The study involved surveying over 2,000 DMT users, the majority of whom claimed to have had positive encounters and even emotional exchanges with beings they felt were advanced and benevolent. Most of the users, upon coming down from the drug, felt the beings were real and not manufactured solely by a hallucination.
The survey produced the following additional data: 99% had an emotional response and of those, 58% believed the entity they encountered also had an emotional response and the feeling was overwhelmingly positive, though some reported instances of fear; 81% of respondents felt the 'entities' were real; and two-thirds believed they had received "a message, task, mission, purpose, or insight from the entity encounter experience."
Comment: Perhaps the worst consequence of the New Age movement has been the uncritical, blind trust in one's emotional reactions. Heroin makes you feel good; that doesn't mean it is good for you. A psychopath can make you feel like a prince or princess; that doesn't mean they have your best interests at heart - just the opposite.
The study adds more anecdotal corroboration that the DMT psychedelic experience is unique from other drugs.
First discovered as a psychoactive agent by Hungarian psychopharmacologist Stephen Szara in the 1950s, DMT is a psychedelic compound of the tryptamine family. It's the only psychedelic that is found both in nature and produced naturally by the human body. Because its chemical structure strongly resemble neurotransmitters, particularly serotonin, some refer to it as 'nature's serotonin.'
As an endogenous chemical, produced naturally by the human body, it has also been referred to as the "brain's own psychedelic."
In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Rick Strassman conducted some of the first human DMT trials and was shocked by a trend he saw. There was a significant prevalence of patients who described their DMT experience some sort of contact or communication with interdimensional entities.
The patients strongly believed they had entered some kind of realm where intelligent "beings", "entities", "aliens", "guides", or "helpers" were working. Though they appeared differently for different people - sometimes as reptiles, spiders, geometric shapes, stick figures, etc. The common thread for most of the patients was that DMT did not produce a hallucination but rather acted as a kind of biological portal to a different dimension or level of reality that we normally can't see.
These entities appeared in different ways for different people, but most often as "clowns, reptiles, mantises, bees, spiders, cacti, and stick figures."
Legendary ethnobotanist and writer Terrence McKenna, who experimented with many different psychedelics, became a major advocate of DMT. Between 1967 to 1994, McKenna smoked DMT 30 to 40 times.
In an interview in The Archaic Revival (1992) Mckenna said:
"It was really the DMT that empowered my commitment to the psychedelic experience. DMT was so much more powerful, so much more alien, raising all kinds of issues about what is reality, what is language, what is the self, what is three-dimensional space and time, all the questions I became involved with over the next twenty years or so."He describes the DMT experience as a hyperdimensional reality that can not be described or "downloaded" by human language, "a fundamentally different order than any other experience this side of the yawning grave."
"What arrests my attention is the fact that this space is inhabited — that the immediate impression as you break into it is there's a cheer. [...] You break into this space and are immediately swarmed by squeaking, self-transforming elf-machines...made of light and grammar and sound that come chirping and squealing and tumbling toward you. And they say, "Hooray! Welcome! You're here!" And in my case, "You send so many and you come so rarely!"
Comment: Another consequence: uncritical people like McKenna, without the knowledge to know what they are experiencing, get sold the Brooklyn Bridge over and over and over...
McKenna, a famously eccentric though revered social philosopher, was fully convinced DMT established a portal between humans and one or more of the following: extraterrestrials, entities in a parallel dimension, dead humans, or humans from the future.
A surprising number of other scientists and medical professionals have agreed with this. Though he did not form a definitive conclusion, Rick Strassman, who later went on to write the popular book DMT: The Spirit Molecule (which inspired the popular eponymous documentary), studied the release of DMT in the brain at the moment of death and during dreams. Ultimately, his research left him confused and overwhelmed.
