tryptamine palace 
by james oroc 



Dedicated to the Fathers of Western entheogenic literature:
William James (1842—1910)
Aldous Huxley (1894—1963)
R. Gordon Wasson (1898—1986)
Albert Hofmann (1906—2008)
William S. Burroughs (1914—1997)
Ken Kesey (1935—2001)
Terence McKenna (1946—2000)
And to Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, for continuing to stoke the fire.
But most of all, to my beautiful wife, for marrying a madman!
“You’re assuming,” said Dr. Robert, “that the brain produces consciousness.
I’m assuming that it transmits consciousness. And my explanation is not more
farfetched than yours. How on earth can a set of events belonging to one order
be experienced as a set of events belonging to an entirely different and
incommensurable order? Nobody has the faintest idea. All one can do is accept
the facts and concoct hypotheses. And one hypothesis is just about as good,
philosophically speaking, as another. You say that the moksha-meditation does
something to the silent areas of the brain, which causes them to produce a set of
subjective events to which people have given the name ‘mystical experience.’ I
say that the moksha-medicine does something to the silent areas of the brain,
which opens some kind of neurological sluice and so allows a larger volume of
Mind with a large ‘M’ to flow in to your mind with a small ‘m.’ You can’t
demonstrate the truth of your hypothesis, and I can’t demonstrate the truth of
mine. And even if you could prove that I’m wrong, would it make any practical
difference?”
ALDOUS HUXLEY, ISLAND (1962)
Use the light that dwells within you
To regain your natural clarity of sight.
LAO-TZU
I
Acknowledgments
would like to first and foremost give thanks to my wife, the “Large Laser” and
my shining light, for supporting me unconditionally throughout all of my
adventures; to Rob for listening to hours and hours of my ideas as they slowly
emerged; to Y. for taking me toading; to Kelly N. for being a role model of a
truly open intellect; and of course to J. for turning me on in the first place—I
love you my mad toad brother.
Through my gifting of copies at Burning Man, an early draft of Tryptamine
Palace ended up in the hands of Jon Hanna, who I ultimately hired to edit the
book for what I thought would be self-publication. Jon has played an important
part in challenging me to really understand my own ideas as well as providing
me with a wealth of information and references. His support has been invaluable,
his intellectual antagonism stimulating, and I must thank him for his dogmatic
insistence that those wiggly little things called “facts” really do exist. His efforts
to wake me up from my complacency resulted in a much better book.
I would also like to thank specifically Goody for all the times he had to take
care of the practicalities while my head was still in the clouds; Flashy for her
unwavering enthusiasm; and Ronnie for lighting up when he read this book and
for letting me know. Also my Burning Man tribemates, past and present, for
always making me think that this work was important—with special thanks to
Brother Dance, Jeff, and Uncle Andy for their invaluable support and trust. Love
to King Weep, sorely missed. I would like to thank Lorenzo Hagerty for giving
me the opportunity to speak at the Palenque Norte dome at Burning Man in
2007; Love and appreciation to the Burning Man organization, the DPW, and the
entire Burning Man community for all the hard work that is accomplished each
year to make Black Rock City a reality. Finally, I would like to thank my editors,
Chanc VanWinkle and Nancy Yeilding, for their hard work and invaluable help
in clarifying my views and thus making this a much better book, and I would
like to thank Jon Graham from Inner Traditions for allowing my voice to lift off
the playa and out into the greater world.
True liberation is in our hearts and in our minds.
Namaste, peace, love, and light.
The author can be contacted at TryptaminePalace@hotmail.com.
Remember these teachings,
remember the clear light,
the pure bright shining white light
of your own nature.
It is deathless.
ATTRIBUTED TO THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD
Table of Contents
Cover Image
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Foreword by Alex and Allyson Grey
Preface
Introduction: How This All Began
ONE—The 5-MeO-DMT Experience
TWO—5-MeO-DMT: Science, Discovery, and the History of Human Use
What is 5-MeO-DMT?
Chronology of Scientific Discovery
A Chronology of Human Use
Legality Issues
Strassman and the Scant Scientific Research on DMT
Entheogens and the Ancient Search for the Sacred
THREE—The Aftermath
FOUR—Welcome to the Power Zone
FIVE—Into the Quantum Realm
The Trap of Material Realism
A Quantum Reality
The Implicate Order
SIX—Enter the Zero-Point Field
The Aether Field
Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle
Hal Puthoff
Newton Meets the Zero Point Field
SEVEN—Toading
EIGHT—Burning Man
NINE—India
TEN—The High Priest: Timothy Leary and the Legacies of the Psychedelic Age
A Psychedelic Movement?
The High Priest
LSD and the Beheading of the New Left
Leary and the CIA
Tim Learys Redemption: The High Scientist Returns
Leary and the Tibetan Book of the Dead
ELEVEN—The Zero-Point Field and the 5MDE: A Quantum Explanation
1. What Is the Source of the Brilliant Laser-like Light That I
Encounter?
2. How Can I Feel as If I Am Occupying a Reality Outside of
Time?
3. How Can This Dimension Outside of Time Seem to Contain
All Possible Permutations and Information?
4. How Can I Exist as Consciousness without Ego or Identity,
and Yet Clearly Still Be Me?
TWELVE—A Quantum God
Ervin Laszlo and the Akashic Field
Resonating with the Mind of G/d
Bernard Haish and The God Theory
THIRTEEN—The Role of Light in Eastern Philosophy
A New Model of Consciousness
FOURTEEN—A Transcendent Future for Humanity?
Experience Is the Only Path to Understanding
A Healthy Dose of Skepticism?
The Immutable Genome
New Visions of God
Fading Metaphors and a Transcendental Remedy
5-MeO-DMT and the Potential for Transcendental Realization
The Power of Absolute Consciousness
Liberation Theology
Extinction Denial
Abraham Maslow and Transcendence
A World in Crisis
The First Shaman
A New Consciousness?
God Consciousness Is Real
FIFTEEN—So Begin the Days of Strangeness
Epilogue
APPENDIX 1.—Resources
APPENDIX 2.—Tryptamine-Containing Plants
APPENDIX 3.—Serotonin, Melatonin, 5-MeO-DMT, and the Pineal Gland
APPENDIX 4.—Is 5-MeO-DMT the Most Potent Entheogen Known to
Humanity?
APPENDIX 5.—William S. Burroughs, the Godfather of DMT
Burroughs and Ayahuasca
Burroughs and DMT
Was DMT an Influence on Burroughs Writing?
APPENDIX 6.—Heaven and Hell—Potential Negative Effects of 5-MeO-DMT
Two Sides to Ego-Death
Entheogenic Paradox
Footnotes
Endnotes
Bibliography
About the Author
About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company
Books of Related Interest
Copyright & Permissions
T
Foreword
he mystical experience is the foundation of all world religions, whose
ultimate purpose is to provide to the faithful an intimate encounter with
God, Christ, Consciousness, Buddhamind, Primordial Awareness, Infinite
Intelligence. . . . To claim that the divine can be accessed via the use of a
material substance would be considered heresy by most traditional religions as
well as by science in our postmodern culture. However, the question of whether
entheogens can catalyze a full-blown mystical experience has been answered
affirmatively and verified scientifically.
In an early Harvard study formulated by Walter Pahnke in 1962, thirty
Harvard Divinity students were given a single dose of either psilocybin or
nicotinic acid. The dosed students were brought to Marsh Chapel to attend a
Good Friday service and later asked to answer criterion defining the categories
of the mystical experience. Over 60 percent of the subjects who ingested
psilocybin reported a primary religious experience—personal contact with the
Divine.
The war on drugs has prevented further follow-up studies until recently
when, in a related but even more tightly controlled and carefully prepared trial at
Johns Hopkins University, Roland Griffiths and his team demonstrated a 65
percent success rate. How many religious institutions or traditions can offer a
similar guarantee, subject to the rigors of scientific verification, that in one
afternoon 65 percent of their practitioners will achieve a bona fide mystical
experience, one of complete unity within and with the cosmos, transcendence of
space and time, a sense of vastness, infinitude and blissful ineffitude? Because
the substances are illegal and reviled by much of society, these results hover like
a heretical miracle in a materialist and rationally reductionist world.
Does this mean that the “psychedelic movement” of the ’60s and the
continued exploration of entheogens by millions worldwide have in fact ignited
the beginning of a new world religion? The answer is yes. The examination of
the nature of God and religion has landed squarely in the lap of the entheogenic
community. A few brave seekers are willing to speak to the mystical experience
and higher levels of awareness that are the result of their exploration of altered
states through ingesting sacramental substances.
A new voice in the evolving literature of experimental mysticism is
heralded with the book you hold in your hands, Tryptamine Palace. James Oroc
has built this book around his connection with the Divine through the unique
properties of 5-MeO-DMT. This special substance catapults the consciousness of
its user into the white-light vast expanse beyond all distractions from the
physical and subtle visionary dimensions.
My personal interest is the author’s willingness to champion the religious
importance of entheogens as a tool for spiritual transformation at this critical
time of human history. May the story of his awakening empower your own.
ALEX AND ALLYSON GREY
Along with the preternatural lights and colors, the gems and the everchanging patterns, visitors to the mind’s antipodes discover a world of
sublimely beautiful landscapes, of living architecture and of heroic
figures. The transporting power of many works of art is attributable to the
fact that their creators have painted scenes, persons and objects which
remind the beholder of what, consciously or unconsciously, he knows
about the Other World at the back of his mind.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, HEAVEN AND HELL, 1956
. . . as I toured the cliff-side town of Positano on the Amalfi coast near
Naples, where buildings grow like barnacles—from the tops of hills and
down the sheer slope to the Gulf of Salerno. It suddenly hit me that behind
every society was a hidden, elflike voice that whispered: “Build! Create!
Build! Create!” Moreover, some of the intricate structures I had seen
during my journey were reminiscent of the sparkling, ornate palaces
revealed to people under the influence of the psychoactive compound
DMT (dimethyltryptamine). It seems as if DMT frees the mind to see the
blueprint—hardwired by the whispering elves—instructing us to create,
create, create.
CLIFFORD A. PICKOVER, SEX, DRUGS,
EINSTEIN, & ELVES: SUSHI, PSYCHEDELICS,
PARALLEL UNIVERSES, AND THE
QUEST FOR TRANSCENDENCE, 2005
T
Preface
he book you are holding in your hands is a much revised and expanded
version of the original Tryptamine Palace, which in 2006 and 2007 I gifted
to members of the Burning Man community in successive versions. Burning
Man, for those of you who have not already heard of it, describes itself on its
website as “an annual art event and temporary community based on radical selfexpression and self-reliance in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada.”
1 Which is a
rather tame description of what is the greatest annual counter-culture gathering
on the planet—a mad tent city of up to 50,000 people from all over the world
that is filled with tremendous art, unfettered love, and frequent explosions,
existing in its entirety for only a single week of the year. Burning Man is all
about participation, and knowing that among its inhabitants I could find those
who would be most interested in my experiences, I decided to contribute to the
Burning Man art-movement by writing this book.
Both of these earlier versions were poorly edited, containing numerous
typos, incomplete statements, and factual errors; in many ways I am embarrassed
that I gave them away at all, since the complete and final version of Tryptamine
Palace was far from finished. Yet all of my excitement and most of my basic
theories were there (if somewhat obscured by the writing at times), and the
reception I received from the Burning Man community was overwhelming. I
would like to thank everyone who waded through those original versions for
their encouragement and support.
One of the most difficult things about the tryptamine experience is that the more
you believe in the veracity of your own experience, the more difficult so-called
normal reality becomes. There have been many times when I have wondered
why I was writing this book, when I have told myself, “To hell with it, just go
back to writing fiction, the truth is too hard to believe anyway.” But something
would not let go of me; something has kept pushing this project along. As I
explain within the chapters of this book, it became a matter of faith: a resolute
belief that the events that had happened to me were important, that ultimately
they did mean something, and that the message conveyed in this book was
intended for a greater audience.
Terence McKenna used to say that he was simply a mouthpiece for the
mushroom, and I can honestly say that I know what he meant, for in many ways
this book wrote itself: I was merely a conduit, somehow channeling a steady,
virtually uninterrupted stream of information—a bizarre experience for a
seasoned writer who has known days of frustration at a keyboard. This is a book
that was determined to be written, despite any weak moments that my ego-laden
self might have had.
Early on I decided that the fastest way to get Tryptamine Palace to a wider
audience would be to self-publish and sell the book on the Internet. The potential
in this journey seemed like a grand adventure, and in many ways I was
embracing the freedom of the self-publishing age. But the truth of the matter was
that in the twenty-something years that I have actively considered myself “a
writer,” I have always hated the idea of submitting my manuscript to uncaring
publishers who would then pass judgment on my hard-earned words. This fear of
rejection has meant that my non-magazine work has either been self-published
or left to languish in my bottom desk drawer.
“Time to toughen up,” I told myself. After dragging my heels for months, I
finally sent a couple of my precious printed Burning Man copies of Tryptamine
Palace off to two publishers, one who had published a book I considered similar
to my own and the other to Inner Traditions, one of the most respected
metaphysical publishers in the world and the company that published Ervin
Laszlo’s most recent revolutionary work that I admire, as well as a host of other
brilliant minds.
“Might as well shoot for the top,” I told myself, but I never expected any
reply other than a rejection letter, which the first publisher speedily sent me. You
can imagine my great surprise when I received an e-mail from Jon Graham,
Inner Traditions’ acquisitions editor, telling me that they in fact were interested
in publishing Tryptamine Palace.
This humbling opportunity has allowed this final reexamination and
ultimate version of Tryptamine Palace to be born. It’s now a work that has been
both diligently checked and internally realized and provides the most complete
summation of my theories and conclusions. Various people have told me that my
attempt to verbalize the realms of the tryptamine experience has led to a
reemergence or reassessment of their own experiences. Previously unable to find
any words for what they had been through on 5-MeO-DMT (or DMT), these
people had kept their experiences locked up inside. However, the ideas and
possibilities presented in this book have apparently encouraged them to again
attempt to better understand and express their own experiences. It is my hope
that Tryptamine Palace stimulates discussion of the unique effects that smokable
tryptamines can have on human consciousness and spirituality.
While becoming an Inner Traditions author is undoubtedly the most surprising
honor I’ve been given, I can’t say that it is the greatest personal honor that
Tryptamine Palace has so far afforded me. For my proudest moment occurred
when I unexpectedly met Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin and his wife Ann at
Burning Man.
I had no idea that 2006 was the twentieth anniversary of the
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and that in honor
of this occasion Entheon Village at Burning Man would be showcasing a series
of speakers, culminating in the Shulgins themselves. For some reason they were
the last people I would have expected to suffer the harsh desert climate of Black
Rock City. Perhaps it was because—as prolific at creating new psychoactive
chemicals as he is—I could barely imagine Sasha ever emerging from his
infamous lab. Since Alexander Shulgin is one of the “fathers of Western
entheogenic literature” to whom I have dedicated this book—and since my
friends had been watching me process the ideas culminating in the book over the
previous two years—the members of my tribe immediately declared that I had to
take the Shulgins a copy of the book. In true Burning Man fashion, we loaded up
a box of books on our bicycles and headed over to Entheon Village.
As soon as I walked around the massive Alex Grey dome and into Entheon,
I saw Sasha Shulgin. A towering figure with a shock of white hair, he looks like
the quintessential Russian scientist, and I knew upon spotting him that it
couldn’t be anybody else. Dr. Shulgin was just getting in line for food when I
introduced myself to him by apologizing for the fact that I had ruthlessly
plagiarized quotations from him throughout my own book. He was very genial,
if not a little bemused. I should mention at this point that we were all in our
finest Mardi Gras costumes for our annual camp party, and that I became acutely
aware of the fact that I was dressed in a red-white-and-blue striped American
flag leotard, which makes me look like a bald Mary Lou Retton on steroids.
My wife and other tribe members started handing out copies of the original
version of Tryptamine Palace to the crowd that had gathered around us quite
quickly. I gave one to Sasha, and explained that I had dedicated the book—in
part—to him. He then put on his glasses, opened the cover, and said:
“You have spelled my name wrong.”
Which indeed I had, spelling it as “Sascha” instead of “Sasha.” Perhaps
because I knew him as the father of DOM, 2C-B, 2C-T-7, and godfather of
MDMA, all those letters had finally gotten the better of me!
Talk about slapping my ego back down to size. But at the same time, it was
a perfect Burning Man moment—one that I will never forget, and reason enough
alone to write this book and a good warning for any writer who wants to take
himself too seriously. But still I hope this work resonates with the light that
resides within you and that you join in this new mind revolution. For if a positive
future is to be ours, we all have a lot of work to do.
INTRODUCTION
How This All Began
I placed 25 mg of 5-methoxy-DMT in a stainless steel one-quarter
teaspoon and vaporized it over a cigarette lighter collecting the smoke in
an upside-down funnel. All smoke was inhaled; the taste was mild—none
of the plastic taste of DMT. About 10 seconds or so after inhaling the last
of the smoke, it began with a fast-rising sense of excitement and wonder,
with an undertone of “Now you’ve done it,” but dominated by a sense of,
“WOW, This Is IT!” There was a tremendous sense of speed and
acceleration. In perhaps 10 more seconds these feelings built to an
intensity I had never experienced before. The entire universe imploded
through my consciousness. It’s as if the mind is capable of experiencing a
very large number of objects, situations and feelings, but normally
perceives them only one at a time. I felt that my mind was perceiving them
all at once. There was no distance, no possibility of examining the
experience. This was simply the most intense experience possible; a
singularity, a white-out (as opposed to a black out). I have little memory
of the state itself. I have no memory, for example, of whether my eyes were
opened or closed. After some seconds or minutes, it started to fade and
came to resemble a merely intense psychedelic state. Here I had the
feeling, a visualization of being part of the universe of beings, all active in
our daily, interwoven tasks, still moving at an incredible rate, and with a
longing for a single group/ organism awareness and transcendence. In a
few more minutes it faded to an alert (+one) state with an additional sense
of awe and wonder, relief, and a strong feeling of gratitude toward the
I
universe in general, for the experience.
ALEXANDER AND ANN SHULGIN,
TIHKAL: THE CONTINUATION, 1997
n July of 2003, shortly before my thirty-sixth birthday, I smoked 5-methoxyN,N-DMT (5-MeO-DMT) for the first time. Attaching no particular
importance to the event, and approaching it with the same characteristic lack of
caution that has accompanied many of my various adventures in life, I sat down
on a mattress in a nondescript suburban home in Portland, Oregon, and drew the
strange-tasting smoke down into my lungs. I remember looking at my friend
whose house we were in and wondering when something would happen, before
he reminded me to breathe out. When I did that my old world—and indeed my
old life—magically evaporated.
Having read Terence McKenna’s descriptions of smoking DMT and not
knowing at the time that there was any difference between 5-MeO-DMT and its
less potent cousin,
*1
I was expecting the effect of the drug to be something of a
cross between taking LSD and a bong hit, and I was sure that I had had sufficient
prior experiences on other substances to prepare me for this event. However, I
cannot describe the paradigm-shifting amazement that I experienced when I
suddenly exited my “trip” more than thirty minutes later, standing in a corner of
the room and moving my arms in perfect yoga sun salutations as I watched
dragons and griffins flying in waves of red and gold along the wall.
This sense of unabated amazement continued to grow as I turned around
and found my friend and his brother with their eyes wide and their jaws agape
after having been stunned witnesses to the whole affair. Then, as I learned that at
one point I had gotten to my feet and declared ecstatically: “It exists! It exists!”
and “I am there,” I could only wonder what had actually just happened to me,
and what in fact I had just experienced. For in the half hour after I had exhaled
from that pipe, I had come in contact with a force far greater than I had ever
known possible—or even imagined existed—and I now felt as if I had blindly
stuck my wet finger firmly into the cosmic socket and come away with my
senses totally fried. Smoking 5-MeO-DMT had suddenly gone from being a
mere curiosity to becoming one of the most important events of my life.
From this very first experience, my view of reality was rearranged in a more
comprehensive manner than I could have ever believed. I now consider 5-MeODMT to be the only true entheogen I have ever encountered, since before that
day I was a hardened atheist who embraced an inherited cynical scientific
material-reductionist
*2 worldview, while now I inhabit a universe that is
mystically inspired, and thus I’m indelibly aware of the existence of G/d. And it
was this first 5-MeO-DMT “experience” was solely responsible for radically
changing me into a spiritually inspired, and much more hopeful, human being.
Entheogens
Entheogen (“generating God within”) is an ethnographic term used
to describe a plant or drug that invokes a sense of the numinous
or a mystical experience. While several other well-known
compounds—such as DMT, psilocybin, mescaline, and LSD —are
often included in this category, I have personally found 5-MeODMT to be unique in that it is the only compound that has allowed
me to experience an out-of-body reality that is both 100 percent
convincing and completely unlike any “known” reality. Other
compounds such as DMT, ketamine, Salvia divinorum, and DIPT
also have considerable reputations for producing out-of-body
realities, but I have had little experience with them.
I can now state with unshakable “faith”—a word that used to make my skin
crawl—that I believe in the existence of the transcendent, formless Godhead and
in the individual human ability to realize that transcendent ideal. I also now
believe in the continued existence of my Soul (or consciousness if you prefer)
after my physical body passes away—two newly acquired “leap-of-faith beliefs”
that have provided me with an enormous sense of peace and well-being, as well
as a complete lack of fear of dying. The words of the great Russian novelist
Vladimir Nabokov express my newfound perspective on the possibilities of the
afterlife perfectly when he writes, “Life is a great surprise. I do not see why
death should not be an even greater one.”
