I’ve seen a lot of stuff popping up about DMT experiences, whether it’s from near death experiences or taking the drug itself. A lot of people come back from these experiences convinced that what they saw was “real.” A lot of people say they encountered “intelligent beings” and many people come back from the experience believing in some sort of higher power. The issue here is that many of the experiences do not correspond to what scripture says. Whether the experiences are real or not is probably something we can never know for sure. However, if they are real, how can a Christian make an argument against them? I’ve heard a couple people claiming that it’s possibly demonic influence. It could be true, but what confuses me about these experiences is that some people claim that the place they went to in the experience seemed “very familiar.” How can this be explained. I know people can have deja vu, but usually it’s from seeing something in a movie or something. What explanations could there be for these experiences?
It’s hard to say. The human brain is complicated. I don’t doubt that whatever people experience during things like this seem “real” to them. But it’s just one person’s experience against another’s – I don’t know that there’s much of an argument to be made either way, kind of like dreams. It’s also possible that NDEs and other experiences can be an avenue for God to speak to someone (and for them to listen in a way they hadn’t before), but it’s such a personal thing that it’s hard to know the source. Are there any in particular that you are puzzling over?
It would be incredibly difficult to arrive at any explanations with full confidence, as you’d have to first control for other factors. I believe there is a strong argument to be made that many people’s consciousnesses are already adulterated to varying degrees even without the use of psychedelics or other mind altering substances.
I’ve seen a lot of youtube channels with people describing NDE experiences and a lot seem different to what the Bible says. A big notable one is Eben Alexander’s experience in the book Proof of Heaven. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lapfn1TeMZw)
I’ve also seen some podcasts on the Joe Rogan Experience talking about DMT trips and the experiences are vastly different as well.
I mean we can say we can’t know for sure but it’s like saying no one here knows for sure or not if I can levitate or not. In my opinion…… there is zero evidence to support someone doing drugs and finding a back door into heaven or dying and seeing God and then being brought back. So when I hear those stories, I don’t care. I hear it. I enjoy the tale. I don’t care if they believe it themselves or are just lying.
Something that occurs to me every time that I hear about questionable experiences that involves OBEs or NDTs is this:
…even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.
2 Corinthians 11:14
That’s not to say all are illegitimate – a young man a church died several years ago, and his brother had a remarkable and comforting dream that I’m tempted to call a vision about true events and circumstances of which he could have had no knowledge.
I had a talk with an Uber driver on a longish drive about this. We just briefly touched on the subject as we mostly talked about our families. But the subject came up initially as it was on a podcast with some popular comedian she was listening to. Not Joe Rogan. Someone else. One thing which I shared with her which seemed to make an impression, is that the brain is incredibly complicated and as any good fiction writer knows, there are times when the characters in the story take on a life of their own.
I was also able to share with her a recent story of a co-instant @Dale with a group of ducks slowly crossing the road in front of me on a hectic day. That put a smile on her face as I got out of the car.
That’s an interesting title… looks like even some reviewers of the book take issue with the word “proof” in the title, saying that goes beyond what one person can show.
Even in the Bible, there is a lot of mystery about what happens after death. It’s not all cut and dried. I wonder what would happen if everyone around the world suddenly experienced God in a vision. Would it all be exactly the same for everyone, like a math problem, or would there be variations based on personalities, prior experiences, culture, awareness, etc.? It’s just really hard to know what people have actually experienced in their own minds.
I always wondered why “there’s no such thing as demonic possession anymore”.
Is the devil afraid to spill the supernatural beans in our secular/atheist society? That’s what I thought when all I knew about drugs was what I’d read.
But then after learning more about people’s personal lived experiences with drugs I’ve come to believe he’s been hiding it in pain sight.
It is truly chilling. Our secular philosophy of the age will deny the supernatural in anything as long as there is an “natural explanation”.
That’s not to say that everyone who takes drugs is immediately under demonic influence, it is more subtle and there is a spiritual dimension we don’t see.
One person takes something and seems fine. Another becomes “lost”. Some are fine for a while and then succumb. No one knows why.
