Entheogens, NDE's, and the Ripple in Still Water-The Case for the SOUL (Part 2)

For Part 2 of this little essay series, I will delve into something both controversial and personal.
In seeking to examine consciousness itself, it becomes apparent that we either need to step away from it, or further into it. While there are a myriad of avenues to achieving this, such as meditation, sex, or even dreaming, the most notorious and intense is the psychedelic, or entheogenic, experience.
Through the use of entheogenic substances, human beings have long explored the boundaries of thought, feeling, and perception. It is no coincidence then, that many first come to witness the “being within the body” for the first time during such an experience.
Even more shocking to the participant is often the presence of other beings within these experiences. To an outside observer, the participant is seated or laying down, having some sort of inner experience with their consciousness centered within, or stemming from, their own brain. Yet, to the participant, this is far from the reality they are immersed in. There are websites dedicated to collecting the experiences of people who have embarked on these voyages, and their experiences do not differ so wildly as to echo their individual personalities. In fact, what is so surprising, is that most people encounter things, places, and beings they could not, or would not (based on taste) imagine in their wildest waking moments of creativity. These experiences present outside the language of the human subconscious, which is at least roughly familiar to us through dreams and meditation.
This essay could go on for many pages detailing the many experiences and visions encountered by the collective humanity. One thing is for certain: there are reliable similarities between one participant’s experience and another’s.
Following ingestion of Dimethyltryptamine, a specific entheogen known as DMT, there is a sense of completely leaving one’s body and finally seeing everything as it is. In the beginning of the experience, the participant hears a sound reminiscent of an extremely high-powered engine, much like a space rocket or jet. While this might sound humorous, there is actually a moment of sheer terror, in which nearly all participants will remark that they believed they were having a heart attack and had met certain death.
What follows that, is usually a series of places, appearing erratically without any apparent movement from one to the other. One such place is the commonly cited “room of gears.” Another such place is a very long river. Finally, if the participant had ingested a large enough dose, he or she meets “the beings.” Oddly enough, there seems to be a variety of races of beings described, but within each race there is a great deal of continuity and consistency between reports. There are beings which resemble very large praying mantis’. There are beings which appear to be elves. There are also dreadful creatures who do unimaginably horrible things to the participant. Yet, equally as common, are experiences in which the participant is bathed in healing and love.
What is so striking is how similar these reports are to near death experiences.
In near death experiences, we have just as many reports of leaving the body, yet retaining some sense of “self” as separate from the whole; either good and benevolent beings, or malicious and terrifying beings.
Now the question, at this point, should not be whether the brain itself can generate such an experience. It certainly could, and it could be that the brain on DMT is biochemically similar to the brain at death. It is also known that our brain may actually produce its own DMT at the time of death, making this a highly likely connection.
Is the experience merely a fallacy of perception? Or is it a glimpse of what is beyond our bodies and material reality, while still anchored to our brains and able to retain memory of it?
Supporting the latter, there have been numerous cases of patients medically dying on the operating table, only to experience themselves ascend above their bodies, seeing the doctors and nurses working to revive them. Upon successful revival, the patients are able to describe odd details that took place after their death- details they would be unable to physically see anyway because their eyes were firmly shut.

I have often heard it said that, “believing there is nothing left when we die forces us to cherish life.” Ironically, however, it is a common theme among NDE survivors and those who have had a powerful entheogenic experience that they return to their lives with a newfound valor and a deep, often life-changing, sense of meaning. Indeed, it is the presence of the afterlife which brings even the most mundane action under the gaze of our own post-mortem eye.
Imagine for a moment, that all is nothing-all is naught. There is no existence and there is no life. At the very moment of the Big Bang, the Grand Expansion, the “beginning,” therein was the inertia of some form of Will.

“Ripple in still water
When there is no pebble tossed
Nor wind to blow.”
-Ripple, Grateful Dead

It is relatively easy to imagine that we, too, were precluded by the same Will, and that this Will exists beyond the material plane as we know it, as a necessary pre-condition for the formation of space, time, planets, stars, and life itself.