2
This radical and personally astonishing change in my own ideology has
resulted in the most spiritually rewarding, intellectually stimulating, and
thoroughly enjoyable six years of my life. In writing down my thoughts on the
reasons for this powerful philosophical transformation, I have decided that the
best course of action is to try to clarify the 5-MeO-DMT experience (“5MDE”)
in a phenomenological manner. In the pages of this book I have therefore
compiled all the things that I have learned and speculated about 5-MeO-DMT
(and its more famous cousin DMT), as well as some of the realizations about the
remarkable capabilities of the human soul that I have acquired while on this
personal journey from the outer reaches of the human experience back to the
core of myself.
Throughout this mostly linear narrative you’ll find my search for answers to
the true nature of the 5-MeO-DMT experience and how it was able to have such
a profound effect on my own personality and spirituality. This diverse physical
and philosophical adventure includes hunting for the marvelous Sonoran Desert
toads, visiting the unique community of Burning Man, and exploring the
paradox and sublime beauty of India and its religious philosophies. I will also
examine the possibility of a quantum-mechanical basis for consciousness,
contemplate the strange properties of light, and examine some of the startling
philosophical implications of the recent scientific discovery of a vast underlying
energy source in the universe that scientists are calling the “zero-point field.” All
in an attempt to propose a theory regarding the nature of the phenomena that I
have experienced and to elucidate how this “minimum working hypothesis”
might fit in with other modern and ancient schools of thought.
Finally, and most importantly, I will explain how I have come to believe
that it is both possible and necessary for many of us to realize our own
transcendent vision of G/d (see box), before our species’ time on this planet runs
out due to both our ingenuity and our stupidity. A fate that can only be avoided
if our society can reconnect with the sacred and learn to live in balance again
with the world and thus see powerful entheogens like 5-MeO-DMT recognized
as important and remarkable tools for the continued survival of humanity.
Naming God
The use of the name “God” has presented numerous difficulties in
this inquiry. Thus, I have created the formula of G (over) d to
express the source of the universal energy that we collectively as
a species have named God. I originally developed this formula in a
clumsy attempt to distance myself from the Christian “God” and
the prejudices that designation carries with it, but I have come to
realize that this formula is actually accurate.
G = the absolute expression of the transcendent formless
God
d = the individual human ability to realize the transcendent
ideal of God
G (over) d = the (knowable) God(s) of humanity
Thus the God(s) and Goddess(es) we as a species are
capable of knowing are in fact historically realized individual
visions that represent a fraction of the transcendental Other. This
formula is congruent with Aldous Huxley’s “minimum working
hypothesis,”
*3 a distillation of tenets common to most major
religions.
But first, after a lifetime of actively seeking out powerful new experiences,
let me now attempt to give words to the most complex and irrevocably lifechanging event I have ever encountered. For as impossible a task that relating a
transcendental experience may be, I will now begin by trying to describe exactly
what happens when I smoke 5-MeO-DMT.
B
ONE
The 5-MeO-DMT Experience
Confined in the dark, narrow cage
of our own making which we take for
the whole universe,
very few of us can even begin to imagine
another dimension of reality.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE, THE TIBETAN BOOK
OF LIVING AND DYING, 2002
y attempting to describe the impossibly intense and paradoxically fleeting
5MDE (5-MeO-DMT experience), I am now moving onto purely subjective
ground. I must stress that the chronology I provide here is only my personal
interpretation of 5-MeO-DMT, gleaned from my own experimentation.
Therefore while the following information is taken from “the front lines,” so to
speak, it cannot be overstated that every individual’s experience is unique—what
happens to me when I smoke 5-MeO-DMT will not necessarily happen to you,
should you choose to smoke it.
For myself, after six years of fairly regular use of 5-MeO-DMT in both its
natural and synthetic (lab-produced) forms, the following consistent patterns
have emerged:
1. I fully inhale the smoke, generally holding it in until my vision of my
physical surroundings has begun to break into fractals, and then I exhale.
Virtually immediately upon exhalation, my vision experiences a field of
light-fractals. My mind then dissolves into this white light, until the
external vision of my eyes is no longer relevant (or at least no longer
recognizes my physical environment). This white light—that blazes with
the focused intensity of a laser and is both whiter-than-white, yet also
sparkling with brilliant color—may be the crux of the experience. The first
time I smoked 5-MeO-DMT, the only instruction I was given by the friend
who provided it to me was to stay in this light for as long as possible.
2. Next, a variety of inner phenomena can appear. Some people report seeing
protector spirits (animals or angels), while others describe communicating
directly with the light. In some of my early journeys, I walked across
plains of stars and talked with a Goddess who appeared in a blend of
changing forms, some familiar, some archetypical, and I remember she
laughed and treated me like a child. Whoever is in charge in that
dimension knows to keep it simple when we visit there; we are children
compared to them, and they teach us things in the slow methodical way
any good teacher does: one simple lesson at a time.
Stanislav Grof has described such encounters in his extensive road map of
the transpersonal experience, The Cosmic Game.
Immediately following the experience of total annihilation—“hitting
cosmic bottom”—we are overwhelmed by visions of light that has a
supernatural radiance and beauty and is usually perceived as sacred. This
divine epiphany can be associated with displays of beautiful rainbows,
diaphanous peacock designs, and visions of celestial realms with angelic
beings or deities appearing in light. This is also the time when we can
experience a profound encounter with the archetypal figure of the Great
Mother Goddess or one of her many culture-bound forms.”
1
Early on in my experimentations, when I was hyper-excited by some of the
strange and wonderful ideas I had encountered in Terence McKenna’s wild book
The Archaic Revival, I meditated with serious resolve on the question, “What are
you? Can you let me know?” before I made my journey to that other dimension.
After reading McKenna’s book I was intoxicated with the idea of gods, aliens,
and other-dimensional beings, and I was certain that this was the correct way of
attempting to communicate with them: surely they would respect my intent.
Then, as soon as I exhaled, the answer from the other side blasted me like a
million volts of pure electricity threatening to fry me to my core.
Love. That is all you need to know. I am Love.
This answer is one of the oldest known to humanity and the center of many
great religions; but it was not one that I had expected, nor one that I had been
looking for. In fact, I would probably have never considered it as an option at all.
But as an answer to a child who is making his first frightful steps into the
unknown, it could not be paralleled for its effect. “Do not fear,” this other
dimension declares, “There is an ocean of love over here.”
After that experience, I stopped asking questions.
3. In this realm of light I relive all the experiences from my life in an instant.
My whole life flashes before me like the wave of a hand—the passage of
time is like a game here. All the people I have known and loved surround
me as I become a part of them and they become a part of me as I expand
out of my form toward realization.
Everyone seems very happy and excited at this point, with a keen sense of
humor attached to the fact that we have had the great secret-and-answer
contained within us all along. The multitude of faces around me keep laughing
and silently shouting at me, “You knew it all along! We knew it all along! It’s all
right! We all knew it all the time! You exist! This is real! This is it! Now just
relax! And just . . . Be.”
Everything that has come before in my life seems to have led to this point,
to this moment. There is no sense of time. I am somehow splitting, growing,
spreading outward, and becoming a part of everything. I am pervading and
connecting with the entire universe from within my very being. As I expand out
and integrate into the happy multitudes and the universe beyond them, then my
ego-identity begins to dissolve as the realization dawns that I am returning to the
Source from where everything came. Looking around, in a dimension without
time or space, I recognize everything and everyone as One, as the embodiment
of all those beings I have managed to love the most unconditionally. There is a
definite feeling that to go past this point, I have to relax, believe, and somehow
let go. At this point I have also at times heard a sound—and this is another
experience commonly reported by tryptamine smokers—that grows to become
the most incredible, all-encompassing note, which somehow transcends all of
creation and beyond. It is pure otherworldly angel music, which I can only
describe with the word Aum (or Om): the primordial noise, the logos, or original
sound of creation. This is a transcendental note into which I effortlessly dissolve.
4. As I let go I experience dissolution into an omniscient state of Oneness, a
place where there is no difference between G/d, the physical universe, or
me. We have ceased to exist as separate entities and now resonate as One.
I resonate with the possession of a knowledge that radiates with the surest
sense of Love—Love that is in everything and is everything, and is so
much more. It is a conscious Love more intelligent than anything we have
ever known, a Love so great that it defies the need for a physical form and
yet paradoxically realizes itself in us and in all of creation. Aum. I become
that Love and I know that everything is One, everything is: G/d
This infinite pulsating field of intelligent energy, from which all physical
forms manifest and into which everything shall one day return, is the allencompassing, brilliant bejeweled light of Love. The Godhead, the Supreme
Mystery, the Conscious Infinity, the Pure Light, the Void that is a Plenum,
Brahman, Yahweh—whatever you wish to call it. It is the Unnamable Name and
the Creation Principle. I recognize It. I know that It is real, that I am a part of It,
and that in this moment I am able to return to It, like the Sufi “moth to the
flame.”
Resonating as one with my G/d and now having ceased to exist other than
as a part of that divinity, all I have to do is breathe to feel the waves of
omniscient energy radiate in and out of my ocean of bliss. My friends, my
lovers, my life, my species, my world—we are all One and we are all part of
G/d. Atman (individual consciousness) and Brahman (universal consciousness)
are One. There is no way to differentiate between anything: I am lost in waves of
an awestruck ecstasy that cannot be described, an egoless bliss. What Rudolf
Otto called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—the overpowering sense of
awe that envelopes one who comes face-to-face with the Divine—is revealed
within the singular realization of the true nature of my G/d: that G/d
paradoxically resides both without and within.
Physically, I believe this is when I go into the quietest part of my journey.
Generally, I’m peacefully lying down and saying nothing. I am only in this
indescribable cosmic resonance for a few short minutes, ten or fifteen at the
most, but it makes no difference to me since I no longer have any concept of
time, and its passage could just as easily be considered infinite. For some, this is
the period of an intense singularity: the white-out (as it is sometimes called), a
total dissolution. It is my belief that during this state my consciousness exists in
resonance with a realm that is actually beyond ordinary human comprehension.
Freed of the matter of my body, my consciousness is able to function in a
manner that it can’t understand, or barely even remember, once it has returned to
the limitations of its corporeal form.
I believe that what I have experienced is the universal state of
consciousness before the knowledge of ego and self, a state of undifferentiated
cosmic consciousness that historically William James described as “Absolute
Consciousness” (a term coined by the Theosophical Society’s founder, Helena
Blavatsky) and Aldous Huxley called “Mind (with a capital M).” This state is
now commonly described among today’s entheogenic community as “God
consciousness.” Me, I just call it G/d for short, which is a very clinical way of
describing what has historically proven to be the most important and aweinspiring force in the development of humankind: our ability to achieve some
kind of mystical resonance with this G/d; the subsequent realization that the
source of this G/d lies within; and the energy and inspiration that this realization
has subsequently released into our human society.
“I” have now ceased to exist; there is no knowledge or recognition of
“myself.” And yet my consciousness remains, clearly still thinking and
experiencing, while seemingly knowing everything, with all knowledge and
information within my grasp.
5. Suddenly (probably as the 5-MeO-DMT first starts to wear off) there is the
taste of fear: “This is all too much.” At the apparent pinnacle of the
experience, when time has ceased to exist and I have dissolved into this
G/d consciousness and lost all sense of my own identity, then I find myself
abruptly searching around wildly in this out-of-body dimension,
surrounded by layers of information and understanding, struggling to
remember how this has all been possible. I exist as pure formless
consciousness without limitations, until “I” consciously realize this
anomaly, asking myself: “How did this happen? How have I come so far?”
And then finally the killer: “Who am I?”
“I” begin to think: “I have an identity, don’t I? How long has this been
going on? What is going on here? How is this possible? I must exist! Something
really weird is happening here . . .” The moment that I start thinking about the
experience instead of simply being in the experience, my ego-based identity
begins to assert itself, and suddenly it is way, way, too much. I struggle to
remember a beginning, a start to “my” own existence, and with this search
comes the terror, followed by an abrupt departure from this indescribable state of
grace.
6. “You have smoked 5-MeO-DMT,” I usually hear a voice say. Then the
remembering pours back in a tellurian wave as my being inexorably flows
from a dimension without matter or time back into this physical one. My
vision suddenly focuses—I can see bizarrely for a moment between the
two worlds, seemingly vibrating in both of them at once—before I am
suddenly dropped into an awestruck heap on the floor. The time between
remembering that I exist and then reentering my body is terrifyingly quick
and very disorientating.
7. Now I am fully back in this reality and over-awed by the sheer POWER
that I have just experienced, the remnants of which still pulsate through
my trembling body. For the following ten or fifteen minutes I am
technically still feeling the effects of the 5-MeO-DMT, but my descent to
ground zero is quick. I am usually fairly ecstatic during this period, my
eyes filled with wildfire, and I can laugh great whooping belly laughs,
deeper than I have ever laughed before. It’s a cosmic laughter at this ongoing humor we call life and the unbelievable joke that I have been let in
on. (When I heard the Dalai Lama laugh in person, I was reminded of the
nature of my 5MDE laughter.) Although these days I prefer to smoke 5-
MeO-DMT alone, in the past this period has been a good time for
witnesses to ask what I saw and experienced. I then respond with great
authority on a variety of subjects—as if channeling from some higher
force—only to have no memory of my statements thirty to sixty minutes
later. The overwhelming sensation that accompanies this phase, even now
after years of use, is that I still have no clue of the depth and breadth of the
power of the substance I am so blindly imbibing and that I should strive to
treat the 5MDE with sacred respect.
Forty-five minutes to an hour later, I am completely “straight” (and usually
looking for ice cream). All chemical traces of the tryptamine have disappeared
from my brain, and I am physically free of its influence.
*4 Except now, having
experienced a full out-of-body mystical experience, my world and my paradigm
can never be the same again.
At this point let me recap my interpretation of the series of events that
generally occur when I smoke 5-MeO-DMT:
1. Dissolution into fractals of white light upon exhalation of the 5-MeO-DMT.
2. A sense of transportation via the brilliant white-light and the possible
appearance of spirit guides and various manifestations.
3. The recognition of the unity of all and that love is the principle that
organizes the universe. The intuition that my entire life has come to this one
moment in time, and the need to “let go” of my own identity
4. Next is the complete disassociation with ego-identity and any concept of
time, as I dissolve into resonance with the One, with G/d (“Absolute
Consciousness”).
5. The reassertion of identity causes a rapid and disorientating transition back
into a restricted consciousness and the return of “my” ego.
6. An abrupt repossession of my physical body as the last effects of the 5-
MeO-DMT dissipate.
7. A period of fading resonance between physical consciousness
(consciousness with a small letter “c”) and G/d consciousness (Mind with a
capital “M”), as I return completely to my normal “baseline” state.
It is important to state once again that an infinite variety of experiences for
any given individual are possible within the rudimentary framework that I have
provided. The scenario I have described here is purely from my own voyages
and the experience is open to other interpretations. It is possible that the order in
which I have catalogued these events is completely incorrect, since no linear
passage of time is evident within the experience. Rather, it is more like being
“hard-wired” into another dimension, where you are somehow able to
experience everything simultaneously while being channeled toward the “Core.”
Some people remember great chunks and frequently report that they went to
a dimension “outside of time,” where they (paradoxically) felt as if they stayed
for an immeasurably long period of time. Others recall nothing but a blinding
white light and the extreme disorientation of their return to physicality, which is
the least pleasant part of the experience. Those who experience this “white-out”
generally think their experience lasted only a few minutes, even though most
out-of-body experiences are between fifteen and twenty-five minutes in duration
once consciousness is “released.” (A percentage of people have prolonged
negative experiences or side effects, see appendix 6.)
I think that the specific period between remembering that they exist and
then rapidly reentering their body is often what people remember. This is
especially the case the first time or if they have smoked too much (which can be
easy to do). There is a razor-fine line between smoking enough 5-MeO-DMT to
fully experience its out-of-body wonders and smoking too much, which results
in the participant remembering little or nothing of the experience other than an
often bizarrely terrifying “white hole.”
The length of time a person can stay in levels 2, 3, and 4 seems to be the
main variable. Some people return to their physical body quickly (i.e., within ten
minutes) and then can remain in an obviously “high” state for up to forty-five
minutes, going in and out of the experience, but clinging as much as they can to
physical “reality.” The sign of a true enthusiast is his or her ability to completely
let go, with maximum immersion in the resonant out-of-body experience. This is
then usually followed by a quick, awe-struck return to normality.
It is my belief that many people only actually experience levels 1, and then
levels 5, 6, and 7, since levels 2, 3, and 4, which are the metaphysical crux of the
entire experience, can easily be forgotten during the intensity of the experience,
or simply may not necessarily be experienced by all people. It may be that every
individual has a varying ability to “filter” the white light through the lens of their
own human experience, thus allowing some of us to perceive far more in this
realm of light than others. There could be a plethora of reasons for this, but I
think a combination of philosophical preparedness (accidental or not) and dosage
has a lot to do with it.
Every person has his or her own minimum effective dose, which will allow
the greatest memory of the experience to be retained. It takes some
experimentation to determine an individual’s ideal dosage. (This will require
owning a gem scale capable of measuring within plus or minus 2 mg to do so
accurately.)
If you are of the rare breed that has the desire to smoke 5-MeO-DMT
regularly, then I recommend that you consistently reduce your dosage until you
find the minimum required for release, as this will give you the best chance of
remembering the largest amount of the experience. Too much happens in too
short a time for it to be really possible to remember it all, but some people do
emerge with remarkably coherent accounts of their experiences.
Dosage
In the original Burning Man versions of this book, I recommended
a specific dosage range for achieving what I call “an out-of-body
release.” Since then, it has come to my attention that a number of
people within the entheogenic community think that my
recommended dosage is too high and potentially dangerous.
Appendix 6, Heaven and Hell, examines the possible lasting
negative effects that a small percentage of 5-MeO-DMT smokers
may experience. This danger is very real, and should not be
ignored. 5-MeO-DMT should always be regarded as a possibly
life-changing sacrament, and one to be used only with the utmost
respect. Hard as it is to conceive, 5-MeO-DMT is truly not like any
other drug.
I have also come to realize that there are numerous
“recreational” 5-MeO-DMT users who enjoy the physical effects of
what I consider “low doses” of 5-MeO-DMT. I have heard of kids
snorting it at clubs, I have seen pressed 5 mg pills for sale on the
Internet advertised as “legal acid,” and—most astonishingly to me
personally—when I recently put 5-MeO-DMT into the YouTube
search engine, I found a clip of some southern redneck smoking it
in a trailer while watching TV, with a fat girl in the background who
keeps shouting, “Look at Billy Bob: he looks weird. Doesn’t he look
weird? Look at Billy Bob . . .” This is very close to my personal
idea of hell and most definitely not the kind of the sacramental
usage of 5-MeO-DMT that I am advocating.
Having stumbled into this tangled web, I want to preface my
remarks on dosage with this fact for guidance: there are two very
different 5-MeO-DMT “trips.” One is very physical, somewhat
psychedelic, in which your consciousness remains within your
physical environment throughout; this occurs at what I categorize
as “low dosages.” Then, at a specific point—and this point will be
different for everyone—your consciousness will leave the physical
containment of your body, leaving just the shell of your ego
behind. For me, this is a true 5MDE, and this transpersonal out-ofbody phenomenon is the subject of my book.
Dosage can vary greatly for different people, but to achieve a
full out-of-body experience, I would recommend a starting point
around 12 mg. Please be aware that this is a much smaller dose
than is usually used when smoking DMT. The book Some Simple
Tryptamines by Keeper of the Trout and Friends remarks that 5-
MeO-DMT can be “distressing” if the optimal dosage is exceeded,
and it suggests that the dosage is under 10 mg for most people, if
it is taken all at once. A person’s body weight does not seem to
have an effect on what dose works; heavier people do not need
more.
In their book TIHKAL, the Shulgins list a smoked-dose range
of 6 to 20 mg for 5-MeO-DMT. While the Shulgins have been
criticized as sometimes presenting conservative doses, it is also
possible that different methods of vaporizing 5-MeO-DMT may
more be more effective than the method I present. My suggested
dose range specifically relates to the method of ingestion I
describe below. Those vaporizing 5-MeODMT in “crack”-type
pipes—particularly of a style that allows for little slipstream loss of
vapor—should start out with lower doses than those I recommend.
(For reports of intense experiences at lower doses, see pages
532–533 of TIHKAL.)
Those who are serious about smoking 5-MeO-DMT should
purchase a scale that can measure accurately within 1–2
milligrams, since any variation larger than that can make a big
difference! If a dose of 12 mg doesn’t allow a release, slowly work
your way up in 2 mg increments. Amounts in excess of 25 mg are
definitely not recommended, since they can lead to
unconsciousness, physical malfunction, and occasionally to
vomiting. Serious long-lasting psychological effects have also
been reported in some individuals with dosages as low as 15 mg.
I have found that 5-MeO-DMT tends to be very self-regulating.
My personal dosage has reduced from my initial experiments to a
lower mg range. Although this is now an amount that is too low to
achieve full release for many people, it sends my 230-pound mass
hurling further through hyperspace each time. People seem to end
up taking only as much as they need. Sometimes they will cough it
out and it hits them straight away; other times they will hold their
breath until no smoke is exhaled, and yet they cruise through the
experience like a dog dozing in the sun. The only thing for sure is
that you can never tell. So if you are feeling the missionary fever
after your initial experiences and are getting ready to turn on the
world, a word of caution: Your friends who are the most
experienced “heads,” the ones you are sure are going to love it,
might turn into blubbering babies or raving loonies. And the frail
little hippie girl—who you weren’t sure you wanted to turn on
because you were afraid she might not be able to handle the trip—
could be the one who makes the journey to the Promised Land
and returns with the answer that might save us all.