Dovetailing with his research into Zen Buddhism, he stated:
"I worked through various models' methods of understanding the DMT volunteers' experiences, and found them wanting. The Buddhist psychological model didn't comport with the data - the "more real than real" element of volunteers' experiences (Buddhism proposes these phenomena are all generated by the mind, rather than "real" observations of external reality); [this] did nothing to suggest a satisfactory evolutionary explanation for the presence of DMT in the human body."Pharmacologist and medicinal chemist Dr. David Nichols said he could not discount the possibility that DMT really does grant some kind of extra-dimensional contact.
"There are probably conscious, sentient beings that don't look like life as we recognize it," Strassman said in an interview, "that maybe exist at some level of existence that we don't have any awareness of. The universe is 95% dark matter/dark energy; we don't even understand what gravity is. So the possibility that there are intelligences that exist at some other wavelength or in some other dimension or some other frequency I don't think is out of the realm of possibility at all."
Of course not everyone believes these hallucinations are anything more than powerful archetypes.
In 2004, author James Kent, who wrote Psychedelic Information Theory — Shamanism in the Age of Reason, wrote that "humans across all cultures have alien and heavenly archetypes embedded in their subconscious, and psychedelic tryptamines can access the archetypes with a high level of success."
Comment: Maybe they're a bit of both? I.e., maybe what Strassman and others are describing are what archetypes actually are, and vice versa?
Kent embarked on his own immersion journalism adventure with DMT and tried to extract information from the 'entities' that otherwise would not have been available to him. He said he could not.
So is DMT just a particularly powerful hallucination generated when the brain has its visual processing system hijacked by a tryptamine or is Mckenna right when he says it allows the user to access an alternate reality where there's a "raging universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien"?
The new study provides some interesting data that, though anecdotal, suggests that DMT provides the user with an "ontological shock" that may be able to rewire negative psychological patterns.
The researchers write in their paper that "it is possible that, under appropriate supportive set and setting conditions, DMT could show promise as an adjunct to therapy for people with mood and behavioral problems (e.g. depression and addiction)."
Recent research on DMT by Brazilian scientists additionally "suggest[s] that classic psychedelics are powerful inducers of neuroplasticity, a tool of psychobiological transformation that we know very little about."
Future research, therefore, could help get DMT removed from the list of Schedule 1 drugs, where it currently sits alongside heroin and marijuana.
Reader Comments
Seems to me they met Pennywise... "Hiya Georgie! Ya wanna balloon?"
Beyond my nightly encounters with this molecule, responsible for what we refer to as dreams, I've seen and encountered a lot, multiple realms or dimensions, you name it ... but I would describe my experiences as having my DNA rewritten, and experiencing divine grace. And that is also at core of how this medicine works ....everyone responds differently, and it is not intended to be injected intravenously (but instead, is meant to be taken within a sacred ceremonial setting, after being properly prepared with prayers and in conjunction with the intents of the drinker ... and whenever we misuse plants, as in these experiments, the experiences are not the same as when treated as sacred.
And they achieve these hightened states through pure meditation. But the catch is that their spiritual teaching is geared towards it (unlike 3 stooge religions most of us here are born into). And theyre properly grounded and use up all of their time just to do that. Their bodies are in harmony which makes it helluva lot easier for them. And not all attempt it, just the ones with talent/affinity for it. Same as Hindus.
The problem with "civilized" city folk and scientists on psychedelics is that they usually dont know what they are feeling and concentrate too much only on the logical mind and its conclusions. And psychedelics have completely different effect when people are doing them in nature. When theyre done in a concrete and EMF filled enviroment too much "negativity" gets picked up and that leads to a paranoid and fearfull state of being.
Btw. The only way to become a good Shaman is to get the knowledge from all the available sources. Which includes "playing" with "demons". And we are not all up to it (which is perfectly fine, nothing to be ashamed of) so caution is advised What is kinda pleasant and isightfull to some makes others cry for mommy
The problem with "civilized" city folk and scientists on psychedelics is that they usually dont know what they are feeling and concentrate too much only on the logical mind and its conclusions. And they usually make conclusions based on a completely wrong perception of the world.
