Nondualism vs Dualism

[Alan V]

Actually, my specific experiences with lucid dreaming which led me to become a skeptic occurred when I was still a believer in a pantheistic God.  What I found out with a bit of experimentation within my lucid dreams was that my dream content was highly influenced by my expectations for that content.  Extrapolating that to "mystical visions" in general, which occur in similar altered states, you can't assume such visions are veridical of anything.  In other words, my experiences with lucid dreaming ended up completely undercutting my interest in mysticism.  When I read accounts from dreaming and consciousness science which made better sense of my experiences than mysticism did, I gave up mysticism.

My experience with ayahuasca has lead me to believe that there is a higher power out there and it is possible to learn from that high power however we choose to open our mind to it. There is some kind of living consciousness that is living in the soul of the ayahuasca plant, and it somehow speaks to the human soul in any way that the human is open to perceiving the message. But it can only be backed up by personal experience

My personal experiences showed that my personal experiences couldn't be relied on to be veridical. That being the case, it doesn't matter what you or I think we experienced. We need something else to back up our experiences, and in my case it was my reading of science. But I think you understood that. You are just evading the point.