You never know how people will react, and you have to be
prepared for anything. I have been bitten, punched, and watched
people unexpectedly vomit. One friend, who is a great fan of the
juice, arches his back fully, with his head on the floor like he is in a
yoga position, and howls at the top of his voice like a wolf for
fifteen minutes. (It’s best to smoke 5-MeO-DMT with him in a place
with no neighbors!) I thought another friend was going to leap
through a third-story window, and I had to pin him to a bed for over
ten minutes while he thrashed around and punched wildly at
invisible demons. He later remembered none of it, believing that
he had been lying peacefully on the bed the whole time. This
happened on the second occasion that he smoked 5-MeO-DMT;
his first trip had been entirely peaceful and was a tremendously
positive event in his life.
It should also be noted that different people experience
different levels of entheogenic effect due to their own personal
intellectual and spiritual development. Not everyone will have a full
mystical experience from smoking 5-MeO-DMT.
Fragments of the 5-MeO-DMT experience may filter back over a period of
hours, days, and weeks, in the form of startlingly vivid recollections. My
conjecture is that our consciousness is able to travel (or simply return) to another
dimension during the 5MDE. Because this is a dimension where time and reality
do not exist as we know them, it is impossible to remember everything that we
have seen and learned there in a linear fashion.
In photographic terms, it is as if we are used to looking through a narrow
aperture to see the world and then suddenly that aperture is blown wide open; the
subsequent quantity of light pouring through “burns out our negative,” so to
speak. The sheer volume of what we encounter overwhelms our cognitive mind
and perceptions. However, the mind is a brilliant computer as well as a camera
and is very persistent when it comes to solving problems. It stores the memory
of that white light and then runs all that data through its full spectrum of filters to
see if it can make anything out of it all. Eventually, like the memories from a
mad dream, scattered scenes and images do return.
A
TWO
5-MeO-DMT
Science, Discovery, and the History of Human Use
We do not understand much of anything, from the episode we rather
dismissively (and, I think, defensively) choose to call the “big bang,” all
the way down to the particles in the atoms of a bacterial cell.
We have a wilderness of mystery to make our way through in the
centuries ahead.
LEWIS THOMAS, “THE ART OF TEACHING SCIENCE,”
NEW YORK TIMES, 1982
I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are mere details.
ATTRIBUTED TO ALBERT EINSTEIN
fter my initial paradigm-changing encounter with 5-MeO-DMT, I was in a
state something akin to intellectual shock, with the tatters of my old
worldview lying shredded around me and a whole new universe of mystery to
explore. To regain my equilibrium I knew I would need a new view of reality,
since I now intuitively believed that I had experienced a different dimension of
existence that I previously had not known existed, and I would have to
incorporate this experience into my own understanding. Everything else seemed
minor and uninteresting compared to that, and I would spend most of the
following three years searching for possible clues or answers to what had
happened to me during the thirty-plus minutes that I had been under the
influence of 5-MeO-DMT. But when I went looking for information, I quickly
realized that there was precious little written about this rare compound, and I
would end up spending months in virtual seclusion searching through a
mountain of volumes on ethnobotany, philosophy, quantum sciences, alchemy,
shamanism, and everything that I could find that had been written about DMT
for leads, since there has been very little written about 5-MeO-DMT itself. This
lack of available information would eventually be part of the inspiration for the
writing of this book and the numerous speculations contained within it. But in
this chapter I will relate the few facts that are known about 5-MeO-DMT, as
well as the role that tryptamines may have played in the development of
spirituality in the ethnosphere.
What is 5-MeO-DMT?
trypt-amine \ ‘trip-ta-,m n \ n. [tryptophan fr. tryptic, fr. trypsin,
fr. Gk. tryein, to wear down (from its occurrence in pancreatic
juice as a proteolytic enzyme) + amine fr. NL ammonia] 1: A
naturally occurring compound found in both the animal and plant
kingdoms. It is an endogenous component of the human brain. 2:
Any of a series of compounds containing the tryptamine skeleton,
and modified by chemical constituents at appropriate positions in
the molecule.
ALEXANDER AND ANN SHULGIN,
TIHKAL: THE CONTINUATION, 1997
5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) is a member of the
tryptamine family—a group of compounds that all have a basic tryptamine
indole ring structure (see figure 1) and are chemically related to the amino acid
tryptophan.
The tryptamines are a particularly fascinating branch of chemistry for
human research, since they include many biologically active compounds,
including both neurotransmitters and entheogens. The neurotransmitters include
serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine or 5-HT) and the primary pineal hormone,
melatonin (N-acetyl-5-methoxytryptamine), see figure 2. The entheogens can be
seen in figure 3 and include psilocybin (O-phosophoryl-4-HO-DMT)—the main
active entheogen in “magic mushrooms”—as well as 5-MeO-DMT and its close
relations bufotenine (5-HO-DMT) and DMT (dimethyltryptamine). The indole
backbone can also be identified as part of the structure of more complex
entheogens such as LSD and ibogaine.
Because these entheogens possess the same basic structure as
neurotransmitters, they are able to cross the human blood-brain barrier, allowing
them to have a dramatic effect upon consciousness. Unlike other known
entheogens, however, 5-MeO-DMT, DMT, and bufotenine have all proven to be
endogenous to the human body, which is to say they are produced naturally
somewhere within us. Thus they can be defined not only as organic entheogens,
but also (depending on your viewpoint) as “endogenous psychotoxins” or
“natural neurotransmitters.”
1 5-MeODMT’s closely related “cousin” DMT has
also been described as a “brain hormone.”
2

Chronology of Scientific Discovery
DMT was first synthesized in 1931 by Richard Manske in the great wave of
chemical experimentation that followed the discovery of mescaline at the end of
the nineteenth century. It was then isolated independently from three different
plant sources: Mimosa hostilis (= M. teniflora) in 1946 and Piptadenia
macrocarpa (= Anadenanthera colubrina var. Cebil) and P. peregrina (= A.
peregrina) in 1955.
3 DMT’s psychedelic effect was first reported by Stephen
Szára in 1956. After its introduction to the burgeoning psychedelic underground
through the writings of Burroughs, Leary, and Metzner, it was made illegal in
1966. This halted scientific investigation into the compound in the United States
until Rick Strassman’s FDA-approved clinical trials of the early 1990s, which he
describes in his 2001 book DMT: The Spirit Molecule.
4
5-MeO-DMT was first synthesized in 1936.
5
It was then found in 1959 in a
member of the Rue family of evergreen shrubs, Dictyoloma incanesce.
6
In 1963
it was isolated from Anadenanthera peregina
7 and consequently realized to be a
major component in some South American snuffs.
8
In 1965 5-MeO-DMT was discovered in the venom of the Bufo alvarius
toad.
9 There are 485 species of Bufo toad worldwide,
10 and while the venom of
many of these species contains trace amounts of bufotenine
*5
(an alkaloid
believed to have some psychoactive properties), the Bufo alvarius toad is the
only creature in the world that is known to contain 5-MeO-DMT. The venom
can contain up to 15 percent 5-MeO-DMT by volume in its dried cutaneous
glands. The Bufo alvarius toad possesses a peculiar enzyme that methylates the
common bufotenine into 5-MeO-DMT. This unique creature is the only known
true entheogen-producing animal on earth.
11
I have found no scientific speculation on why Bufo alvarius carries such a
high percentage of a potent entheogen in its unique venom, nor have I found
conclusive evidence to confirm the popular belief that Mesoamerindian shamans
knew it was possible to collect, dry, and smoke the venom of this singularly
potent and fascinating animal. Interesting speculations about the possibility of
the shamanic use of Bufo alvarius venom do however exist, and I explore these
further in chapter 7, which describes my own initiation into the strange world of
toading.
Smoking Tryptamines
Organic 5-MeO-DMT can be smoked by milking and then drying
the venom of Bufo alvarius, the Sonoran Desert toad.
*6 Smoking
this venom can have a virtually identical effect to smoking
laboratory-synthesized 5-MeO-DMT.
Contrary to the popular underground mythology that credits
smoking toad venom as an ancient Native American pastime, it is
quite possible that smoking toad venom is a completely modern
invention. The first scientific paper to publicize the fact that Bufo
alvarius is a walking 5-MeO-DMT factory appeared in 1965. This
was at the height of the so-called psychedelic-revolution—a time
when numerous young “anthropologists” were searching through
scientific leads, looking for clues to “natural psychedelics” both
new and old.
Although smoking tryptamine-containing seeds and plant
extracts happened with some frequency in South America, these
same botanicals were more often taken as snuffs or in potions.
Smoking purified tryptamines is, in any case, an invention of our
modern civilization. Nick Sand, the underground chemist who
manufactured “Orange Sunshine” LSD, is credited as the first
person to discover that synthetic DMT could be smoked. Prior to
this the few “recreational users” of the modern period were
following the lead of William S. Burroughs and injecting it.
One astonishing discovery in the catalog of natural reservoirs of
tryptaminesis is that DMT has been found in human blood, urine, and
cerebrospinal fluid,
12 and 5-MeO-DMT has also been found in human
cerebrospinal fluid.
13
In his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule, Strassman
proposes that the pineal gland, which the Hindu religion associates with the
“third eye” and which René Descartes believed was the seat of the soul, may be
where endogenous DMT is produced. For more on this theory, please refer to
appendix 3: Serotonin, Melatonin, 5-MeO-DMT, and the Pineal Gland.
A Chronology of Human Use
Human beings have used 5-MeO-DMT for at least two thousand years,
14 since
5-MeO-DMT is a component of various entheogenic snuffs used in the Amazon
basin for at least this long, and probably a great deal longer. These include yákee, yá-to, and yopo in Colombia, epéna in Brazil and Venezuela, and paricá
and nyakwána in Brazil.
15 These snuffs are derived from the seeds of
Anadenanthera species and from various species of Virola, a genus of trees in
the nutmeg family.
16 Traditionally, these snuffs are administered by forcefully
blowing a mixture of powdered plant material up another person’s nose,
sometimes using the hollowed-out bone of a bird’s leg. This rather painful
method of delivery produces an out-of-body experience of approximately the
same duration as smoking synthetic 5-MeO-DMT, during which the shaman
takes a “journey.”
17 While on this journey, the shaman undergoes a
transformation that allows him or her to obtain significant knowledge from
direct interaction with the gods.
5-MeO-DMT can also occasionally be found in plants used as admixtures
in the preparation of ayahuasca, the principally DMT
*7
-rich shaman’s brew
immortalized in William S. Burroughs Yage Letters to Allen Ginsberg and then
popularized by the radical ethnobotanist Terence McKenna. The origins of
ayahuasca, and indeed of the tryptamine snuffs themselves, may be much older
than we can realize, as they appear to “predate written records,”
18 but there does
seem to be some evidence that indicates that ayahuasca is the more recent
invention. The first ethnographic reports of ayahuasca use come from 1855,
19 so
we can be confident that it has been in use for a couple of hundred years at least.
Archaeological evidence of the use of the 5-MeO-DMT snuffs reaches back
further than the ethnographic evidence of ayahuasca use, but current speculation
suggests that there could be an upper limit on detecting tryptamine alkaloids in
archaeological artifacts of around 1,500 to 2,000 years.
20
The more modern use of 5-MeO-DMT seems to date back less than 35 years.
Although synthetic forms of 5-MeO-DMT may have been occasionally
available, this compound doesn’t appear to have been in popular use during the
sixties by the counterculture, and this may be why it avoided being included—
with DMT, LSD, mescaline, and other psychedelics—in the 1970 Controlled
Substances Act’s list of prohibited Schedule I drugs, which went into effect May
1, 1971.
On November 3, 1971, founder John Mann legally incorporated the Church
of the Tree of Life in the state of California. This church was created in order to
declare that those visionary plants and drugs that had not been scheduled were
sacraments. The church hoped to shield members who used any of these stated
sacraments by using a “freedom of religion” defense if the government tried to
make these entheogens illegal in the future. In 1972, church staff produced The
First Book of Sacraments of the Church of the Tree of Life: A Guide for the
Religious Use of Legal Mind Alterants. The original edition of this book made
no mention of 5-MeO-DMT. However, a 1973 booklet, Legal Highs: A Concise
Encyclopedia of Legal Herbs and Chemicals with Psychoactive Properties,
included 5-MeO-DMT, noting that “the Church of the Tree of Life has declared
as its religious sacraments most substances in this book.”
21 The Legal Highs
booklet also listed Karma Kem Ko. in Yatesboro, Pennsylvania and Terrestrial
Materials in San Francisco, California as suppliers of 5-MeO-DMT.
In a 1977 Head magazine article titled “DMT,” authors Jeremy Bigwood
and Jonathan Ott noted that 5-MeO-DMT “has been sold on the illicit market”;
they also commented that it was not a controlled substance.
22 Nevertheless,
Bigwood and Ott did little to promote the drug when they referred to a
description of the effects of 5-MeO-DMT from M. V. Smith’s 1976 book
Psychedelic Chemistry: “The effects of 5-methoxy-DMT are unpleasant for most
people (smoking it gives me nausea plus the feeling that I’m being sat on by an
elephant).”
23 Bigwood and Ott concluded by stating that they felt the drug “has
little recreational value.”
24
The 1978 High Times Encyclopedia of Recreational Drugs related that 5-
MeO-DMT “has been synthesized and was occasionally available in the
California underground market a few years ago. The effects are practically
identical to laboratory DMT available in the sixties.”
25
In 1984, one of the true classics of underground entheogenic literature
appeared, promoting the hallucinogenic value of the Sonoran Desert toad.
Attributed to an author called Albert Most (probably not his real name) and
published in Denton, Texas (by Venom Press), Bufo Alvarius: The Psychedelic
Toad of the Sonoran Desert is an informative and practical how-to guide for
finding this particular species of toad, for the purpose of collecting and smoking
its venom. In this pamphlet, Most clearly identifies the active entheogen in Bufo
alvarius venom as being 5-MeO-DMT (and not bufotenine). The enduring cult
success of this publication is probably responsible for the culture of toad venom
use that still exists in certain areas of the southwest today. (While Most and his
followers advocated their Church of the Toad of Light, there is little evidence
that this “church” was ever incorporated.)
By 1985, an updated edition of The First Book of Sacraments of the Church
of the Tree of Life included mention of the fact that 5-MeO-DMT was available
from Inner Center, Co., in Hermosa Beach, California. It is not clear when Inner
Center first started offering 5-MeO-DMT for sale, but a 1994 post to Alt.drugs
mentioned that Inner Center used to sell 5-MeO-DMT but that they didn’t offer
it any longer and may have stopped selling it around March of 1992. The edition
of the booklet Legal Highs that came out in 1992 no longer included vendor
listings for chemicals. Apparently the government had been targeting the
companies that were included in earlier editions, pressuring them to stop selling
to individuals who were not part of an established research laboratory. This may
be why Inner Center stopped offering 5-MeO-DMT around that time.
Other than these references, there is scant mention of 5-MeO-DMT being
extracted or synthesized for modern entheogenic consumption until the early
1990s. Interest in extracting DMT and 5-MeO-DMT was sparked through the
publication in 1992 of The Entheogen Review, which frequently discussed
various plant sources for ayahuasca analogues. Edited by Jim DeKorne, this
quarterly journal acted as a “network newsletter” that shared brew prep and
extraction techniques. In the winter 1993 issue, DeKorne published “Smokable
DMT from Plants,” describing a simple method of extracting “DMT” from
Phalaris grasses. In the spring 1994 issue, DeKorne printed a correction,
pointing out that the grass he had used primarily contained 5-MeO-DMT, and
the description of the effects produced by the extract therefore reflected that
tryptamine, not DMT. (In truth, some Phalaris grasses do contain DMT as their
only or primary psychoactive alkaloid, while others contain only or primarily 5-
MeO-DMT.) Further interest in plant sources of DMT and 5-MeO-DMT was
sparked by the “Beta-Carbolines and Ayahuasca Potions” chapter in Jonathan
Ott’s 1993 book Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and
History as well as his 1994 book Ayahuasca Analogues: Pangæan Entheogens.
Legality Issues
After about five-years’ absence from the market, one specialty entheobotanical
company—JLF Poisonous Non-Consumables—listed synthetic 5-MeO-DMT in
their mail-order catalog in 1997. They appear to have been the first company to
start offering it for sale again commercially. Then in a 1998 interview, Jonathan
Ott mentioned his own incipient company Pharmacophilia, which planned to sell
a product called Pharmahuasca—a two-pill combo of a Natural Herbal Relaxant
(free-base harmaline) and a Natural Herbal Tonic (5-MeO-DMT).
26 Apparently
Ott had changed his opinion on the value of 5-MeO-DMT since his article in
Head some two decades earlier. Although a limited number of pressed
Pharmahuasca pills were produced, and some research and development was
done via human bioassays, Ott’s Pharmacophilia company either never
materialized as a commercial venture, was short-lived, or has remained an
extremely “underground” and unpublicized venture.
For a brief window of time between 1997 and early 2004, 5-MeO-DMT
became increasingly available for purchase via a number of web-based
companies. These companies were offering a wide range of nonscheduled
“research chemicals,” primarily in the phenethylamine and tryptamine families,
most of which whose psychoactive effects had been described in the Shulgins’
books PIHKAL and TIHKAL. Yet under the Controlled Substances Analogue
Act of 1986, many of these chemicals (including 5-MeO-DMT) could be
considered to be analogues of illegal chemicals, and hence—under certain
circumstances, constellated around their use as psychoactive drugs—they would
also be illegal.
On September 7, 2001, police raided JLF Poisonous Non-Consumables, and
on January 28, 2002, they arrested the owner, Mark Niemoeller, serving him
with a 13-count federal grand jury indictment. The charges related to several
specific chemicals that JLF sold. In order to get out of jail, Niemoeller made a
deal with prosecutors not to sell any items mentioned in the indictment or in the
search warrant, along with some additional items not mentioned, including 5-
MeO-DMT and the skins of Bufo marinus toads. Niemoeller ended up spending
a few years under house arrest.
27
On July 22, 2004, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) published
an announcement describing their “Operation Web Tryp,” which resulted in
legal actions against five U.S. research chemical vendors. Charges were largely
made on the basis of the Controlled Substances Analogue Act. Many of the
companies selling research chemicals that were not busted responded to the
DEA’s announcement by closing their businesses.
These days, companies that sell research chemicals keep a much lower
profile, and most of them cannot be easily located via web search engines. The
days of easily obtainable synthetic 5-MeO-DMT seem to be behind us. I have
provided a comprehensive list of the plants with higher amounts of 5-MeO-DMT
and DMT in appendix 2, Tryptamine-Containing Plants, and various extraction
methods are easy to find on the Internet. As far as I know, none of these plants
are (as yet) specifically scheduled (except in Louisiana, when the intended use is
consumption), although be aware that manufacture of controlled substances,
which includes extractions from plant materials, is a crime that can result in fines
and lengthy prison sentences in many countries. It is worth noting that while 5-
MeO-DMT is not scheduled on the federal level, it is listed as Schedule I in
Nebraska and South Dakota, and it is also restricted in some manner in
Denmark, Germany, Greece, Japan, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, and the
United Kingdom. For current information related to 5-MeO-DMT law, see
www.erowid.org/chemicals/5meo_dmt/5meo_dmt_law.shtml.
Strassman and the Scant Scientific Research on DMT
Due to the draconian governmental policies toward scientific investigation into
the field of psychedelic drugs—resulting from reactions to the society-changing
introduction of LSD to Western youth in the sixties (and the subsequent cultural
fallout)—there have been few sanctioned studies of any psychoactive
tryptamines since the late sixties and early seventies, when most psychedelics
were placed into Schedule I. According to Jonathan Ott, there has been little
information published on the human pharmacology of 5-MeO-DMT prior to his
2001 book Shamanic Snuffs or Entheogenic Errhines, which provided details
related to his own intranasal, sublingual, and oral bioassays (both neat and with a
concurrent dose of harmaline).
28
The important exception to the lack of government approved studies was
Dr. Rick Strassman’s clinical investigation of DMT in New Mexico in 1990.
Much of the scientific discourse in this chapter has been learned from the
pioneering work Strassman describes in his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule.
While his research involved DMT and not 5-MeO-DMT, these two closely
related compounds have many similarities, allowing us to speculate that much of
his information can be applied to both. Further, because DMT and 5-MeO-DMT
are found endogenously in the human body, it would seem reasonable to assume
that his theories on the role of one tryptamine could easily apply to the other.
Indeed, some naturally occurring mind states, such as the near-death experience,
much more closely resemble reports of 5-MeO-DMT trips than DMT trips.
Here is an outline of some of the important discoveries and speculations
that have been made.
1. Once smoked, DMT (or 5-MeO-DMT) crosses the blood-brain barrier with
astonishing speed. (5-MeO-DMT differs from DMT in that it has a
methylated oxygen group attached to the DMT molecule; according to
Alexander Shulgin, this results in an increase in potency.) The blood-brain
barrier (BBB) is the most sophisticated defense system in the human body;
it is far more impenetrable than the defenses surrounding the other organs,
and it is incredibly selective in what it allows to cross over into the brain.
For the most part only simple sugar molecules like glucose (for energy)
and certain amino acids are allowed across, transported by highly
specialized “carrier molecules.”
These same carrier molecules willingly transport DMT (or 5-MeO-DMT)
molecules across the blood-brain barrier (BBB). The brain then
consumes/metabolizes these tryptamines as quickly as possible, which is why a
DMT trip is so short (and why you will always come out of it). Strassman has
gone so far as to describe DMT as “brain food,” and the same could be said
about 5-MeO-DMT as well.