And psychedelics have completely different effect when people are doing them in nature. When theyre done in a concrete and EMF filled enviroment too much "negativity" gets picked up and that leads to a paranoid and fearfull state of being.
So when you are filled with fear and paranoia and feeling insecure you become food for any entity that feeds on energy. Even without any entity around you are loosing your energy . In essence it is your fault you are opened up and you are allowing your energy to flow out of you.
But the split is a breakdown of communication and not an ACTUAL separation - just as an eddy is still part of the river flow even though spinning as an entity that persists within its own boundary.
As Fear was used to conflict or split Mind, reopening the bubble is likely to encounter an ego-alien conflict as soon as fear is triggered. However, every situation is unique.
The communication at Mind level is a Totality or Synchronicity - and our bubble consciousness is filtering, limiting and translating Qualities or Infinite potentials - to a representational reality that represents an imbalance of inner and outer aspects such that the inner is effectively minimised to the outer as Reality that the inner both judges and is subject to - but rarely connecting these as one thing.
Just as fear shuts down higher functions of consciousness to the reptilian brain, its identification is the dense body and binary logic.
The capacity for the Higher Mind to communicate is not broken in truth - or the lower mind could not even seem to be a separate thing in itself, but is broken in awareness - and part of this is indeed an incapacity of translation of qualities of wholeness into any linear concepts. However you cannot NOT be this, though you can be unaware of your true being while in the waking or surface mind.
The idea of threshhold personalities is also the Idea of the Holy Spirit - as the bridge between your true Creation and the result of seeking to control reality as a private or personal agenda. Recognition of the Holy Spirit is willingness to heal and be healed, to release fear to the awareness of peace of being - but the involvement of the ego's attempt to grasp and define in terms of control, sets an alien agenda on top of what is in truth formless - and this gives rise to symbolic representations that may still operate as dreams or visions of connection, guidance or insight, but stop short of abiding as a simple intimacy of infinity as exactly this - with no alien agenda invoked or intruding - ie There is no Other.
The search for experience is driven by the attempt to grasp Reality as a possession - which gives rise to losing intimacy and attempts to recreate or regain what was lost, a hollowing out - and and acting out from a sense of self-lack instead of the overflowing of an effulgence of being. And so a reversal in Consciousness is generated over great tracts of experience and time such as to normalise a masking over fear of pain of loss of love - excepting of course this fear is aperpetual background - and can be triggered to foreground in an instant.
The key to safety is not in defences but in what you are giving. If you are set in the intent of possession and control you are not only alienating from your Self - but setting off a like response in most everything you encounters - and thus limiting the range of your encounters. However, defences cannot be released until something better or more truly aligned with you in truth is moving you. Much of our fear is unconscious - and we need to become conscious so as to bring it into the fied of our responsibility - rather than cast out in the attempt to get rid of it (and thus draw exactly this into our experience) . The other aspect of responsibility is releasing that which is not yours. Taking on what belongs properly to wholeness of truly shared being, is ignorant and arrogant and sets up for a Fall.
Aligning in our true desire is not seeking to be someone or something we are not. Yet what we are, is an expression of Infinity - that is our natural environment or field of connection, communication and support. No one can live another;s life - but entanglements can generate denials and denials generate negative loops that can operate as negative entities that are ultimately derivative. Love is primary. But in a reversal consciousness love is suppressed as threat to a sense of control. How could this NOT result in a locked down masking in the forms of love as attempt to mitigate or ward off ills or evils?
It doesn't matter what works for another's reintegration, so much as their freedom to extend and share in a recognised sense of shared worth. No need to sell your path or recruit reinforcement, so much as to be truly moved, or transparent to an honesty of being. The More of what we are is simply Infinite - Let it be as it is - by not trying to force it into the old mind bottles of limitation as control.