What’s the difference between the DMT peak experience and the psilocybin peak experience? On DMT (or ayahuasca) you forget yourself and become God. You are the One Consciousness sustaining the entire universe. On magic mushrooms (psilocybin) you don’t forget yourself but ascend to heaven and get as close to God as you can bear. God is experienced as an almost unbearable, alternately blissful and painful, source of infinite light and love.
On DMT you are God; on magic mushrooms you are the Son of God. DMT is Hinduism; psilocybin is Christianity. But if Bernardo Kastrup is right about the dissociative Cosmic Mind (our individual consciousness is just a dissociated aspect of universal consciousness) then which is closer to reality? DMT or mushrooms? If in reality all of reality is One Mind, then Hindu DMT is more real. But this unitive consciousness seems to be dissociated the other way: we remember the One but we forget the Many. If we grant ontological status to phenomena and the world of multiplicity, then Christian psilocybin is more real. As dissociated sparks of the One Mind, we can reconnect to the Source while maintaining our separate identities, like a child being reunited with a long-lost parent.
The relationship that is established on a breakthrough heroic dose of magic mushrooms is that between the Son of God and God the Father (to use the patriarchal Christian terms). This relationship affords the Son great power but also great pain and suffering, since he (or she) is simultaneously identical to and different from God. The unbroken thread between the world of the Many and the One is experienced as one of enormous energy and enormous tension, like a high voltage wire. On the one hand, the Son is God (“I and the Father are one” John 10:30) but on the other, the Father is infinitely greater than the Son (“the Father is greater than I” John 14:28).
This is why there is so much emphasis on suffering in Christianity and so little in Hinduism. When you are dissociated, you don’t feel pain (which is why we do it!) If you have completely transcended the world of multiplicity in perfect moksha, where is the pain? There is only One without a Second. Therefore there is no friction and no pain. Alternatively, if you have completely dissociated from God the other way, so that you are just a creature among creatures, your pain and suffering is limited to your relations with others, which is trivial compared to that arising from the friction between you and the immortal Source of all existence.
Buddhism is famously about the cessation of suffering; Christianity is about the harnessing of suffering. Self-realised yogis and enlightened Buddhists don’t suffer very much (and neither do materialist atheists). Christians do (especially psychedelic Christians). This is the price you pay if you follow the Way, the Truth and the Life of the Son of God.
“But Jesus answered and said, Ye know not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with? They say unto him, We are able.”
Matthew 20:22
the way of the holy mushroom 