2. There has been some scientific speculation that DMT is produced within
the body during the deepest part of REM sleep (and this may cause those
heavily bizarre dreams that are difficult to remember). My own hunch is
that Hindu saddhus and Buddhist monks can cause their bodies to produce
DMT or 5-MeO-DMT during meditation after years of ascetic training. In
Thailand today, the modern Qui Gong master Mantak Chia explains to his
students that the visions they will experience during their arduous
multiday “darkness meditation”
29 are caused by their pineal gland
producing more DMT as its melatonin level drops. It is interesting to
consider that many of the meditation traditions focus on visualizing dying
and experiencing “emptiness,” that Amazonian shamans believe that their
spirit “dies” and is then “reborn” during their ayahuasca journeys, and that
the 5-MeO-DMT experience bears a remarkable similarity to many neardeath experience accounts.
3. In his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule, Strassman radically theorizes that
the pineal gland may flood the human brain with DMT upon first forming
in the fetus (at forty-nine days) and then again at death and that DMT is
the chemical “vehicle” that allows the spirit (or the consciousness) to enter
and leave the body. (This may be the bravest scientific speculation since
Copernicus suggested that the Earth was not at the center of the universe!)
Strassman points out a fascinating corollary between human development
and the Tibetan belief system. In development, the forty-nine days it takes for
the pineal to appear corresponds to the same period it takes for a fetus to first
display its gender and thus, one could argue, its identity or ego. This is exactly
the same amount of days that the Tibetan Buddhists—who have by far the most
sophisticated belief system with regard to the soul’s passage after dying—
believe elapse before the beginning of the “bardo of becoming.” That is, it takes
forty-nine days before a soul reincarnates into a new physical form if it failed to
gain enlightenment, according to the Bardo Thodol (more commonly known as
The Tibetan Book of the Dead).
Other potential corollaries can also be found between Dr. Strassmans’
research and Tibetan Buddhism. The Tibetans also believe that at death our
consciousness continues after all other signs of life in the body have ceased for
the time “it takes to eat a meal,” or approximately twenty minutes.
30 They regard
this as the period during which the spontaneous nature of mind (rigpa) erupts,
and we are either reunited with the universal mind (dharmakaya, the “clear
luminosity,” or “ground luminosity”) or fall back into the bardos. This is the
point when we have the greatest chance to obtain enlightenment and break the
cycle of rebirth. If, as Strassman suggests, the brain is being flooded with potent
tryptamines at death, then this twenty-minute period would correspond to
approximately how long the effect of these tryptamines would last on our dying,
matter-bound consciousness.
Entheogens and the Ancient Search for the Sacred
Dr. Strassman’s modern research and theories on DMT can be regarded as a
scientific continuation on one of the oldest themes in the history of humanity—
the use of entheogens as a window to the sacred.
The consumption of entheogens has been at the core of humanity’s search
for the sacred since the earliest days of our societies, and examples are abundant.
Some 3,500 years ago the ancient Hindus worshipped a lost entheogen called
Soma as if it was a God and created their greatest legacy (the Vedas) in tribute to
it. Mescaline-containing Trichocereus cacti were used by the Chavin culture of
Peru as long as 3,000 years ago and continue to be used by northern Peruvian
shamans today.
31 Psychoactive kykeon was drunk for the two thousand-year
period of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were considered to be the pinnacle of
Greek civilization.
*8 Tryptamine snuffs have been used in South America and
the Caribbean for at least 2,000 years, although their origins, along with the
origins of ayahuasca as well, now appear to be lost in the mists of time. Peyote
has been used by Mexican Native Americans for the past 400 years,
32 and the
Amanita muscaria in Siberia for perhaps the past 300 years.
33 A wide variety of
many additional visionary plants—Psilocybe mushrooms, morning glory seeds,
Salvia divino-rum, Cannabis, tobacco, Datura, and so on—have been used
ceremonially by other traditional peoples the world over.
The modern father of comparative religion Mircea Eliade credited
mysterium tremendum et fascinans—instances of heightened awe—as the origin
of spirituality among our human ancestors, possibly brought about by those
moments when the caveman first saw lightning strike and create fire, or when
the plains dweller first saw the mountains, or when the jungle dweller first saw
the sea. Interestingly, though he popularized the term shaman, he was
uncomfortable for most of his life with the idea that primitive societies used
entheogenic plants to gain spiritual insights. In his pioneering work on the
subject, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, he largely downplays the
importance of entheogens, characterizing their use as being a decadent
innovation rather than an integral component of the ecstatic experience. He even
quotes the Russian anthropologist Åke Ohlmarks’ assertion that
in the Arctic the shamanic ecstasy is a spontaneous and organic
phenomenon; and it is only in this zone that one can properly speak of a
“great shamanizing,” that is, of the ceremony that ends with a real
cataleptic trance, during which the soul is supposed to have left the body
and to be journeying in the sky or the underworld. But in the sub-Arctic
the shaman, no longer the victim of cosmic oppression, does not
spontaneously obtain a real trance and is obliged to induce a semi trance
with the help of narcotics or to mime the journey of the soul in dramatic
form.
34
Although it is true that some shamanic cultures relied on fasting, chanting,
drumming, and other physical techniques to induce states of ecstasy, this was
generally because no suitable visionary plants were readily available. The
majority of shamanic societies around the world utilize a staggering number of
different plant entheogens, and the most potent of these contain tryptamines:
bufotenine (5-HO-DMT), DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, psilocin (4-HO-DMT), or
psilocybin (O-phosophoryl-4-HO-DMT). Despite Ohlmark’s remarks, few
people would classify a tryptamine experience as a “semi trance” or describe the
effects produced by psychoactive tryptamines as “[miming] the journey of the
soul in dramatic form”! Eliade himself, in a conversation late in his life with the
anthropologist Peter T. Furst, excused his dismissive attitude toward entheogens
by noting that his seminal book first came out in France in 1951, and remarking,
“What did we know in the early 1950s about these things?” At that time, for
example, he was unaware of the antiquity of entheogen use in America.
35
While it was suggested as early as the 1930s that the Greek and Hindu
religions’ first movement toward “dynamic religion” was associated with the
“divine rapture” produced by intoxicating beverages,
36
it took other
unconventional thinkers—the husband-and-wife amateur mycologist team of R.
Gordon and Valentina Pavlovna Wasson—to suggest that some people likely
first conceived of God after consuming psilocybin-containing mushrooms. The
viewpoint that entheogenic plants were the source for most early religious
ideation was later furthered by Robert Graves, Alan Watts, and Mary Barnard.
R. Gordon Wasson, with Albert Hofmann and Richard Evans Schultes, went on
to propose specific entheogenic plant sources for Soma and kykeon.
37 Sanskrit
scholars acknowledge that the 114 verses of the ninth book of the ancient Hindu
Rig Veda, which are dedicated to a mysterious god/elixir called Soma, surpass
all other books of the Rig Veda in the awe of their tone.
38 And while the formula
for that preparation has long been lost, some 3,500 years ago soma was the most
precious thing known to humanity, because it ushered those who drank it into the
presence of the Divine: “We have drunk Soma; we have become immortal;
arrived at the light, we have found the Gods.”
39 Yet, like Eliade, the majority of
academics in the twentieth century rejected the idea that psychoactive plants
have had any influence on humankind’s discovery of God and spirituality.
Although many continue to oppose this view today, acceptance of the impact of
entheogens on the origins of religion has been steadily gaining ground in recent
years.
Language, art, the controlled use of fire, and a realization of the Divine—
these are unique to human evolution, and they form the cornerstones of
civilization’s foundation as we know it. All of these were invented or discovered
within a relatively short period of each other, with the domestication of cattle
following not long after. Such a genesis seems to beg the question: What, in fact,
kick-started this radical transformation of human consciousness?
Naturally occurring entheogens seem to be the prime candidate for an easily
obtainable psychological catalyst. Terence McKenna proposed in Food of the
Gods that psilocybin-containing mushrooms would have been ubiquitous in the
dung of the first domesticated cattle,
40 a suggestion that is particularly
fascinating in light of the possibility that one very early religion was the
Paleolithic cult of the Great Horned Goddess. Algerian cave paintings of the
Goddess from this period, as well as paintings of the cattle she is clearly
connected to, and other paintings of mushroom-headed people dancing while
holding mushrooms appear to represent both the beginning of the artistic
tradition and the shamanic use of entheogenic fungi.
The biggest challenge in the attempt to establish an accurate history of
entheogenic practices is that the compounds themselves usually leave few traces;
they are consumed. And the roots of many entheogenic practices lie in preliterate
cultures. In cases when these practices survived into modern civilizations that
had a written record (the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries, or the Vedic Soma
ceremony, for example), they were kept secret, and assumed a cultlike status.
The secrets of their preparation (and the primary psychoactive plants that were
used) were apparently never committed to writing, but only passed along orally.
Sadly, this has doomed such practices to extinction in our modern civilization,
due to the eventual persecution of initiates by both invaders and more modern
counter-philosophies eager for influence, and by the now overpowering effect of
the written word upon our societies.
There is no physical trace left of Soma or kykeon. Unless some
archaeologist discovers more specific written records or ceremonial vessels
containing traces of psychoactive residues, these entheogens are effectively lost
from human knowledge, destined to be a passing footnote of history at worst, or
a launching point for endless speculations at best. Yet the Eleusinian Mysteries
were considered the high point of Greek civilization—valid enough to last two
thousand years. And, according to religious scholar Huston Smith, Alfred North
Whitehead is reported to have remarked that Hindu Vedanta is the most
impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived and that, etymologically
and otherwise, Vedanta is “the culmination of the Vedas.” Smith feels that “the
Vedas derive, more than from any other single identifiable source, from
Soma.”
41 But as important as Soma and kykeon may have been to the
development of these two great spiritual societies whose combined philosophies
have affected the entire world, we have no true knowledge of them anymore. All
we have left are reports of their usage and their obvious entheogenic effect. We
have no real way to recreate them or to say how they were discovered in the first
place. Only those few cultures with surviving oral traditions retained a direct
link with the sacred through the ingestion of natural entheogens.
The 5-MeO-DMT–containing snuffs, ayahuasca, and the Trichocereus
cactus brews from South America can thus be regarded as the surviving complex
entheogens from a human history that has had its equivalents in both the
European (kykeon) and Asian (Soma) hemispheres. These sacraments are still
widely used; both the tryptamine-containing snuffs and ayahuasca are still
commonly employed (often now in urban mestizo communities) in Colombia,
Peru, and Ecuador, while a version of ayahuasca known as hoasca is used in the
government-sanctioned syncretic Brazilian churches of the União do Vegetal
(UDV) and the Santo Daime.
*9 The Tricherocerusi cactus, which has been in
continuous use in Peru for 3,500 years and boasts the longest history of
entheogen use that we know of, has also inspired a syncretic cult, where
traditional Peruvian shamanism has become mixed with primitive Christian
beliefs, and which continues to be popular to this day.
I call these sacraments “complex entheogens” because they require the
preparation of two or more plants that contain at least two different compounds
to produce the desired result. (Clues seem to indicate that Soma and kykeon
were also complex preparations that may have involved more than one
ingredient. The secret of such preparations was kept within the priestly classes
and was closely guarded.) While both DMT and 5-MeO-DMT are active when
snuffed or smoked, DMT is not orally active (and 5-MeO-DMT is only very
weakly orally active), due to these chemicals being neutralized by a stomach
enzyme called monoamine oxidase (MAO).
*10
Ayahuasca, however, allows either tryptamine to become active when taken
by mouth, because ayahuasca also contains another plant, Banisteriopsis caapi,
which produces beta-carboline chemicals (such as harmine and harmaline) act as
monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOI). The Banisteriopsis caapi vine is the
principal ingredient used by all ayahuasca cultures. However it is the balance
between the plants containing the tryptamines and the Banisteriopsis caapi vine
containing the MAOI inhibitors that ultimately allows the full effects of the
ayahuasca to be felt. This ancient discovery must be regarded as a significant
feat of intrepid research from an area that contains as many possible plant
combinations as the Amazon basin.
There is reasonable speculation that some Tricherocerus brews may have
exploited this MAOI effect, and they sometimes employ additional psychoactive
plants such as Brugmansia and tobacco.
42 There is also limited evidence that
Banisteriopsis caapi is still used, combined with yopo, as a snuff today.
43
(Archaeological evidence supports this view, with an ancient Piaroa snuff
sample testing positive for both bufotenine and harmine.)
44 The use of MAOI
inhibitors in these preparations thus may have offered a clue to the eventual
discovery of the formula for ayahuasca.
For me, the ancient discovery of the complex biochemistry of ayahuasca by
the “primitive” shamans of the Amazon jungle stands out as one of the greatest
puzzles of the entire tryptamine mystery. What kind of experimentation led to
the discovery of this very specific interaction between the orally inactive
tryptamines and the beta-carbolines that allow them to become active? This
mystery deepens in light of the fact that there are estimated to be over seventy
different ayahuasca cultures spread across the Amazon basin
45
that use different
combinations of plants to provide variations on the same entheogenic effect, all
for the specific purpose of traveling to the “other dimension,” from where the
shamans believe it is possible to return with significant new knowledge.
These shamans consider the Banisteriopsis caapi vine to be The Mother of
All Plants and credit her direct intervention for all their botanical knowledge.
While the ethnopharmacologist Jonathan Ott, who probably knows as much
about the traditional use of 5-MeO-DMT as anyone else alive, has speculated
that the South American shamans originally intuited the more complex formula
for ayahuasca from their use of the much older 5-MeO-DMT–containing snuffs.
Either way, the ritual use of both DMT and 5-MeO-DMT as entheogens by tribal
shamans has been the primary method of guiding and maintaining these tribes’
destinies, both as tools of prophecy via divine communication and as powerful
healing agents. These tribal cultures—the caretakers of the last real “garden” on
the planet—have lived with remarkable ecological sophistication in the Amazon
for longer than any other society on Earth.
T
THREE
The Aftermath
Achieving genuine happiness may require bringing about a
transformation in your outlook, your way of thinking, and this is not a
simple matter . . .
HIS HOLINESS THE 14TH DALAI LAMA,
THE ART OF HAPPINESS: A HANDBOOK
FOR LIVING, 1998
erence McKenna wrote that smoking “DMT is like an intellectual black hole
in that once one knows about it, it is very hard for others to understand what
one is talking about. One cannot be heard. The more one is able to articulate
what it is, the less others are able to understand.”
1 Terence was writing about
DMT, but the same paradox applies equally to 5-MeO-DMT. You can really
only begin to understand this book if you have experienced the disorienting
effect of one the entheogenic tryptamines in any of the variety of their forms.
This paradox applies even more so when trying to explain experiences as
mystical as some of mine. But if you have been there, then you know, which
seems to be the case with the handful of individuals I have met who have had
experiences like mine, and who instantly comprehend. They all agree that a full
5MDE is very different from any other drug experience.
This point is well illustrated by the following e-mail that I received from
Martin W. Ball, Ph.D., who had written books on both magic mushrooms
(Mushroom Wisdom: How Shamans Cultivate Spiritual Consciousness) and
Salvia divinorum (Sage Spirit: Salvia Divinorum and the Entheogenic
Experience) prior to trying 5-MeO-DMT. Martin produces “The Entheogenic
Evolution,” a weekly podcast that discussed Tryptamine Palace and 5-MeODMT on one of his shows. While he was curious and polite in his discussion of
my book, I could tell that he found some of my claims hard to swallow. Thus he
could be considered an excellent example of an entheogenic practitioner who
had a wide base of experiences that he could compare to his own eventual
5MDE. I received his e-mail the morning after his first 5-MeO-DMT experience.
Greetings Oroc! Last night I went on a journey with 5-MeO-DMT . . .
mixture of toad, phalaris, and psychotria . . . full and complete mystical
union—no other way to describe it . . . the most beautiful and complete
experience of my life. I think I can truly say that I now know exactly
where you are coming from. WOW!!!
You are either outside of the experience, or you are in it. No description I
can provide will really enlighten you. “The more one is able to articulate what it
is, the less others are able to understand.” While McKenna’s observation struck
me since the beginning of my quest as being one of the best descriptions of the
DMT paradox, it has also occurred to me that the same could be said to equally
apply to another of the great mysteries: the mystery of faith.
Prior to my use of 5-MeO-DMT, the word faith used to make my spine
crawl, mostly because of my prejudice toward modern Christianity. Like most
intellectuals, I associated the word with a form of mental weakness despite the
numerous examples of great strength it has provided the world. Faith, in any
creed or religion, is accepting that powers exist that are greater than we can ever
hope to understand. In contemporary Western society, we are mostly taught that
this viewpoint is archaic, since we are so infatuated with the Newtonian beliefs
that have allowed our society’s terrifyingly destructive Industrial Revolution.
This modern viewpoint has attempted to deconstruct our universe into a simple
machine in the belief that the expansion of physical knowledge will one day be
able to create a world freed of ignorance and superstition.
This youthful and arrogant presumption that faith is merely a superstition
and a weakness has largely killed off the belief in anything but a fundamentalist
view of G/d, as well as any recognition or appreciation of the sacred in our
society other than as ritualized forms of lip service. The focus on materialism at
the expense of spirituality has disconnected our species so far from its natural
environment that we now stand on the precipice of environmental destruction: a
situation that the modern “intellectual” can logically understand, but feels
inadequate and powerless to change. Our generation is one of the saddest in
history; we are fatter, stupider, and unhealthier—in body, mind, and spirit—than
any people before us. The only generations worse off will be the next ones to
come.
I can say all this with honesty, because I have been one of the worst
offenders. For twenty years I have lived off the fat of our decadent civilization,
privileged in this incarnation as a white male first-world citizen. And yet I have
spent most of my adult life poking and peering into the affairs of the peoples of
many lands, too often with little real empathy—a life spent experiencing,
entertaining, and occasionally enduring—and all the time believing that I was
merely living out my days until they would eventually end. Life was without
purpose: fascinating, but ultimately directionless and pointless. This was
especially so because I have chosen to ignore the status quo, since family and
career are the main providers of purpose in our lost society (as well as being the
main tools by which our governments can control us).
My philosophy in life was largely hedonistic, politically anarchistic, and
spiritually atheistic. I believed the religions of the world provided many useful
rules of conduct to live by, but were ultimately hollow and meaningless in
themselves. They were antiquated systems of societal control designed to keep
the hungry masses stable and producing, an archaic system that has now been
superseded by the societal use of prescription drugs and television.
*11
Prior to smoking 5-MeO-DMT, I believed that life was ultimately a riddle
that I would have to try and solve on my own. The closest I came to any kind of
spirituality was through my regular connection with nature during my many
years of living in the mountains and through an active appreciation of the world
via skiing, climbing, cycling, and paragliding. As a mountain athlete, I found I
could experience the same closeness to the wonder of nature through Zen-like
dedication to “extreme”
*12 sports that I did when I took LSD or magic
mushrooms while out in the wilderness. Best of all was combining the two—
skiing on acid, mountain biking on mushrooms—whereby I could really
experience the phenomena that Zen describes as “action through non-action.”
This is the rare feeling that jazz musicians in New Orleans call being “in the
pocket,” or what professional athletes describe as being “in the zone”— that
place where all physical and mental creativity originates when you still the egomind and manage to just let things flow. All good athletes know that you don’t
think about the best things you do, you just do them—often after years of yogic
discipline. Think about it, and you will fuck up.
Most of my spiritual and metaphysical leanings during the first thirty-five
years of my life were devoted to a better understanding of this phenomena,
eventually through yoga, the alpine environment, psychedelics, and a bit of
philosophical reading on the side. Smoking 5-MeO-DMT changed all that, and I
have effectively undergone a complete faith-based transformation—one that the
majority of my close friends find as remarkable as I do. In the aftermath of my
extraordinarily powerful initiation, I recognized what I had been through for
exactly what it was (since I had spent years reading descriptions of it, while
never thinking it might happen to me): a genuine mystical experience.
This is the spark of all forms of spirituality since the beginnings of
humanity, which in my mind had been restricted to the shaman, the Sufi, the
fevered saint. I had met the same knowledge that has inspired countless men and
women throughout the mists of time. Some may argue that I have simply
experienced a powerful, chemically induced hallucination, but my faith tells me
something different. It tells me that I have experienced a deeper reality,
contacting with a power greater than any I knew existed, and now my world will
never be quite the same again.
What are the most obvious changes? Where do I begin! Perhaps the most
important change is that I have been instilled with a new sense of responsibility
—a determination to work toward some positive end. Following my epiphany, I
found I couldn’t lie anymore (not even a little white lie), so I went around telling
everyone exactly how I felt about everything, revealing my previous secrets and
falsehoods. This process caused a great deal of confusion and upheaval in the
beginning, but it has resulted in an almost total lack of friction in my private life,
since everything is out in the open. This phenomenon fascinated an ex-heroin
addict friend of mine, who—since kicking—had become a radical neo-Catholic.
She said it was a classic sign of religious conversion.
While I have always been a voracious reader, my tryptamine experiences
unleashed an unquenchable desire for knowledge. Since then, I have read more
books, with a more thorough absorption of content, than in any other period of
my life. One of the many ways that I often describe the effect that 5-MeO-DMT
has had on me is by describing it as “the greatest intellectual adventure of my
life.” My worldview has been considerably enriched and enlarged, and I have
become much more open to ideas that I would have previously found
“unscientific” or “illogical.” Since I have smoked 5-MeO-DMT, I have found
myself far more tolerant, and even sympathetic, to the message of Christianity—
although it is still hard to take seriously in most of its current forms.
When I initially experienced the realignment of my natural energies through
the revelation of my first few experiences and the destruction of my old
paradigm, I found that many boundaries had been removed. The occurrence of
coincidences and synchronicities
*13
in the rhythms of my life also became
extraordinarily common, especially if the situation somehow involved
tryptamines.
