Clearly the power of what different parts of our brain are tasked to do are normally just about as extremely understated as the transcendental explanations can seem overstated. Or vice versa if you are a believer with opposite convictions. It's up for everyone to decide for themselves what they believe in, of course, but whatever the truth turns out to be this shit is complicated.
My view is this one: a lot of these things are demystified - I think there are neurological explanations for a lot of very strange phenomena that involve hallucinations (think hypnogogic / hypnopompic, etc) with wide ranges of content, content that indeed includes elements also seen in DMT trips, just combined differently. If DMT is so powerful that it unites a lot of different kinds of hallucinations, it can still be explained, the leap to make is just bigger. But the fact that if we try hard a lot can still be pieced together should hold our attention, not the parts we cannot piece together yet. It is a similar discussion with evolution vs. intelligent design in that some people seem to be drawn more strongly towards skepticism that encourages to find the truth despite the missing parts, not fold under the pressure of uncertainty to go to the more emotionally satisfying argument that overthrows our thinking on grounds of such esthaethics and the ethereal ghost of sensibility.
I think that it is just because of brain coherence: the parts communicating together forming a complex circuit with output just seem staggeringly bigger in number with DMT - so indeed there is your unity. The self transforming (to me mostly natively shapeless) elves may have their origin in our childhood where we may have deeply associated playfulness with the kind of creative operations the elves seem 'tasked with'. And while bliss, rapture and ecstacy (yes I have witnessed these with e.g. I.M. 5-MeO-DMT) feel to be of spiritual nature, I don't think trying to explain it would even be *that* difficult - intense pleasure combined with very deep meditative calming of all the rest should be sufficient to achieve it. Again, I don't want to devalue it's transformative beauty by saying it can be explained - but thinking that something worth worshipping is betrayed by explanation is orthodox ideation, which seems like the real sin!
To depart from jaia's kind words: yes I think it takes more courage to demystify DMT despite everything it has going for itself, than to allow yourself to believe the illusion. It may take more work to find scientifically backed explanations, but in the end those are much more consistent with everything we know - even if believing is more consistent with everything we think. Don't pretend that you have Occam's razor on your side.
I think the number of entity contacts that can be somehow linked to our own emotional / subconscious state are vast, and this compells me to think those we cannot link or explain are as well. What the mind does is project in the first place, so if complex mentalities are projected onto entities, no wonder this can be convicing. And the entities are inherently wired / defined to be experienced as not-ourselves! That is the whole point.
Just like I remember that experiencing a god-like presence has both been triggered by electrically stimulating a certain lobe as well as been explained with evolutionary reasons (it has value to 'imagine' a divine operator behind something like fruit falling from a tree just so that you don't experience it as coincidental and inconsequential - there was a better way to formulate the explanation though..), I think that there are many circuits we have gained over time that are normally wired together beautifully and in such a way that it is hard to take a step back and see what is actually going on with it, we don't know better and we are convinced that we are seeing the world even, rather than the movie we generate by receiving input from it....
It is so awesome that when something like DMT comes along that rewires it's activity profoundly, yet apparently still enables or induces our ability to integrate it into experience that feels not lucid but superlucid (I'd say there is the real magic), we don't even tend to believe that our brain is misleading us.
But honestly, we rarely do.
!