Well that’s not true. We know there are “chemicals” and “brain chemistry” involved, so of course it couldn’t possibly be demonic… how silly. We know better than that these days.
…
Some of you may remember I believe essentially Berkeley’s immaterialism.
When you cut down the sacred pole of Materialism and burn the Idol of Plato in the high places of your mind, you may suddenly realize that the spiritual forces of Evil, far from being constrained and limited by science, can use our unquestioning belief in “physical explanations” to deceive “even the elect”.
But we were warned “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”
Not Flesh and blood. Not Brain Chemistry. We don’t even know what we don’t know.
Jesus is our only hope in this battle.
- My problem is that your OP lacks Je ne sais pas … maybe Focus?
- Like the flight of a bumble bee, butterfly, humming bird, or dragonfly in a flowery garden, the flight path of any of them appears to start “here”, jumps to “there”, and then flies across the field to another flower or butterfly…
- DMT, I read, is an acronym:
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This makes answering your first question easy, if it was your first question: “How can a Christian make an argument against it?”
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Simply this way:
Taking hallucinogenic drugs to unite with God is cheating, and cheaters never prosper.
- Don’t take drugs that are not prescribed by a bona fide, government-approved physician.
- You’re more likely, if you do, to have a permanent out-of-body experience and see Jesus face-to-face prematurely,
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Regarding OBEs:
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IMO, there are three kinds:
- Those you have when you take non-medically prescribed drugs;
- Those you have when you die permanently;
- And those you have when you have an NDE (near-death experience).
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To avoid the first, don’t consume non-medically prescribed drugs.
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To avoid the second, don’t play on freeways,
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The third kind are, most commonly, IMO, unavoidable and, as a rule: involuntary.
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I think that narrows your concerns considerably.
If C.S. Lewis had any insight in ‘The Screwtape Letters’, the adversary is fine with Western culture not believing in the supernatural.
I’ll go with the C. S. Lewis proposal that in such experiences we are getting glimpses of our actual intended home, and since we were made for it it rings a bell as familiar.
When one of my grandfathers died it wasn’t just my mom who reported that he showed up with something to say; several aunts reported the same thing – and they agreed on what he had to tell them despite there having been no reason to even make a reasonable guess as to the content of such a visitation. My mom said he also told her “something I needed to know” that only her dad could possibly have known about (though she never shared what that was).
I’ll go with variations for this reason: once at a conference held at a Lutheran church in Oregon, during a time of prayer someone started speaking in tongues, and I started getting words in my head. When the pastor calmly stood and asked for an interpretation, I was puzzled, even confused: were those words an interpretation? But before I could sift through my puzzlement someone else stood and spoke in English with essentially the very same message I’d “heard”, so when the pastor asked for a confirmation I stuck my hand up along with some other people. Talking later it turned out that we all had different wording that varied depending on our vocabulary, life experience, and other matters.
It still kind of freaks me out.
A grad school friend worked at a mental hospital for a while where the head doctor was a declared atheist, yet that friend told us that the head doctor was convinced that a small number of cases at the hospital could only be explained by demon possession (I forget the reasons why). The doctor still didn’t believe in God, but he definitely believed that there were malevolent ‘spiritual’ entities in the world that could take over people’s minds and even bodies.
I’ve been told a number of times that I should try micro-doses of ayahuasca; I’ve avoided it not because I think there’s any invitation to demons involved but because the advice I can find about it says only to do it accompanied by two or three friends you really trust . . . and at this point in my life there aren’t enough to fit that admonition.
This is frustrating since according to many, many pages of reading it seems that I could definitely benefit.
- Best move: don’t consume non-medically prescribed drugs. Second best move: always have “a designated sober companion” that you can trust nearby.
- Flying higher than a kite under the influence of a popular drug in 1971, in New Delhi India, I gave all my belongings except my passport and my rupees to a friend in a youth hostel, and took a taxi to the train station to catch a train to Benares, believing that God wanted me to bathe in the Ganges and become a homeless ascetic. Fortunately, I missed that day’s train and returned to the youth hostel to catch the next day’s train. That afternoon, the drug wore off, I sobered up, and my friend gave me my belongings back, proving that our God can and does bale fools out of self-damaging choices.
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