Take, for example, the day after I first smoked 5-MeO-DMT, which was
obviously one of the most exciting and unsettling days of my life. As I
confronted the astonishing fact that the core of my existence had been
irreversibly altered, I drove to Hood River, Oregon, where I had an assignment
to write a kite-surfing article for an English magazine. I parked my rented car on
the main street and called my future wife on my cell phone while sitting on a
park bench in the sun. As I described to her in great detail how excited my mind
was at that point, I got up and started walking aimlessly down the main street.
Talking to her as I walked, a jewelry store caught my eye, and I stopped and
looked in the window at a psychedelic collection of hand-blown glass frogs and
toads. I immediately went in and purchased one, which now sits proudly in my
house shrine.
Upon returning home after the three-week trip to Oregon, I went to clear a
pile of junk off the kitchen table and the first thing I found was a copy of The
Archaic Revival by Terence McKenna. A friend had given me the book several
months earlier when she had moved to Los Angeles, and though I had been keen
to read it—having enjoyed Food of the Gods some ten years earlier—I had not
even had a chance to look at it. I opened the book, and the first thing I read was
that smoking “DMT is like an intellectual black hole . . .” which perfectly
described the intense excitement and confusion I was experiencing as I struggled
to try to explain to my friends what was going on in my mind during those days
after my first 5-MeO-DMT experience. This book, by far McKenna’s most
radical, became for me both a lifeline and a rocket ship into intellectual
hyperspace, as over the next few months, supplemented by regularly smoking 5-
MeO-DMT, I gave full and open credence to the wildest rumblings of Terence’s
imagination.
Shortly after stumbling across that book, a random person turned up and
gave me a jar of DMT. At that time, this was one of the most difficult drugs to
find—I had been unsuccessfully searching for it for so many years that I had
actually given up! Then, only a few months later, I met a mad Israeli in a Los
Angeles taxicab who quickly insisted that he would take me to Mexico in search
of the elusive Bufo alvarius toads.
For at least a year, I became somewhat obsessed with 5-MeO-DMT. After I
first discovered the drug, I was fortunately living in a secluded house on a
Caribbean island, where I had a steady diet of healthy food and exercise. Once I
realized that I could smoke 5-MeO-DMT alone, the chance coincidence of my
meditative surroundings allowed me to immerse myself fully in the 5-MeODMT experience in a stress-and paranoia-free environment. I therefore
concentrated on getting as physically fit and healthy as I could for my
tryptamine smoking.
During the first few months after my initial experience, I smoked 5-MeODMT two or three times a week. This regime, along with the voracious reading,
triggered an avalanche of ideas that flowed constantly through my mind. My
inner world became so all encompassing, both inside and outside of the
experience, that I believe my mind and body began to separate. My body became
more of a machine, and my consciousness became more of an independent
entity, as I began to float through the world almost as a disembodied observer.
At the end of this period, which coincided with an unusually high
popularity with both sexes (everybody seemed to want a piece of me, even
complete strangers), I began to experience—for the first time in my life—a form
of sexual impotency, as I found it difficult to concentrate on the physical act of
lovemaking. (Paradoxically, my love for my partner during this period had
substantially deepened and grown.) I was beginning to live in the ether, and
while my physical reality remained healthy (my life was in as good a shape as it
had ever been), my mind was ablaze with the world of possibilities that the
tryptamines seemed to offer and by the spiritual evolution that I was rapidly
undergoing. Fueled by a steady diet of radical reading, I found myself seriously
considering the possibility of transcending completely out of concensus reality.
So if anyone in my audience is undergoing a similar mental revolution, let me
offer the same words of advice that Sogyal Rinpoche’s master gave to calm him
down as he observed his physical world dissolving after years of arduous
meditation: “Don’t get too excited. In the end, it’s neither good nor bad.”
2
If it were not for the following two experiences, I might have continued smoking
5-MeO-DMT with the same carefree abandon that marked these first months of
experimentation, continuing my light-headed ascent into the mental stratosphere
until my physical form would have hardly mattered at all. But as fate would have
it, the character of my 5-MeO-DMT experiences was about to change.
The first of these experiences is my most sacred tryptamine experience of
all, and not one that I can easily relate. It challenges the last shreds of my
worldview so soundly and touches a place so deep inside my soul that it is hard
for me to share it with anyone. By relating my experience, I open this book up to
ridicule (proof, some might say, of my own self-delusion), or even to charges of
blatant fiction. But I can assure you that this is all true, described as it happened
without embellishment. If you choose to take the experience at face value, then
you must agree that the inexplicable nature of this 5MDE places it squarely
within the realms of the occult and the Divine, and far outside of any “normal”
drug experience. It is also one of the main reasons why I consider 5-MeO-DMT
to be the only true entheogen that I have personally encountered.
This 5-MeO-DMT experience began at close to midnight on October 30th
in New Orleans, in a neighborhood famous for its association with Haitian
voodoo. I was with an old friend, Rene, a middle-aged Canadian woman long
experienced in the ways of the counterculture, having spent many years in
California and having worked as a photographer with the Grateful Dead for eight
years. She had smoked 5-MeO-DMT once and was keen to do so again, but she
was happy for me to lead the way. Rene doesn’t smoke weed, had not been
drinking, and thus was completely sober at the point when I inhaled the 5-MeODMT while sitting cross-legged on a couch opposite her.
On this occasion I sailed through the usual progression of steps, and I
remember hitting the stage during which the enormity of the knowledge and the
timeless nature of my environment usually would frighten me into a return to my
physical form. I recall opening my eyes at that point, and in an unusual moment
of physical clarity, I saw that Rene was sitting across from me meditating. I felt
that everything was okay, sailed straight through that stage (which is usually my
peak) and burst into a realm that can only be described as pure light. But this
was not ordinary white light, nor even the white tunnel that I dissolve into when
I exhale from a 5-MeO-DMT hit; instead, it was a fractal-filled prismatic light of
indescribable radiance and beauty that pulsed with its own intelligence.
I remember this all with remarkable accuracy. I then felt a strong sense of
the presence of my friend Brigid, who had died several years earlier. I had loved
Brigid very much, yet I realized I had not thought about her in quite some time,
perhaps because my thoughts had been overwhelmed by my fascination with my
“new” world. But now she was clearly in my consciousness, and it was much
more than a sense of simply remembering her. It was as if we were walking
together, hand in hand, through towering shadowy trees on a field of stars, and
she was laughing, her smile radiant. This was not a memory, but a feeling of
actually being there with her.
The next thing I knew, I found myself back in normal reality, lying
peacefully on the sofa and feeling totally calm and incredibly “straight,” after
what was my least tumultuous return from the Tryptamine Palace. All I said was,
“I just remembered an old friend.”
At this point Rene came over and sat down beside me where I lay and
gripped my arm quite hard. I realized that her face was covered with tears.
“There was a woman in the room,” she said, as she wrung her hands with her
eyes closed, seemingly occupying some place between two worlds. “She was
young and beautiful. Oh, she seemed like she was so much fun. She was
laughing. And she wanted to tell you that she was sorry she did not get a chance
to say good-bye. And that she loves you. She is still here, but she’s fading
away.” Rene went on to accurately describe my dead friend’s appearance and
personality, though she did not know her at all. She was obviously agitated and
very emotional. It was as though she had taken some kind of a drug, and it took
many hours before she completely “came down.”
Rene’s version of events went like this: After I exhaled the 5-MeO-DMT,
she saw a beam of light the size of an American quarter come out of my chest.
*14
When I split into two perfect copies of myself, sitting side-by-side on the couch,
she found it hard to believe what she was seeing, being completely straight at the
time. She said that even though she opened and closed her eyes, and rubbed
them, the vision continued, apparently for a period of several minutes. After a
while, she decided to close her eyes and meditate, since the whole affair was
freaking her out a little. This is when the spirit of my dead friend suddenly
appeared: an encounter Rene described in convincing detail.
Rene is a mother with a grown son, and she was completely sober during
my trip. But if you had walked into the room while she was relating what had
happened, you would have sworn that she had taken some kind of a drug and
that I was the sober one. She has had considerable experience with people on all
kinds of chemicals during her fifty-plus years on this planet, and yet it is safe to
say that she had never experienced anything like this before. It is worth
mentioning that Rene has lived in California for some years, and she is receptive
to various “New Age” concepts—far more so than I am! She has had other
“channeling” experiences and comes from a long line of women known to
possess fey powers. So she was later able to take the whole bizarre metaphysical
occurrence somewhat in stride.
I, on the other hand, had no idea what to think, since I did not at this time
believe in life after death, and certainly not in a form coherent enough to be able
to wish me good-bye! Yet there was Rene, shaking and crying and describing
Brigid—the same person I had just been walking with in another dimension—in
fairly astonishing detail. To this day, I still do not know what to think or believe.
The veil between the worlds is thin in New Orleans—the most magicbelieving city in North America—and people who really put stock in such things
claim that around All Saints’ Eve the veil barely exists at all. I had always felt
that I had a strange karmic/telepathic bond with my beautiful friend, whom I had
been with for the last time in New Orleans several years earlier. A few years
later, I attended my first Mardi Gras. Early on its climactic final day—Fat
Tuesday—I was standing on the street watching the Zulu parade when a sudden
deep depression descended upon me, causing me to cry real tears for no apparent
reason. My friends were concerned, but I managed to shake off this severe
feeling and made it through the rest of the day with a general sense of unease—
as if something very wrong had just happened in the world.
The following week I telephoned my homeland in the South Pacific to
check on a pair of old friends who were expecting a baby (worried that this
might have been the source of my concern). Upon hearing that their bouncing
baby boy had been delivered premature but fine, I breathed a sigh of relief. Then
I asked, for no real reason, if my friends had seen Brigid recently. Complete
silence was the response on the end of the phone, before my friend told me that
Brigid had died suddenly of a brain embolism. He had assumed that I had
already heard. She had died on what had been, on the other side of the world in
New Orleans, Mardi Gras Day.
Coincidences like these occur naturally enough in life and can easily be
discredited by logical disbelievers. I certainly would not consider this a proof of
any kind myself. But whatever happened between Rene and me (and who knows
what other cosmic force) while I was under the influence of a brain-full of 5-
MeO-DMT is a much harder experience to discredit. Did the spirit of my
deceased friend enter the room? Or did my mind, supercharged from three
months of regular 5-MeO-DMT smoking, project that image into the ether? And
if this is so, then why is my recollection one of walking and laughing with
Brigid, with no sense of her wishing to tell me anything? Yet Rene delivered a
clear message that could only make sense to me, since she had no idea of
Brigid’s former existence.
All in all, this was a heavy experience, and I decided to take a break from
tryptamine smoking for a while so that I could have adequate time to reflect on
the variety of possibilities that this experience had opened up. Like I said, I still
don’t really know what I think—but this is the type of experience that places 5-
MeO-DMT into a realm of its own as far as I am concerned. I don’t consider 5-
MeO-DMT to be a “drug.” Rather, it is a sacrament of some kind, and it is best
used and respected in such a context. Smoking 5-MeO-DMT up to this point had
been mind-blowing good fun and spiritually enlightening enough to make me
now believe in the existence of G/d. But after this experience in New Orleans,
my interpretation and understanding of what was happening while I was under
the influence of 5-MeO-DMT took on a deeper meaning. It’s been several years
now, since that night, and as I sit here writing these words, I still question what
really happened that evening, as I have questioned it a thousand times before.
Whose energy was at work in that room? What did Rene see while I lay there in
the depths of my experience? Yet I know in my heart and in my mind that it all
happened; it was, in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s marvelous phrase, “true enough.”
And no amount of reading, tryptamine smoking, or sitting at Rinpoche’s feet is
likely to ever be able to explain it much better than the little I already know. It
was the profoundest glimpse of an ancient unheralded reality that our
contemporary society is now mostly too blind to see, an encounter that today we
dismiss as myth, fantasy, or even schizophrenia, and one that cannot be easily
classified by modern entheogenic lore. So after that experience, my spiritual and
intellectual progress had no choice but to step away from the futuristic and the
fantastic as my search moved on to both a careful examination of our sciences
and to volumes that have been written by those men and women who have
similarly drank from the mystic’s cup throughout the ages.
If the 5-MeO-DMT experience grips you and really moves that mysterious
energy inside of you that some call the Soul, then you will experience a period of
intense excitement and disorientation, much like you have discovered an entirely
new world. Looking around with the eyes of a child again, all that you have
callously taken for granted now glows with fresh significance. And as exciting
as this can be, it is also potentially terrifying. This experience can be quite
different from individual to individual, and there is not—as of yet—a modern
philosophy for those who taste a moment of entheogenic enlightenment. There
are few saddhus, shamans, or sages to guide most of us. Few of us are prepared
for a brush with the Divine, and talking of it leads us toward the occult
*15 and
toward ground that Western civilization largely abandoned centuries ago.
My experience that night in New Orleans produced the belief—still difficult
to admit—that I had somehow communicated with a friend who had died several
years before, and none of the wild and wooly imaginings of our New Age sages
—their theories of aliens and insects, or parallel dimensions—had prepared me
for that.
Over the first months of my experimentation with 5-MeO-DMT, I became a
radically different human being, with a radically different way of viewing my
world. My thirty-five years of only believing in modern scientific material
reductionism had come to an end. This was both liberating and occasionally
distressing at the same time. Had it had not been for three major “stabilizers,” I
believe I could have actually “lost my mind”—a possibility that I considered
quite frequently as I moved into my new paradigm.
1. First, there were the obvious positive effects of my new worldview on my
personality. I became notably more relaxed, happier, less likely to become
angry, more compassionate, and my mental processes were thoroughly
stimulated (and remain so to this day). Although I would not have
described myself as tense, unhappy, easily angered, uncompassionate, or
unintelligent before my 5-MeO-DMT experiences, “the new me” knows
that I have made significant progress in all these areas. I actually find it
hard to remember what I was “like” before all this began. But I feel as if I
have lost some of the “hard edge” of my personality, which resulted from
many years of cynicism. I am now generally much more positive and
hopeful.
2. My wife and close friends were (and have continued to be) supportive of
my transformation, even though at times it has undoubtedly been
concerning to them. They nevertheless seem to universally agree that I
have been going through a powerfully positive experience. Those closest
to me, and thus most affected by the changes in my personality, have all
tried 5-MeO-DMT themselves, to varying effect. But all of them feel that
it has had a profound impact in different ways on their lives, worldviews,
and personalities.
3. After The Archaic Revival fell into my hands (about a week after my 5-
MeO-DMT initiation) and I realized that I would be unable to locate
conventional teachers in this matter, I went to the greatest body of sages I
have ever known: the library, and its modern extension, the Internet.
A newfound lightness-of-intellect now seemed to accompany the lightnessof-consciousness that smoking 5-MeO-DMT had endowed upon me. This period
marks the beginning of my greatest intellectual adventure since childhood, an era
that has been defined by my newfound ability to grant even the craziest of New
Age ideas at least a modicum of possibility and not immediately reject it because
it was outside of my previously held worldview.
As I sit working on this treatise, it occurs to me that I am a bit like a DJ at
times—a sort of literary mixologist—diving into the works and thoughts of
various authors whose ideas are most fascinating to me, and whose world-views
have shed the most light on the peculiarities of my own radically altered reality.
Scratch a little Terence McKenna in here, a little of David Bohm and the other
physicists in there, Sogyal Rinpoche and the Tibetans to provide the heavy bass
beat, throw in some Strassman and Shulgin for the technical details, some Joseph
Campbell for a bit of magic, mythology, and historical transcendence. You get
the picture. All these radical ideas floating around in the ether, visible to my
mind and flashing like neon birds of paradise. While with my own plodding
discourse, I try to make some sense out of what I have been through over the last
few years.
At first, I was particularly interested in books such as those by McKenna,
Strassman, and Shulgin, which directly shed light on the tryptamine experience.
But these days, six years into this life-changing journey that blasted me to the far
reaches of the universe, I am more likely to be reading Tibetan or Hindu
cosmology, or the modern genius of Ervin Laszlo or Joseph Campbell, than any
books specifically about entheogens.
There are two notable exceptions. First, I continue to be enthralled by the
efforts of former LSD researcher and psychiatrist Stanislav Grof to map the
transpersonal realms. I think that history will regard Grof’s contributions to our
understanding of the unconscious as important as those of Carl Jung or Sigmund
Freud and that he will be seen as Jung’s true heir. Grof’s work has proven to be a
grounding reaffirmation of my own extraordinary experiences and has thus
helped keep me from going insane. It should not, therefore, be surprising that I
will be making numerous references to a number of his books throughout this
one.
The second exception is a fascinating book by Jeremy Narby, a Swiss/
Canadian anthropologist, called The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of
Knowledge, which I like to periodically reread, since I find I resonate so much
with Narby’s own personal experience. Narby’s world gets completely turned
upside down when—after three years of living with various tribes in the Upper
Amazon—he finally decides to try ayahuasca. After that single experience,
Narby finds his reality and worldview split asunder. Then, with a somewhat
delayed reaction, he embarks on a radical, tryptamine-inspired intellectual
adventure of his own.
He begins with a reconsideration of the possibility that what the shamans
had been telling him all along was literally true: that drinking ayahuasca opens
the inner consciousness to a world of practical information and that the
ayahuasca actually tells them things. Narby comes to regard the two giant
fluorescent boa constrictors he hallucinated after drinking ayahuasca as, in fact,
his own DNA talking to him. I’ll leave the rest of the story for you to discover
yourself, but can sum it up as the tale of a rigid material-reductionist who—
when confronted by a reality greater than he had previously considered—finds
himself knocked clean out of his intellectual box.
It is an excellent book: amusing, human, and very readable. Since Narby is
a trained scientist, he presents a lot of fascinating facts on the way to his
hypothesis that tryptamines allow us to tune in to a global wavelength of
communication that is produced by DNA, which is the same in all living things,
differing only in code, and has been unchanged on Earth since the existence of
the first single-celled life forms almost four billion years ago. What is most
interesting to me in this book, however, is how similar Narby’s intellectual
journey was to my own, in the sense that—through our tryptamine experiences
—we were both flung to a point light-years away from our philosophical starting
points.
*16 There, our intellectual adventures became journeys back to ourselves
and toward a heightened understanding of our own reality. Everything has
changed in our worlds, but nothing has. Nothing has changed, but everything
has. After having experienced this, both Jeremy Narby and myself have had to
try and explain those experiences for our own elucidation. While reading The
Cosmic Serpent I realized that one of the finest things you can hope to bring into
this world is an idea.
Narby’s book also contains some fascinating facts about consciousness. For
example, did you know that when you look at this book, you are not really
seeing it? Rather, you are seeing an internal 3D reproduction that is constructed
by your brain. The photons of light reflected by the page strike the retinas in
your eyes; they break it down into electrochemical information, and then send
that on to your brain, where nerve cells separate the information into categories:
form, color, movement, depth, and so on. Then the brain puts it all back together,
virtually instantly, into a coherent image that forms the neurological basis of our
consciousness—which is a complete mystery to science.
Now that’s enough to keep anybody thinking for a while. But consider a
corollary to these facts about our vision: this process requires the presence of
light. In the dark, we see nothing. In the dark, all we can visually perceive is the
lack of light. So the neurological basis of “hallucinations” (and dreams) is totally
outside of the purview of current science. If we do not really understand how we
see an actual object in front of us in broad daylight, then how can we hope to
understand how we “see” something that is not externally even “there?”
Thus, there is currently no way to neurologically explain the fields of
intense light that I “saw” just before I “saw” my dead friend Brigid that night in
New Orleans, nor the tunnel of white light that is common to nearly every
5MDE that I have had, let alone the inner visual phenomena that I witness
during the experience. Somehow, in the depths of a 5-MeO-DMT voyage, while
my body still occupies the physical realm where light and darkness are “real”
quantities (supposedly fixed and immutable), a tremendous light—brighter than
any I have known—is produced from somewhere inside of my mind. And on
that occasion in New Orleans, according to the testimony of a sober witness,
some of this light apparently escaped my physical body as my Soul crossed
between the boundaries of the living and the dead. Science would say such a
thing is impossible, but in this case science admits that it cannot even begin to
understand. Any way you look at it, this strange and mystical event confirmed
for me—once and for all—that tryptamines provide a direct link to the sacred
realm.
Up until this point, the vast majority of my 5-MeO-DMT experiences had
involved an ecstatic aspect. And while they had been mind-blowing and aweinspiring enough to ensure respect, they had also generally been enjoyable to the
degree that I sometimes described the experience as a “cosmic orgasm.” This
joyful and loving aspect changed within the course of two experiences, the first
of which was the All Saints Eve’ experience.
The second experience that affected my ability to smoke 5-MeO-DMT, and
the very nature of the 5MDE itself, was an accident that occurred a little over a
month after All Saints’ Eve. I decided to break my 5-MeO-DMT sabbatical to
coincide with the visit of a good friend from Australia. He is a brilliant artist and
an active seeker of curious things. With a lifetime of varied experiences behind
him, I was keen to introduce him to 5-MeO-DMT, even though he himself
appeared a little dubious. I had recently obtained a glass vial of 5-MeO-DMT
that I was told was 99.5 percent pure, as had been all the samples I had seen
from research chemical companies. However, this new batch of 5-MeO-DMT
was an orange color, more like the extracted DMTs I had seen. And since all the
5-MeO-DMT I’d previously encountered had been totally white, I was curious to
see if there would be any difference in effect with this orange material.
I had already become quite ritualistic about my 5-MeO-DMT use, and the
sanctity of the 5MDE had been vitally reinforced by the All Saints’ Eve visit of
my dead friend. Around midnight, on an evening with no full moon, my
Australian friend and I were joined by my regular 5-MeO-DMT partner, Captain
Urquhart. He had never successfully “released” on 5-MeO-DMT, so he generally
did not partake in smoking any longer himself, but he was very familiar with my
behavior when I did.
