXM are no exception. He discusses this at various points in the book, trip by trip, stating such things as:

“Initially, my personality was revealed to be not an “I” but an orchestra of “I’s” working in unison to create a sense of one “I.”

I find this interesting because, from what I understand, this notion of multiple selves working together to create the illusion of a single “I” is understood to be true by mainstream neuroscientists and others who study consciousness.

His descriptions of the self get creepy, reminding me of what others write about DMT, when he says things like:“The psychedelic had held a door open into one “me,” allowing another “me” to see in…and “I” was a squirming electric flesh-chemical ant colony.”

And later, almost reassuringly, he writes about what part of him moves on after death, saying that witnessing “these tiny knowing bits of me, by deduction, the “I” in the Anti-Ego state doing the watching, must be incomplete.” Therefore, he concludes that the state he is currently in feels stripped down “because it is existing as a partial self.” This essence, the part that’s left over after everything else is stripped down…”must be the “real” me – the me that crosses into death.”

This brings up the questions I wrote about in this post on reincarnation and what it is that actually carries on after death. Unfortunately, it doesn’t answer them.

……

Continue to Part 2
Continue to Part 3

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