I agreed to go first, and weighed out three large doses using an accurate
scale. What happened next should be taken as a warning to all 5-MeO-DMT
aficionados, and act as a reminder of the fact that we have absolutely no clue
about the power of this substance once we inhale it.
I smoked the first dose in a glass pipe with a screen and a little bit of weed.
Around this time, I had been studying the literature regarding DMT on Erowid
(www.erowid.org), the best entheogenic information resource on the Internet. I
had been reading a lot about not burning the DMT, but instead allowing it to
vaporize. So I was trying to keep the flame of the lighter as far from the 5-MeODMT as I could while still volatizing it. I must have undershot due to this
technique, and I had a mild experience during which I never really “released”:
my consciousness didn’t leave my body or the room, despite the fact that I saw a
variety of mild visual phenomena.
Methods for Smoking Tryptamines
After much experimentation I have settled on the following simple
method for smoking 5-MeO-DMT. Using a long glass pipe (a
bubbler works fine and cools the smoke) with a pipe screen, place
a tiny amount of herb (mint, tobacco, whatever you prefer) into the
bowl, with the 5-MeO-DMT on top. Torch it good, inhaling very
slowly, and fill your lungs to their maximum capacity with the
smoke. (Smaller initial dosages allow you to fill your lungs with all
the available smoke without fear.) You should be on a bed or on
the floor with cushions around you and any breakable objects
placed out of reach. Retain the smoke as long as possible, until
you can see the effects: your visual reality begins to dissolve into
fractals. Then exhale.
If for some reason the hit apparently has no effect on the first
attempt (though it always should if you follow this simple method),
do not increase the dosage. Simply replace the screen with a
clean one (very important, in order to avoid any unprocessed
residue that would increase the dose) and try again. Other
methods can also work (such as “chasing the dragon” on a piece
of tinfoil), but I have found this simple approach to be best. A fully
inhaled 15+ mg hit of 5-MeO-DMT is practically impossible for
anyone to escape.
The first advice I was ever given about 5-MeO-DMT—by the
brother who turned me on to it (and who was repeating the words
that he had been told when he first smoked it)—remains the best
guidance: “After you smoke it and breathe out, try to stay in the
light. If you get out of the light, there will be all kinds of creatures
and strange things that will want to distract you and talk to you.
But if you stay in the light as long as you can, then it will take you
all the way.” This has certainly proven to be my experience, and I
pass this advice on to every novice who asks me about 5-MeODMT.
I have found that it is best to smoke tryptamines three or four
hours after a healthy light meal, one that doesn’t contain meat.
Apprentice ayahuasca shamans eat light meals of fish and
plantains during their months of training. (Fish contains tryptophan
and bananas contain vitamin B6
, both of which are required to
produce serotonin.) A vegetarian meal is also a good option, but
avoid fried foods.
Drinking large amounts of water, tea, or other liquids before
smoking 5-MeO-DMT is not desirable, although it is a good idea to
drink plenty of water earlier in the day. Alcohol should not have
been consumed, and one’s mind should be as clear and
uncluttered as possible. 5-MeO-DMT should be experienced free
of any other chemical distractions—smoking it while on acid or
mushrooms is for souls braver than mine! Mixing with MDMA
should be strictly avoided; this combination has resulted in
negative experiences that appeared similar in character to
overdoses of tryptamines alone. If during the 5MDE you think
someone is having trouble breathing and looks like he or she
might vomit, roll the person gently into the recovery position, and
vomiting will happen if it needs to. Generally if the person does
vomit, he or she will afterward relax into an easy experience, with
the blockage—both physical and mental—now cleared.
Smoking 5-MeO-DMT at the dosages mentioned here is a
heavy thing, and should not be taken casually. But it’s best to
avoid making too big of a deal out of it as well. This can be a real
tightrope at times. If you are with those who have never smoked it
before, it is natural to want to tell them that the experience they
are about to undergo is sacred and amazing, but you should also
note that the easiest way to get to the highest realms is by having
no expectations. Maintain a dignified presence but, if at all
possible, create an air of humor around the proceedings. Such a
lack of tension, in my experience, leads to more loving and joyful
journeys for the majority of participants involved.
After approximately five minutes, I was sufficiently recovered to
remark about what tricky stuff tryptamines can be. Remembering the fact that
the body’s tolerance to DMT apparently builds rapidly—which means that the
full effects from it are not obtained if it is smoked in too-frequent a succession—
I wondered if this was also the case with 5-MeO-DMT. Disappointed with the
mild results that the evening had so far provided, I decided that I might as well
try another hit, something I had never done before.
Going back to the kitchen, I placed a fresh hit on top of the apparently
completely burnt first hit, since there was still quite a bit of weed in the bowl
(too much). Then I went back to the living room, where I repeated the same
procedure of trying to vaporize the 5-MeO-DMT, this time receiving an even
less effective sub-threshold hit. This appeared to confirm that the information
about tolerance applied to both tryptamines, not just DMT. (This conjecture has
since been disproved, however.
*17
) Once that hit wore off, I was fairly
convinced that I had been ripped off on this particular purchase of orange 5-
MeO-DMT, since it seemed a lot weaker than the white 5-MeO-DMT I had
previously encountered. I passed the pipe to my smoking partner who confirmed
that it appeared to be empty of any 5-MeO-DMT as I lay on the floor feeling
mild effects that were far from entheogenic.
After a while I sat up, and the three of us smoked a joint of good weed and
discussed again how tricky the 5-MeO-DMT could be. My friend from Australia
was by then quite skeptical about all of the extraordinary things he had been
hearing about the compound from me. My other friend remarked how there had
been none of the distinct strong smell that he had experienced in other sessions:
a warning that I should have recognized then and there.
The living room was darkly lit with lamps, so—perturbed by the “failure”
of this new supply of 5-MeO-DMT—I picked up the pipe and went to the corner
of room where I could better examine the remnants in the bowl under the light.
In doing so, I noticed a dark little nugget of a crystal. Like the proverbial fool
rushing in where angels fear to tread, I put the pipe to my lips and thoughtlessly
torched the rock with the full force of the lighter. The room erupted in the
distinctive overpowering smell that signifies 5-MeO-DMT and I immediately
took in a tremendous hit that sent my senses reeling even though I had not yet
breathed out.
“Shit, you’ve done it now haven’t you?!” my Australian friend exclaimed,
while Captain Urquhart just looked wide-eyed and flashed me a big grin as he
took the pipe from my hands. The intense fractalization of the world had begun
well before I exhaled, and I don’t remember getting to the ground.
Some thirty-five minutes later (not that I had a clue of how much time had
passed) I reentered this world and realized that I was propped up against the
couch with wet towels draped around me and two worried-looking friends trying
to get me to communicate with them.
“It’s M.O.M.’s Ball,” I shouted and laughed tremendously, feeling
absolutely fantastic and totally energized in every cell of my body. “We knew it
all the time! You knew it all the time! It’s M.O.M.’s Ball!”
M.O.M.’s Ball
A few words of explanation are required at this point to see the
connection between M.O.M.’s Ball and my 5-MeO-DMT
experiences.
Mardi Gras is a centuries-old pre-Lenten carnival held in New
Orleans each year that is world famous for the revelry surrounding
its parades and the accompanying balls. Each of the great
parades is put on by a “Krewe,” which usually goes by some
mythological name like Bacchus, Rex, or Zulu. Many of these
Krewes are like secret societies, and one needs to be a member in
order to participate in their parade or attend their ball. Over the
years, Krewe membership has become a political- and societybased situation (not unlike the Rotary Club or the Freemasons in
other cities), with some Krewes being notably stiff and stuffy. As a
reaction to this “uptown” stuffiness, some thirty years ago a group
of the city’s underground luminaries (bar owners, musicians,
bikers, dope dealers, and so on) got together and decided that
they would form their own Krewe, blow off the parade, and go
straight to the party. This party is called the Mystics, Orphans, and
Misfits’ Ball but is more commonly called M.O.M.’s, and it has
become a unique New Orleans Mardi Gras institution and an event
like no other. On the Saturday night before Fat Tuesday (Mardi
Gras Day) approximately twenty-five hundred freaks gather in their
finest costumery for this over-the-top, invitation-only, often X-rated
event, that is the hottest ticket for Mardi Gras, and arguably the
world’s greatest psychedelic costume party.
M.O.M.’s Ball is not for the light-hearted, since a lot of crazy
shit can go down there. The crowd is mostly between their late
twenties to late fifties. They are serious partiers who have come
from all over America— with the best of whatever drugs they have
—to enjoy this unique night. The party has an air of menace about
it at times (an extreme goodtime- with-an-edge, not unlike New
Orleans itself), and this fact was taught to me in the most
resounding manner when I attended my first M.O.M.’s Ball. Which,
oddly, was the only M.O.M.’s Ball ever held outside of Mardi Gras
—a special once-in-a-lifetime event on December 31, 1999—and
a night that I will never forget.
The weirdness began around an exchange that occurred
between myself and my girlfriend of the time and an older swinger
couple that came up to tell us how gorgeous she looked. As the
two women were talking, the husband quickly became a pain in
my ear, bragging that he had backstage passes and a limo
outside, while his jaw ground away. “Classic cocaine abuse,” I
thought to myself (I can’t stand talkative cokeheads), and I quickly
made a move to get away from this couple and back onto the
dance floor. This resulted in a mildly combative exchange with the
husband over the fact that we didn’t want to “party” with them.
Trying to be as polite as possible I gathered my girl away, after
accepting a token drink as we departed. That should have been
the end of the matter, except for the fact that some twenty minutes
later all hell started to break loose inside of my head.
It started out fun enough, the massive rush of a large dose of
good LSD, with the accompanying rippling waves of changing
reality. A number of years previously, I had been a keen student of
acid, almost a disciple you could say, and I had been lucky
enough to be around enough high-quality acid (in foreign lands) to
allow me the opportunity to explore my personal limits. Thus, I had
taken what Terence McKenna would describe as “heroic doses” of
both liquid and freshly dipped blotter.
Although I had consumed LSD in the 1000–1500 microgram
range on numerous occasions, I had stopped taking what I
considered “giant doses,” having tired of journeys to where the
entire world was made of blue electricity and I found myself deadended down some hopeless rat’s alley, exhausted from the
arduous experience. Even having willingly taken LSD in these
large quantities, I was not prepared for the experience that I went
through on what I presume must have been a hell of a lot of LSD
(and who knows what else) contained within that spiked drink.
At first I felt as if I was becoming some kind of a god and that
the passing of the millennium was allowing me to enter a new
phase of cerebral development: I began to imagine that I was
controlling the party with my mind. Deciding that I was now in
control of how much fun could be had, I first considered
summoning various friends from around the world, before I
decided that instead I would change the musicians onstage—a
white rock band called The Radiators who are the M.O.M.’s house
band—into something more funky. Voila! Suddenly the Radiators
turned black and grew afros, morphing into Bootsy Collins’ Rubber
Band or, at least in my mind, into something like it. I was
experiencing what I regard as one of the classic differences
between a synthetic psychedelic like LSD and the natural
entheogens like psilocybin or DMT—the latter can help you find
union-with-God, while too much of the former can make you think
you are a god!
*18 And while I thought I was the epitome of cool, I
was apparently becoming increasingly physically out-of-control,
and then (so I was later told) dropped my pants around my ankles
in the middle of the dance floor and began to wave my large whiteboy ass around in the air. It was only the fact that my best friend in
the world was visiting from Europe that saved me, since he was
one of a few people who could have controlled me in any shape or
form at this point, and he and my girlfriend managed to get me
outside and onto the levee banks by the Mississippi before the
acid really took control.
That was only the beginning of what was by far the heaviest
LSD trip I have ever been on and one of the heaviest experiences
on any compound I have had, before I discovered 5-MeO-DMT.
(The only experience comparable had occurred ten years earlier,
also in New Orleans, when I accidently ate over 100 hits of
Orange Sunshine acid in powdered form. On that occasion I had
the only “true hallucinations” of my life, and came to in a hotel in
Belize City some 36 hours later with no recollection of how I had
gotten there.) My memories of this experience are vague at best,
as I spent the following five hours virtually comatose, only
occasionally coming in and out of “reality.” But I do recall that there
was an archetypal battle between Good and Evil going on in my
head. In many ways I was on a classic shamanic voyage, traveling
in other-dimensional worlds, as I experienced a form of
psychospiritual death and rebirth.
It was a mythic LSD experience, my shamanic initiation on the
cusp of the new millennium, and a journey far beyond any I had
taken in nearly a decade. My few lucid moments corresponded
with that peculiar rationality that one can get on acid—that sense
that you know that the things you are seeing are not really
happening. But in the other periods, when I was completely
outside of myself, I was forced to abandon any attempts at
rationality. And it was during those five hours that I came closest
to the realms that I now access during a 5-MeO-DMT experience.
M.O.M.’s and my 5MDEs
At first I thought that this was the obvious link to my 5-MeO-DMT
experiences, since 95 percent of my 5MDE’s end with me exiting
through my own personal M.O.M.’s Ball as I am transported back
from the wild other dimensions that 5-MeO-DMT allows me to
access. I am “dropped back off” at my previous “high point” so to
speak, and thus I can reoccupy this reality with a minimum of
disorientation, with the heavy trip that I took on that New Year’s
Eve at M.O.M.’s Ball acting as some kind of preparation for my
subsequent discovery of the tryptamine dimension. But I was
puzzled that this phenomenon has continued despite my strong
faith in the spiritual aspects of the 5-MeO-DMT experience, given
that M.O.M.’s Ball is very hedonistic, and not exactly something
one would ever call a spiritual affair, excepting perhaps in the
Dionysian sense.
Now I have come to a different and more complex conclusion.
There are two reasons why I currently discredit my original notion.
First, I question why I would always “get dropped back” at
M.O.M.’s Ball. I have undoubtedly been very high at other points in
my life, such as my neo-mythical night on Orange Sunshine dust,
and yet I have never been dropped off back at that night, nor at
any of the other psychedelic places I have been (such as eating
mushrooms at night on the pyramids in Tikal, or on my knees fullof-wonder in front of the Temple of Stars on the playa at Burning
Man). So why is it always M.O.M.’s Ball? And not the comatose
levee-stricken aspect of my new millennium M.O.M.’s Ball
experience, but rather, a super-charged archetype of M.O.M.’s
Ball, which seems more like some form of Paradise while I’m in
there, with no obvious reminders of any real-world M.O.M.’s Ball
that I have actually attended. The other reason that I now find it
difficult to relate any more recent 5MDE to my first M.O.M.’s Ball
acid trip is because LSD and 5-MeO-DMT produce such different
effects.
5-MeO-DMT takes me over completely, transporting me to
dimensions far stranger than anything in my imagination. Yet,
because of this overpowering totality, what I experience seems so
utterly real and convincing. Realer than reality, these are
McKenna’s “true hallucinations.” Something about the experience
feels inherently organic, natural, and holy—even if synthesized
material is used. On the other hand, at the boundary limits of LSD,
it always feels artificial, unreal, and “weird science,” no matter how
hard I trip, and my hallucinations are recognized as such.
Consider, for example, the shattering hallucinations of my grand
Orange Sunshine dust adventure. On that night, the billboards
breakdanced and talked to me, giant statues came down off their
podiums (flashing in and out of the traffic), and, for a while, if I
rested my eyes on anything it began to dissolve into molecules,
then atoms, and beyond, so I had to constantly keep moving my
head so I wouldn’t see right through things. Yet as amazingly real
as it all seemed—far more real than TV or any movie could ever
be—my consciousness still hung on the fact that it was not real.
As I moved toward those invisible boundaries between the worlds,
my ego was still able to influence enough pull that I could never
truly escape consensus reality, I could only warp it to the extreme.
With 5-MeO-DMT, I am totally transported, and I cannot deny the
supernatural reality that I encounter.
Grace Slick is said to have once remarked that dropping LSD
was like being sucked up a straw, while smoking DMT was like
being shot out of a cannon; this is a fairly accurate simile, even
though she was talking about the gentler of the two naturally
occurring tryptamines! It seems to me that DMT and 5-MeO-DMT
—and to a lesser extent mushrooms, peyote, and San Pedro—can
open you up to a natural place that is closer to the true center of
existence. In contrast, the synthetic analogues that human beings
have invented—LSD, DIPT, DOM, ketamine, and so on—can only
reveal a crueler mirror-world of that reality—a place where
ultimately our human frailties betray us.
We may have split the atom and escaped the atmosphere (in
the vain hope of improving on what nature has already provided),
but no laboratory will ever better the entheogenic perfection of 5-
MeO-DMT: a product of G/d’s nature, found in plants, animals, and
possibly even nestled next to one’s own brain within the pineal
gland. For myself, it has been the most effective conduit to this
sacred reality. This leads me to my “more complex” speculation as
to why my 5-MeO-DMT experiences so often end at M.O.M.’s Ball.
Suppose that G/d wanted to talk to you in an indirect and yet
totally effective way. Imagine that you are at your favorite party
ever, a party that is more than just a party: a hedonic Garden of
Eden, blissful Norse heaven of Valhalla, and the Islamic version of
Paradise, all rolled into one. Everyone is there—your friends, your
family, and those whom you love and admire, all present as
magnificently costumed archetypal images. Now imagine that with
each conversation you have that night, every interaction with
friends and strangers alike, you are actually talking to G/d. Each
being is a variation of the millions of possible permutations,
themselves only a small fraction of the forms in which G/d can
appear.
This idea is one of the cornerstones of mythology: the
intervention of the Divine disguised within the physical workings of
the mortal world. But can you imagine how effective such a
strategy would be? G/d passing you a cold beer, G/d with a joint in
his hand, G/d talking to you in a thousand loving voices, G/d
dressed in silk, feathers, and lingerie— wiggling her tight little ass
in your lap as she whispers eternal wisdoms in your ear . . .
This is now what I have decided is happening to me at the
end of my 5MDE : my visible tryptamine gods have essentially
become M.O.M.’s Ball, and M.O.M.’s Ball has become them, the
Divine personified in that arena where I am the happiest and most
free. Through M.O.M.’s Ball and its rainbow-plumed inhabitants,
G/d talks to me. Teaches me. Loves me. Guides me.
Until I eventually have to go home.
My friend from Australia—who had attended M.O.M.’s Ball in New
Orleans with me on several occasions—looked at me and said, “What the fuck
are you talking about, Roc? This isn’t M.O.M.’s Ball. You’re in your bloody
living room.” But my other friend laughed and said that it was all right, since
believing that I was at M.O.M.’s Ball was the way I often made my way out of
my 5MDEs and that I looked like I would be okay. I remember exclaiming,
“Okay?! I’ve never felt better in my life!”
Then, for the first and only time, I consciously reentered my 5MDE after
coming out of it. Before I took leave of this world, I remember having the
exquisite sensation of literally diving back into another dimension, into an
apparently ongoing party in my mind, which is perhaps my own twisted idea of
heaven: my own personal 5-MeO-DMT “M.O.M.’s Ball.”
The next thing I remember was coming around again—apparently another
ten minutes or so later—stretched out on the floor in my living room with a pair
of now very concerned and somewhat pissed-off friends. My buddies had taken
care of my catatonic body for close to forty minutes after I had first exhaled that
gigantic hit of evidently perfectly fine 5-MeO-DMT, orange or not.
What had happened was that I had melted the two hits of 5-MeO-DMT into
a single “rock” within the excess of weed in the bowl of the pipe. By trying to
vaporize rather than burn the chemical, and by not changing the screen between
attempts, I had created a single dose that was probably in excess of 40 mg—an
amount that may have been strong enough to stop me from breathing (and
possibly even kill me). My Australian friend—who has had a lot more
experience with junkies, drug store cowboys, and the type of users likely to
overdose than I have—was really upset, as he was convinced I had nearly
checked out permanently. My vital signs had been weak and my breathing
virtually non-existent. My two capable friends had been considering mouth-tomouth at one point, before rolling me into the recovery position in case I needed
to vomit. They had then hauled me up against the couch and draped me in wet
towels, which had only momentarily interrupted my festivities at my private
“M.O.M.’s Ball.”
I could tell by the length of time of the whole trip—around 40 to 45
minutes, probably the longest trip I’ve ever taken—and the look of serious
concern on my regular smoking partner’s face that this really had been a close
one and that I had been as physically non-responsive as they described. But,
perversely, I felt unbelievable—better than I ever had in my life. I came out of
my near overdose totally ecstatic from the experience! As close to physical death
as I may have come, to me it had been nothing but pure rapture.
After these two journeys, my 5MDEs seem to have grown in sheer power, even
though I have cut my dosage down by 25 percent or more. Now my visits to the
Tryptamine Palace conclude in a sense of awe and wonder that feels far closer to
terror than rapture. Terror is not actually the correct word. I am experiencing
Rudolf Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans: the overpowering sense of
awe that envelopes someone who confronts the Divine, an ancient timeless
energy that is far greater than our existence or our imagination.
It is this sense of sacred awe at the tremendous power I experience that I
now return with from my experiences. These days I often declare as I come out
of the journey that, “I have no idea of the power of what I am dealing with,” and
that my friends should, “Under no circumstances, ever let me touch that stuff
again!” It now takes every iota of my courage to return to travel further into that
unfathomable zone. Those who have witnessed my experiences since the
beginning say that in each trip I appear to be on a literal journey and that I pass
many of the same mileposts along the way (such as when I declare, “I am there.
It exists!” or “We knew it all along!”). But over time I have begun to reach each
milepost faster (apparently better knowing the way) before quickly getting to the
point where I can continue into the unknown, dissolving into that intense
singularity. Most recently, I seem to have stopped “journeying” at all, and now I
virtually immediately “drop in” to the resonant mystical state, with none of the
signposts that used to mark my way. A friend offered the description that you are
“a drop, which returns to the ocean”
*19 on 5-MeO-DMT —an excellent
metaphor in my opinion.
5-MeO-DMT has taught me fear, a powerful lesson for someone who has
never feared authority, the ridicule of my peers, loneliness, or the possibility of
physical injury. Yet now there is a force that I respect above all others, and one
that I know I will never conquer. When I return from a 5MDE, I am blown away
by the force I have encountered on the other side. One hundred percent
completely, totally, and inconceivably, blown away. Period. The kid gloves are
now apparently off; I have journeyed to that place too many times to expect any
sympathy.
These days, when I knock on the doors of the Tryptamine Palace, I am no
longer greeted with unconditional love, but instead, I am reminded of the
responsibility that comes with ultimate knowledge: an undeniable responsibility
to myself, to my tribe, to my species, to my planet. This is the terrifying
responsibility that comes with such an awesome love. Every shaman knows it,
Siddhartha Gautama knew it, Lao Tzu knew it, Christ knew it, St. Augustine
knew it, and Krishnamurti, too—all knowledge comes with a price. Or as Hunter
S. Thompson liked to put it, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”
T
FOUR
Welcome to the Power Zone
Ecstasy! . . . In common parlance . . . ecstasy is fun . . . But ecstasy is
not fun. Your very soul is seized and shaken until it tingles. After all,
who will choose to feel undiluted awe. . . ? The unknowing vulgar abuse
the word, and we must recapture its full and terrifying sense. . . .
R. GORDON WASSON, “THE HALLUCINOGENIC FUNGI
OF MEXICO: AN INQUIRY INTO THE ORIGINS OF THE
RELIGIOUS IDEA AMONG PRIMITIVE PEOPLES,”
BOTANICAL MUSEUM LEAFLETS HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 1961
The strong man dares to be alone with God.
NATIVE AMERICAN PROVERB
wo months after my accidental overdose, I returned to my homeland in the
South Pacific after an absence of several years. I was still full of 5-MeODMT fever, and greatly excited by the prospect of introducing my oldest and
dearest friends to the universal truths one can learn by smoking tryptamines. But
to my surprise and disappointment, I could not find anyone even willing to try it.
Everyone had kids, jobs, responsibilities, and the idea of a cosmic wake-up
call that might jolt them out of their semi-comfortable reality did not seem to
appeal. People these days want party drugs, happy drugs, horny drugs, keepme-
awake drugs, make-me-forget-about-my-job drugs, and not many are game for a
“heroic dose” of a full-blown entheogen. Most of my friends just looked
uncomfortable when I declared that smoking 5-MeO-DMT had caused me to
find my G/d. A lot of people, I realized, just aren’t ready for that.
I also went home determined to improve my rather tenuous relationship
with my father—a result of the compassionate desire for reconciliation that a
faith-based epiphany can release in an individual. Alas, that intention failed
miserably, when a financial argument (my father’s favorite kind) spiraled out of
my control and resulted in me demanding that he appear at court to sign certain
papers. After that, he ceremoniously disowned me, telling me never to come
near him or my mom again. (He’s since gotten over that, at least.)
Dispirited by the turn of affairs and disgusted by my own lack of selfcontrol, I spent the night on the farm of two of my closest childhood friends. I
again attempted, unsuccessfully, to convince them that they needed to try 5-
MeO-DMT. Finally, I decided to smoke some myself—partially as a
demonstration for my friends, and partially to dispel the bad mindset that had
resulted from the negative dealings with my father. I didn’t have a particularly
accurate scale with me, so I made the dose on what I figured to be the small side
—a precaution that probably made no difference, since this was the beginning of
what I now refer to as my “power” experiences.
Simba is my best friend from high school, while I literally grew up with
Charley, his wife, since our families were friends from before either of us was
born. Both of them were in the adjoining kitchen when I smoked the 5-MeODMT while sitting on their living room floor in the company of Simba’s older
brother Johnny. Simba and Johnny are more like brothers to me than simply
friends, since their family home was a constant refuge from my own while I was
a troubled teen.
I took a solid hit on my long wooden pipe and felt the swirl of that other
reality, even as I handed the pipe to John, and I remember seeing the twinkle in
his eye as he watched the drug grip me. I exhaled, and the next thing I knew I
was coming back wide-eyed and shouting, stretched out on the floor with all
three of my friends on their knees—laughing with tears in their eyes as they held
on to me, apparently by request.
“Roc,” I heard Johnny bark, addressing me by my childhood name, “What’s
Mother’s Ball?”
But I couldn’t reply. I was too blown away by what I had just experienced.
I remembered Terence McKenna saying that if he had to use one word to
describe DMT and one word to describe 5-MeO-DMT, it would be “magic” for
the former and “force” for the latter.
*20 Well, now I knew exactly what he
meant! All of my experiences up to this point had been so full of love and
wonder that I had thought that he was being pedantic. But the power level had
somehow been cranked up another few notches, and I felt as if I had just come
within a hair’s breadth of getting fried.
With eyes as wide as saucers and feeling extraordinarily happy to be alive, I
ran out into the backyard of the farmhouse hooting and hollering, before flinging
myself face down on the grass and embracing the earth. My friends, who
continued to be amused, were quite impressed by the whole show. I think this
was the first time I declared that someone should, “Bury that vial in the ground
and never let me near it again.” I remember the overwhelming sense that I had
no idea of the force of this substance that I was toying with. My friends were
quite sure that they didn’t want to try the 5-MeO-DMT after watching my ride.
Actually, it was my reaction to my inner experience that dissuaded them, as
during the 5MDE I was sitting and lying down peacefully. (This has continued to
be typical of my experiences with 5-MeO-DMT, which tend to be heavier than
those of most others: only upon coming out of them do I become so mentally
excited, physically agitated, and over-awed by the sheer power of what I have
experienced. I have learned to go last in the circle so as not to dissuade others!)
Eventually, everybody said their “goodnights” and went off to bed.
The next morning I rose around dawn and drove my rental car a hundred
miles to the nearest international airport in order to fly back to my Caribbean
home via the United States. I went through ticketing with a minimum of
pleasantries, and then sat silent with my thoughts for the entire thirteen-hour
flight to Los Angeles. My flight from LAX to Miami got bumped, so I called an
old girlfriend who happened to live nearby in Venice Beach and arranged to take
her out for lunch. (Coincidentally, she was the same person who had given me
The Archaic Revival.) I found a cab—a big American van painted blue and
yellow—and I jumped in with two other guys to share a ride, since we were
heading in the same direction. One of the guys had a surfboard, and out of sheer
boredom I struck up a conversation about surfing and mentioned that I now
mostly “kite” surfed. The other occupant of the cab was a dark, brooding chap
with a painful-looking pierced chin, who had remained completely silent
throughout the entire exchange up to that point. But he now looked across at me
and asked how I liked kite surfing, his English betraying an obvious Israeli
accent. I replied that I liked it a lot.
“My wife just left me for a famous kite surfer,” he replied, introducing
himself as “Yaron.” And from that potentially unpleasant beginning, we moved
like lightning through a discussion that included various Caribbean islands, the
blue rock called larimar, Atlantian pyramids under the sea, New Orleans and
Mardi Gras, Dr. Albert Hofmann and his closest associates, some of their
children, and then Yaron asked me if I was familiar with PIHKAL and TIHKAL,
the Shulgins’ unique contributions to the world of entheogenic literature. By
then I figured that our conversation had gone so far, so fast, that I might as well
just “throw it out there,” so I made a statement to the effect that I was a lot less
affected by the ongoing drought of quality liquid LSD in the world than I might
have thought that I would have been, purely because I had discovered the
wonders of smoking 5-MeO-DMT.
When I said that, my newfound friend Yaron looked at me and declared,
“Brother, we have to talk. Each year I go down to Mexico and hunt for the
toads.” Enough said. We swapped e-mail addresses, shook hands, and the cab
arrived at my destination in Venice Beach. Ultimately, that conversation—which
took less than ten minutes—would lead me to the living source of organic 5-
MeO-DMT. Once again, coincidence and synchronicity in the tryptamine
universe came about with the same regularity as the tides, or the movement of
the sun and the moon.
Six months after spending Christmas in my homeland, I was in Boca del Drago
on an island in Panama near the border of Costa Rica, staying at a friend’s house
in the middle of nowhere. As so often occurs with tryptamine ceremonies, a
stranger turned up with intimate connections and references, and it was decided
that we would all dip into my tryptamine supplies that night. I only had a small
amount of 5-MeO-DMT and DMT with me, so I decided to share the 5-MeODMT with the others, and try the DMT myself, as my experiences with 5-MeODMT had grown in power to such a degree that I could only approach doing it
every few months.
Our session came close to not happening at all, since at one point the
evening disintegrated into a fairly heavy verbal battle between my host’s wife,
Nina, and myself. Nina is a very intelligent, well-educated woman who works on
massive AIDS projects in Africa; as she sat, drinking her way through a bottle of
wine and listening to me talk, it became increasingly obvious that she could not
handle the way I was liberally using words like “faith” and “G/d.” Our
“conversation” became more and more combative, and as we argued, her
scientific-rationalist opposition struck me as being virtually identical to the kind
of argument I would have used prior to my own initiation to 5-MeO-DMT.
Finally, as her opposition to my claims and theories became outright hostile, I
declared that everyone had to stop drinking and that we needed to sober up for
an hour or two before we took to smoking the “mystery” in question.
Around midnight we all made our way up to the rooftop terrace where the
ceremony was to take place. The night was a blanket of brilliant stars, and the
house lay surrounded by thick native jungle, adding to the growing sense of
expectation. Nathan (our mystery guest, who no one knew) volunteered to be the
first to try the 5-MeO-DMT, and he proceeded to embark on one of the most
peaceful, all-knowing, and remarkably coherent 5MDEs that I have ever been
fortunate enough to witness. At one point during the experience he looked
straight at me and asked in a voice filled with wonder, “Will this last forever?” I
had to tell him that it wouldn’t, and that he should hold onto it while he could.
When he finally emerged from his journey, his countenance could only be
described as beatific. He sat in a comfortable chair gazing out at the cosmos, like
a man who had just seen the shining reality implicit in the nature of his own
Soul.
Nina came next, obviously curious after seeing Nathan’s taste of
enlightenment. We moved into a small room just off the terrace to smoke the
pipe, since the wind was playing havoc with our attempts outside. Nina took a
short sharp hit and immediately coughed most of the smoke out, but she was
already on her way. She didn’t remember later that her husband and I had led her
back out onto the terrace to lie down.
During her experience it was as if we were watching the astounded pleasure
of a little kid who has just discovered the ocean for the first time. There were
touches of fear, but most obvious was pure wonder, excitement, and cries of
delight. As she excitedly started to come out of the experience, she insisted that
her husband and I join her on the mattress and hold onto her (much as I
apparently had done while coming out on my friend’s farm). She repeatedly
apologized for being so hardheaded and combative. Later, as rationality slowly
took hold again, she said she could remember hardly anything about the
experience: she had a “white-out,” and she wasn’t sure that it had any meaning
at all. In a white-out—a commonly related phenomena that I have seen on
various occasions—the person, like Nina, comes out of their experience with
clear recollections of some kind of an event, yet half an hour later can only recall
dissolving into the white light and then nothing at all.
Nina’s experience was particularly childlike compared to Nathan’s, who
remained calm throughout his experience, like a wise old man sitting on top of a
mountain. And, in stark contrast to Nina, Nathan retained one of the most
coherent memories of his experience that I have ever witnessed. The differences
between these two experiences have caused me to theorize a possible mechanism
for reincarnation based on the concepts of “polarity,” or “creation by
subtraction.” These ideas, which in truth have circulated in Hindu and Buddhist
philosophies for centuries, have their modern origin in theories proposed by
Aldous Huxley, Peter Russell, and most lately, Bernard Haisch, regarding the
idea that our consciousness is essentially a filter of a far greater universal
consciousness.
Aldous Huxley proposed that our consciousness is a filtered version of
“Mind at Large.” Citing the work of Cambridge philosopher C. D. Broad, he
came to the conclusion that our consciousness is literally unlimited, as indeed it
would be if each of us is indeed a manifestation of an infinite consciousness.
Huxley explained that it is the function of the brain to filter out virtually
everything other than immediate consensual reality, until we are left with what
he described as “a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us
stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.”
1
A potential mechanism for this filtering is proposed by Bernard Haisch in
his book, The God Theory. Naming this mechanism “creation by subtraction,”
Haisch proposes how these filters could progressively allow us to recognize
more and more form out of the undiluted light of Mind:
In optics, the process of creating something (the projected color slide)
involves taking something away. White light may be bright and beautiful
in its own right, but you can’t depict anything using just white light alone.
A world in which everything is precisely and perfectly white would
effectively be an invisible world. By that I do not mean one that you
would see through; rather I mean one that you could look at but still see
nothing, because everything would be exactly the same, a fog of white. In
optics you create by taking away. To create the sky blue, you have to take
away the violet, indigo, green, yellow, orange, and red.
The esoteric traditions tell us that creation by subtraction is one of
the fundamental truths underlying reality. . . . [T]hese traditions teach that
creation of the real (the manifest) involves subtraction from infinite
potential . . . By limiting the infinitely possible, you create the finitely real
. . . A replica of our real world can thus be created out of the unlimited
potential of the white light through a process of intelligent subtraction
carried out in space and time. A virtual reality is thus created out of
formless possibility. In fact, motion pictures are a concrete example of
how a filter, the film, by selectively subtracting from a formless potential,
can generate a virtual reality.
2
This filtering of the Undiluted Mind as Divine Light through our evolving
consciousness is what creates the various form-bound deities; until ultimately we
arrive at the unfiltered transcendental formless realization of our own divine
nature when in union-with-G/d—the individual realization of Jesuit
paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of “The Omega Point.”
*21
If 5-
MeO-DMT really does free our consciousness from matter and gives us a
glimpse of what it will be like when we return to the omniscient Mind, freed of
what Alan Watts called our “skin-encapsulated ego,”
3
then it would make sense
that some of us would be closer to making that final recognition of our true
nature (due to the superior development of these necessary “consciousness
filters”) while others would be overwhelmed (and retain little memory), since
they would not yet have developed a consciousness capable of an “unfiltered”
recognition of the true nature of mind, being, and G/d.
It is likely that these more advanced filters are acquired through
contemplation and other methods ascribed to mystical traditions; they may also
come in the form of sudden spontaneous intuitions regarding of the true nature
of reality. It may be that we develop more and more advanced consciousness
filters through a series of births and rebirths. Perhaps some of us have undergone
far more rebirths into this dimension, while others are like children at the
beginning of their explorations in this earthly paradise of matter, with a long,
discovery-filled path of many reincarnations ahead of them.
That night also revealed another mysterious dimension of the 5MDE.
Strassman states that DMT is consumed by the brain quite quickly, and this is
equally the case with 5-MeO-DMT. The brain eats tryptamines like food, and
once that has happened, virtually no traces are left in the system. So by the time
someone comes out of a 5MDE, after fifteen to thirty minutes (depending on
how much was smoked) there is practically none of the 5-MeO-DMT left in his
or her body.
That night under the stars, it was at least forty-five minutes and probably
more after Nathan came out of his experience before Nina took the pipe. I
always allow a participant some time to enjoy the afterglow of the experience.
Then I try to get him or her to express what was seen or felt during the 5MDE,
since this is the period when some people say incredibly interesting things,
almost as if speaking from outside of themselves, most of which they will not
recall when you ask them about their experience again an hour or so later. As I
said before, Nathan had emerged with a remarkably coherent picture of his
5MDE, and I questioned him to get him to express as much of his experience as
possible, due to my own interest in the matter. Then I prepared and administered
the dosage to Nina, after providing her with instructions and describing the sort
of effects she might experience, all of which takes time, and even more so
because the wind was playing havoc on my preparations.
Thus it strikes me as being physically impossible that forty-five to sixty
minutes after Nathan had come out of his experience there could have still been
enough residual 5-MeO-DMT in his body to send him on another trip when Nina
began her own. But during her 5MDE, he sat the whole time staring out at the
stars and randomly shouting out loud exclamations like, “Wow!” and, “How
amazing!”—verbalizations that I thought were totally inappropriate, as Nina was
in the depths of her own experience, and several times I told him to be quiet.
When Nina came out of her experience she demanded a lot of attention from her
husband and me, getting us to lie down on the mattress and hold her as she
recounted what she could of her voyage.
After Nina had finally calmed down, Nathan shook his head and laughed
while he looked at me and declared, “You didn’t warn me about that!” He told
me that as soon as Nina had fallen into her 5MDE, he had gone back into his
own 5MDE without warning—in his own words, “Just as hard, if not harder than
before.” Through one of those strange resonant phenomena that add even more
mystery to the 5MDE, he unquestionably had a second experience, effectively
“piggy-backing” his way into a spontaneous 5MDE. Since then I have learned
that such “contact highs” are not uncommon. I have witnessed them on several
occasions with different participants who had no idea that it might happen, and I
also have experienced the effect to varying degrees myself.
This piggy-backing anomaly should not be confused with a similar one that
I have seen with old acid-heads, whereby a more experienced freak “sucks” the
experience out of a novice tripper upon psychic contact and walks away high,
while the person who actually took the LSD is left trying to figure out how they
have suddenly “come down” (the infamous “acid succubus”). The 5MDE piggybacking phenomenon that I am describing does not seem to have the inherent
vampirism that happens with other substances, since the subject is apparently
unaffected in terms of the strength of their own experience (although sometimes
he or she seems to become calmer), while the second person involved (who is
inevitably still recovering from his or her own 5MDE) embarks on another
experience without warning. (You generally have to have very recently smoked
5-MeO-DMT in order to piggy-back, though spontaneous events can occur in
some individuals if they have smoked 5-MeO-DMT in the past.)
It is my hypothesis that the organic tryptamines rearrange the patterns of
consciousness, making it possible to step through a portal into another reality.
Briefly, after returning to consensus reality, the person’s consciousness remains
connected to a pattern that it is still capable of glimpsing through a window into
the Tryptamine Palace to observe the wonders inside. All it takes is the right
suggestion, and consciousness willingly returns there. Shamans use this space
between the two dimensions to heal, but in ceremonies they generally take
ayahuasca (or peyote, or San Pedro) in doses well below what we would
consider “entheogenic” or “visionary”—doses so small that they could almost be
considered homeopathic. But the shaman has trained his or her sensitivity to that
zone through years of journeying there at full-force, and thus can recontact the
manikari—the healing spirits—with the slightest suggestion.
Shared or “group-mind” experiences are commonly reported with
ayahuasca, an entheogen that is frequently taken in a group. One of the original
names that chemists gave to harmine (a beta-carboline MAOI alkaloid contained
in ayahuasca) when it was first isolated from Banisteriopsis caapi in the 1920s
was “telepathine,” due to the legendary reputation of the Amazonian brew even
then. However, I believe that the piggy-backing phenomena is related to the
apparently telepathic quality of the tryptamines in ayahuasca, rather than the
harmala alkaloids.
I gave my last hit of 5-MeO-DMT to my friend Doug. Since he does not smoke
pot or cigarettes, he coughed the whole thing up and did not achieve a release
experience (even though it looked to me as if he had actually inhaled far more of
the smoke than Nina had managed). He blamed his own high expectations on the
apparent failure. But after having witnessed Nathan and Nina’s solid
experiences, I could only assume that Doug’s mild response was due to his
virgin inability to retain the 5-MeO-DMT and Cannabis smoke in his lungs.
Having now given away all my 5-MeO-DMT supply, I decided that I might
as well try some of the conventional DMT that I had. I loaded my pipe with a
dose at the high end of the range described in TIHKAL, which I realized was
larger than anything I had previously tried. Substantially more DMT than 5-
MeO-DMT is needed to achieve a release, as it is estimated by various sources
to be three to five times weaker. Three “good tokes” seems to be the consensus
on the appropriate dose. But the tiny amount of 5-MeO-DMT needed for release
tends to make me wary of accidentally indulging in too much of any tryptamine!
Sitting cross-legged, I took a number of steady hits on the pipe. In the
distance I began to hear a mechanical humming noise, which at first I took to be
a distant generator until I realized the noise was building steadily in volume as I
hit on the pipe and stared out into the darkness. In an instant, the veil was lifted
and I saw the tryptamine world glowing as colorful as a cartoon on television.
Suddenly all I could see were snakes—large, fluorescent, primitive-looking
snakes covered in dots—and the whole scene reminded me of an Australian
Aboriginal song-line painting.
“Damn these snakes,” I thought. I was annoyed because Doug had told me
earlier that day about Narby’s book, The Cosmic Serpent, and how ayahuasca
shamans commonly saw snakes, and I wondered if some kind of autosuggestion
was at play. The field of snakes completely occupied my vision in the dark. I
could not see the jungle behind it, but I was still aware that I was sitting on the
balcony and that I was myself (although that “self” would have been incapable
of taking another hit on the pipe at that point!). The hundreds of snakes in my
vision wriggled this way and that, rapidly and unbelievably congealing into a
clear representation of the Hindu elephant-headed god.
“Ganesha!” I remember thinking in surprise, “What are you doing here?!”
The image seemed so out of place. Then my DMT trance shattered, almost as if
it had been dashed to pieces by my surprise, and I found myself at baseline and
back on the balcony, just a few minutes after I had inhaled the DMT. This was
the most success I had personally had with smoking DMT up to that point.
I consider it more difficult to obtain a full experience with DMT than with
5-MeO-DMT, since the latter is easier to consume. There are other, qualitative
differences between the two experiences as well. DMT is visually outrageous in
the way you would expect from a psychedelic, while the visual impact of 5-
MeO-DMT includes multiple layers, some of plain images (such as the faces of
your loved ones or seeing yourself lying on the bed under the effect of the drug)
while other layers contain ineffable visual elements that cannot be explained,
since they are (presumably) projected from a realm language simply cannot
describe. On 5-MeO-DMT, I have never seen snakes, foreign gods, UFOs,
mechanical gnome insects, or any of the other weird things that people report
seeing on DMT. What I have experienced is an infinite Void that is a Plenum
that is ultimately both myself and G/d. But how do I begin to describe that?
Another difference was apparent in my experience that night: DMT’s
effects are somewhat fragile, difficult to get into, and easy to disturb. The “outof-body” aspect of a DMT experience fluctuates; it has an ebb and flow. 5-MeODMT, on the other hand, at the correct dosage is virtually inescapable (except
for certain rare cases). It instantaneously and completely sends you into another
realm, which is essentially beyond imagery.
In his book, The Essential Psychedelic Guide, author D. M. Turner
describes DMT as “sheer perfection” and 5-MeO-DMT as “sheer force.” My
own interpretation is that 5-MeO-DMT is more entheogenic, as it seems to
transport me straight to a place of formless omniscience that I intuitively
recognize as union with G/d. I suspect that if Dr. Strassman had focused on 5-
MeO-DMT instead of DMT in his search for the “spirit molecule,” he would
have found results closer to the entheogenic effect he was looking for—more in
line with a near-death experience, or the “faith-based” epiphany of recognizing
the true nature of G/d—with less of the “extraterrestrial” visionary element that
DMT supplies.
As far as I understand, the chemical and pharmacological difference
between the two tryptamines is that 5-MeO-DMT has a methyl molecule and an
oxygen molecule attached to the basic DMT ring, which allow it to cross the
blood-brain barrier faster. This is presumably why it is more potent than DMT.
With such a slight difference, it may be difficult to understand why there seems
to be such an obvious difference between the effects of the two. In fact, I believe
that there isn’t that much difference in the effects of these two tryptamines, at
least at higher doses. A number of hits of regular DMT are needed to achieve
release, and, when you do, it generally doesn’t last very long. To use the analogy
of a rocket escaping the pull of Earth’s gravity, it is as if DMT is only powerful
enough (at regular doses) to send you out of the atmosphere, but then the gravity
of your ego pulls you back in. 5-MeO-DMT, on the other hand, is an interstellar
vessel—it blasts you out of the atmosphere before you can even put the pipe
down, and if you can learn to use it right, it can take you straight back to the
Mind of G/d.
A powerful dose of 5-MeO-DMT (in the 15 to 25 mg range, which can be
taken in one solid hit) can arguably send you further than most other known
substances—hence the entheogenic force and the comparative lack of the visual
magic that DMT traditionally provides. This correlates with the Hindu and
Tibetan traditions, which state that magical powers are obtainable through years
of meditation, but that these powers themselves are a “lower effect” on the way
to the ultimate goal of a transcendent reunification with G/d. Traditional
shamanism also believes that those who are seduced by the magic of their craft
will fall into black magic and become sorcerers—shamans who use magic for
their own purposes rather than for the betterment of others. Such sorcerers are
considered to have lost their way among the “lower powers” of the ayahuasca.
Even when compared to smoking DMT, the increased potency of 5-MeODMT allows human consciousness to access different and deeper dimensions; in
fact, it allows the prepared consciousness the “unfiltered” experience of reality’s
ultimate nature. Once the normal filters of our matter-bound consciousness
return (as the 5-MeO-DMT wears off), then there can be no “normal”
understanding of that formless “unfiltered” experience, due to the physical
limitations within which human consciousness is generally bound.
The physicist and philosopher Peter Russell has written a definitive
overview of meditation using the same analogy of filtered white light flowing
from a projector that we just examined with Bernard Haisch. In Russell’s
overview, the white light flowing from a projector indicates the four different
states of consciousness identified by Hindu philosophy: the waking
consciousness and the dreaming consciousness (states which “filter” the light of
the projector); the “unconscious” state of deep sleep (where the plug from the
projector has been pulled, and there is no white light); and a fourth state of
consciousness that is the pure unfiltered white light of consciousness itself. This
pure self-awareness of the “unfiltered” light is our ultimate consciousness, a
state of peace and bliss—an awareness that the pure consciousness one
experiences is but a concentrated point within a single universal consciousness.
DMT still “filters” the world of form through our “adjusted” consciousness,
generating a magical myriad of visual worlds that John Perry Barlow once
described to me as “God’s video game.” At its conventional dosages, DMT gives
access to dimensions rooted in the collective experience of the human
imagination: the sixth chakra, the domain of Jung’s archetypes, the Tibetan
bardos of beneficent Buddhas and their terrifying demonic counterparts, the
Hindu pantheon with its countless gods and goddesses, the shamanic realms of
god-like animals and protector spirits. But in the Tibetan model of the bardos,
the Hindu concept of atman-Brahman (the oneness of individual and universal
consciousness), and in virtually all of the mystical traditions throughout history,
there is the belief that there is yet another realm of knowledge above these.
As Aldous Huxley wrote, “Visionary experience is not the same as mystical
experience. Mystical experience is beyond the realm of opposites. Visionary
experience is still within that realm. Heaven entails hell, and ‘going to heaven’ is
no more liberation than is the descent into horror. Heaven is merely a vantage
point, from which the divine Ground can be more clearly seen than on the level
of ordinary individualized existence.”
5 The mystical experience is the supreme
realization that is beyond visualization—the supreme recognition of the true
nature of self, the identification with Oneness, atman-Brahman, the total union
with G/d, accompanied by the corresponding snuffing out of your own identity,
which the Sufi mystic Jalal ad-Din Rumi described as being like “a moth caught
in flame’s allure.”
6
While 5-MeO-DMT commonly rockets the user to that unfiltered realm
beyond both form and the human imagination, smoking DMT results in this
transcendental resonance with Oneness much less frequently. This seems to be
partially due to DMT’s lower potency and partially to the trickier nature of
delivering a high enough dose. During a 5-MeO-DMT experience, I am able to
experience “consciousness without identity,” and I neither remember smoking
the 5-MeO-DMT, nor have any sense of who “I” am. The “I” in me ceases to
exist, now a part of something greater. With DMT, I generally retain knowledge
of who I am and what I have done. No other compound, at any dose, has ever
been able to produce DMT or 5-MeO-DMT’s liberating effect upon my
consciousness.
*22
My theories on the essential difference between DMT and 5-MeO-DMT
have proven to be unpopular with a number of people, especially those who are
enamored with the visually exciting elements of the DMT experience. Some
even seem somewhat threatened by my assertion that 5-MeO-DMT is the more
“powerful” of the two tryptamines, and their general response is one of
incredulity: How could I possibly consider 5-MeO-DMT to be more
entheogenic? Yet, ironically, their arguments for the “superior entheogenic
effect” of DMT actually support my beliefs. For example, DMT users report
fantastic visual worlds, which often contain weird elements like elves on
bicycles or holographic floating Sony signs, whereas 5-MeO-DMT users
experience a less visual, more tellurian experience of Oneness, which defies
description.
DMT smokers usually retain and can describe their experiences in great
detail, which generates its own potent mythology, while 5-MeO-DMT users
often experience a “white-out” or singularity, which is all you might expect to be
able to remember if your consciousness had experienced the universe “outside”
of the normal five senses and your consciousness was not sufficiently open or
prepared. As mentioned earlier, recollection of the 5MDE seems to be due to a
different set of conditions (that is, the user’s philosophical preparedness), rather
than simply being a memory of the drug’s visual dialogue.
Support for my view can be found in a somewhat unlikely source: a
scientific paper on the Bufo alvarius toad by Wade Davis and Andrew Weil.
When speculating on the reason why DMT was added as a Schedule I controlled
substance in the late sixties, while 5-MeO-DMT wasn’t, Davis and Weil
proposed:
The disparity in the law probably has to do with the different reputations
of these two drugs. When smoked, DMT produces a very rapid, intense
intoxication of short duration that is marked by vivid visual imagery.
These effects made it popular among users of LSD, psilocybin, and other
well-known psychedelic drugs, and thus drew the attention of authorities.
By contrast, smoking of pure 5-MeO-DMT, a more potent tryptamine,
produces an overwhelmingly powerful experience that can be unnerving.
One user describes inhaling 5-MeO-DMT vapor as “a rocket ship into the
Void.” Another comments: “If most hallucinogens, including LSD, merely
distort reality, however bizarrely, 5-MeO-DMT completely dissolves
reality as we know it, leaving neither hallucinations nor anyone to watch
them. The experience need not be negative, but it is not for a novice”
(anonymous, personal communication, April 11, 1987). As a result, 5-
MeO-DMT never gained the street popularity or notoriety of its chemical
cousin. Over the years it has remained an obscure drug taken mostly by
small groups of psychiatrists and explorers of consciousness.
7
It may be that my theory only applies at what I will call “the release-level”
of either compound, as reports from those who have taken large doses of DMT
are strikingly similar to a 5-MeO-DMT experience, such as in this quote from
TIHKAL, which describes a 100 mg smoked dose of DMT: “Up, up, out, out,
eyes closed, I am at the speed of light, expanding, expanding, expanding, faster
and faster until I have become so large that I no longer exist—my speed is so
great that everything has come to a stop—here I gaze upon the entire universe.”
8
Arguing over which of these two tryptamines is the “most” entheogenic is
probably pointless, since—at the right dosages—they clearly both are able to
terrify and enlighten. They reveal layers of the same truth, which originates in
the same arena, and the main difference between the two is the speed with which
they cross the blood-brain barrier and deliver their “revelations.”
My DMT trip in Boca del Drago might seem rather unremarkable compared to
the entheogenic effect that 5-MeO-DMT has had on me, were it not for two
interesting postscripts. The first of these relates to the miraculous aftereffect I
experienced in the days following my brief meeting with Ganesha.
I awoke the next morning feeling better than I ever had before. After
witnessing a sunrise that unexpectedly nearly bought me to tears with its sublime
beauty, I began to realize that everything was glowing with an inner light and
beauty and that I was enveloped in a blissful state. Feeling unbelievably alive
and in balance, I climbed out of the rooftop perch where I had been sleeping,
went down to the main house for some breakfast, and then decided to walk three
miles to the small jungle research station where I was taking a course.
I felt as if I was walking six feet in the air, and everything continued to
glow with the same inner light. I can only describe my mood as euphoric, an
unbelievable state of inner bliss. It lasted for more than three days, during which
I ate the same food each day from the single available restaurant and shared
dormitory accommodations with a bunch of mostly American college students
who were all about fifteen years younger than me—two variables that usually
would have dampened my mood. Yet I was as happy as I could possibly be.
Filled with an indescribable sense of wonder and contentment, I went to
sleep each night curious about whether the miracle would continue through to
the next day. The rational observer inside of me could see that something
remarkable was going on: it was as if I was eating a steady diet of that good,
legal MDMA I once tried from Texas in the 1980s. It was better than that
though, as I had the total euphoric feeling without any of the excess energy,
sweating, and madness that can come from that love drug. I simply had a
tremendous sense of satisfaction and inner happiness. Smoking the DMT and
bumping into a snake-infested Ganesha somehow had triggered a deep-seated
inner peace within me that touched upon the sublime.
During my brief university tenure as a student of the Phenomenology of
Religion, I had written a paper on the subject of whether or not it was possible to
obtain enlightenment while you were alive. I argued that the Buddhist faith
asserted that it was possible and that in Gautama’s time, according to the
Buddhist texts, several hundred people had obtained enlightenment while they
were alive by realizing nirvana through his teachings. It was one of the few
papers that I ever received an “A” for, and I remembered being deeply impressed
by the idea that we could strive for and obtain enlightenment in this lifetime. The
whole concept seemed so positive when compared to contemporary
Christianity’s “you must accept Jesus to die pure and enter the Kingdom of
Heaven” doom and gloom.
There in Panama—after dismissing my DMT encounter with fluorescent
anacondas and Ganesha as “a minor effect”—I had somehow stumbled into a
state of grace in which I couldn’t feel a hint of malice toward anyone; it was a
state of total euphoria and contentment, a living state—dare I say?—of nirvana.
But I didn’t believe that it could last. I almost felt as if I had to hold my breath to
stop the bubble from bursting. Maybe that was my mistake: not believing that I
could remain in that blissful state. When Nathan’s eyes had shone with wonder
and he asked me if he could stay that way forever, I told him that it wasn’t
possible, so he should hold on to it while he could. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I
shouldn’t have told him that. Maybe, with enough believing, you really can
retain nirvana.
Unfortunately for me, it came to an end after three incredible days, when all
of us at the research station arose at dawn and made our way by boat, and then
by bus, into the interior to visit the cloud forests in the mountains. During that
bus journey, I felt my euphoric state gently fading. It slowly evaporated away,
the change in scenery apparently enough to cancel the effect. Over the next
twenty-four hours I returned to my normal self, somewhat saddened to lose that
state of grace, but glad that I had been fortunate enough to experience it—to
know that such ways of living are real and possible.
The second postscript related to this singularly remarkable DMT experience
happened nine months later, when my time in India (and a heavy diet of Tibetan
philosophy) reawakened my interest in Buddhism and Hinduism. In Hinduism—
which may be the most tolerant and resilient religion in history—countless
different gods have been venerated throughout the ages (with more being created
all the time). In fact, the number of Hindu Gods is theoretically equal to the
number of practicing Hindus! Yet out of that mass of possibility, a few—such as
Krishna, Hanuman, Lakshmi, and so on—have achieved the highest status in the
pantheon due to their popularity with practitioners. And out this of pantheon of
gods, I discovered that the elephant-headed Ganesha is one of the gods most
loved and venerated by all Indians, even by non-Hindus! His popularity is now a
worldwide phenomenon: just look around the nearest hippy coffee shop or yoga
studio!
Among his many attributes, including being the lord of writers and scribes,
Ganesha is considered both “The Remover of Obstacles” and, paradoxically,
“The Guardian of Gateways” or the Gate Keeper, and most homes in India have
a picture of Ganesha above their doorway to prevent evil forces from entering
the house. Since I believe that DMT is effectively a “gateway” to another
dimension, I am now no longer so surprised at bumping into Ganesha that
evening in Panama. Perhaps it was not my night to step through that door.
W
FIVE
Into the Quantum Realm
If we think we can picture what is going on in the quantum domain, that
is one indication that we’ve got it wrong.
ATTRIBUTED TO ERWIN SCHRÖDINGER
May God us keep
From single vision & Newton’s sleep!
WILLIAM BLAKE, FROM A LETTER TO
THOMAS BUTTS, NOVEMBER 22, 1802
hat began as a studious attempt to understand what happens to me when I
smoke 5-MeO-DMT has become—after six years of research—a
comprehensive examination of the workings of human consciousness,
perception, and ultimately, what the true nature of reality may be. Out of the
myriad of extraordinary events that have occurred within the context of my own
5-MeO-DMT experiences, a more limited number of questions regarding the
nature of the 5MDE have occupied a central position in my mind. They can be
summed up as:
1. What is the source of the brilliant laser-like light that I encounter?
2. How can I feel as if I am occupying a reality outside of time?
3. How can this dimension outside of time seem to contain all possible
permutations and information?
4. How can I exist as consciousness without ego or identity, and yet clearly
still be me?
5. Why do I so firmly believe that this experience is a recognition and
subsequent realization of both the true nature of G/d, and of myself?
My search for answers to these questions led inexorably to the world of
quantum physics, a realm that I knew little about other than reading popular
accounts, such as Gary Zukav’s book The Dancing Wu-Li Masters, even though
I generally found quantum physics intimidating due to my misconception that it
involved a lot of applied mathematics. Like most people, I stopped studying
math after getting out of high school, and I never had a strong grasp of calculus
—my mind just doesn’t work that way. Or perhaps it was simply because of the
shifting complexity of the ideas quantum physics presents that I never really
could grasp them. But as I followed the leads present in much of the DMT
literature—from the McKenna brothers, to Jeremy Narby, to Rick Strassman,
and beyond—I repeatedly found myself back in the quantum realm.
Slowly the collective ideas of a small group of scientific renegades—
maverick thinkers such as David Bohm, Rupert Sheldrake, Roger Penrose, Hal
Puthoff, Bernard Haisch, and Ervin Laszlo—have effectively helped me to
construct a new worldview to replace the old paradigm that my 5-MeO-DMT
experiences dissolved away. The obvious similarities between the emerging
scientific view of reality and the possibilities implicit in the 5-MeO-DMT
experience (and tryptamines in general) have allowed me to feel as if my
metaphorical mental feet are returning to somewhat firmer philosophical ground.
We are Homo sapiens, “the knowing man,” animals that prized
psychological knowledge over the physical bounties of the Earth, and who—
thanks to that same Promethean knowledge—now hold the fate of the planet in
our hands. This unquenchable thirst for knowledge, combined with the ingenuity
of our modern wonder-tools (such as the particle accelerator, the super
computer, and the Hubble telescope), has allowed us over the last twenty years
to probe the universe at levels—both great and small—that humanity never
previously imagined possible. And the findings that today’s most radical
scientists are discovering with these incredible instruments are so strange and
unbelievable that it is as if they have come from another dimension. (Which they
well may have!) Most of what we were taught about “science” at high school is
now turning out to be false; the model we were taught for the atom is as wrong
as the model we held for our solar system before Copernicus; and the models we
have for the mechanism of consciousness may well be equally as antiquated and
naive.
The Trap of Material Realism
Our modern worldview is built on the physical model of the universe provided
by Newtonian physics: the idea that all objects in the universe have mass and
influence upon each other and that without the influence of this mass, all objects
would remain at rest. A good visualization of this is balls on a pool table, which
will remain at rest until another ball hits them and sets them in motion. This
philosophy, known as material realism, asserts that all bodies in the universe—
from pool balls to galaxies—move according to universal laws. This method of
thinking laid the groundwork for the belief that all activity in the universe must
be caused by knowable laws and formula, the most fundamental of which is
Newton’s F = ma (force = mass x acceleration).
The belief that knowing these “universal laws” would enable us to
understand all the workings of the universe (from the creation of stars all the
way down to our own biological function), as if everything was a complex
machine, has led to three centuries of scientific material deconstructionism: a
process of breaking everything down to its most basic components in an attempt
to prove that these laws were in themselves inescapable. In the process of
reducing the mystery of the universe into simple action and reaction—and by
ignoring its obvious complexity and interconnectedness—we embraced the
belief that by mastering these laws, we could free the human species from the
“bonds” of nature.
Ironically, our “faith” in this model of purely random action and reaction
has resulted in the dominance of the philosophy that the universe is simply a
complex machine, and that we are mere creations of blind chance. This leaves us
with the philosophical conundrum that it shouldn’t really make any difference
whether we are here or not. And, even though we clearly are here, we are seen
as only biological machines, slightly more than robots. Our consciousness is
considered to be merely a strange side effect of purely chemical and electrical
interactions. A hundred years after killing off God, we’ve concluded that we
have no purpose other than “fighting to survive.” We have taken the magic out
of the world and reduced it to mere formula, thus allowing our “superior
sciences” to deconstruct ourselves.
Modern civilization is built on the foundation of three theories that have
become dogma, which we inherited from the three most influential thinkers of
the pre-quantum age. From Newton’s equation we concluded that the universe is
nothing but a machine; from Darwin we accepted the gospel that man is a
creature of chance that has to “fight to survive”; and Descartes convinced us that
the physical world of the body and the mental inner world of the mind should be
considered as separate entities.
Though they remain unproven, these three ideas are universally accepted.
They have been responsible for spliting us off from our planet, from our
biosphere, and ultimately from our true selves; embraceing these theories has
resulted in the creation of a rabid culture that now threatens the ecological
balance of the planet itself. For, as Alvin Toffler says in the introduction to Ilya
Prigogine’s Order Out of Chaos (1984) “One of the most highly developed skills
in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the split-up of problems into
their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget
to put the pieces back together again.”
1
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution we have increased the
human population by over five times. We continue to tear the planet to pieces in
search of resources that we cannot replenish, while we defile and pollute the
rivers, oceans, and even the air we breathe, as we send tens of thousands of
species of flora and fauna to extinction—a fate whose door we could soon be
knocking on ourselves. The mechanical materialistic model of both humans and
the universe as mere machines, has not only destroyed our belief in G/d. As the
American philosopher Danah Zohar remarked, “Newton’s vision tore us out
from the fabric of the universe itself.”
2
This paradigm has only been around for the last few centuries, which—
even compared to the minor span of human existence as a whole—is a miniscule
amount of time. When compared to any kind of geological epoch, it is not even a
blink in the eye of the universe. Yet even while our politicians and kings of
industry race to further these Newtonian excesses, science—the origin of these
destructive simplifications—has moved on to stranger, far less certain ground.
This new paradigm of uncertainty and potential, this revolutionary human view
of the universe, is called quantum physics.
A Quantum Reality
Ironically it was science’s unquenchable thirst for breaking things into smaller
and smaller pieces that ultimately bought the walls of Newtonian physics
tumbling down. As our instruments grew more and more powerful, and we
began to probe the subatomic realm—the supposed “building blocks” of the
universe—scientists came to a staggering realization. In the realm of the very
small, Newtonian physics did not hold. In fact, in the realm of the very small,
nothing we believed in as solid reality turned out to be true. Solid reality, if we
look deep enough, does not seem to exist at all!
To understand how this is possible, we have to comprehend a concept that
is central to the ideas of quantum physics. It is called “nonlocality.” It refers to
the capacity of quantum particles (such as two electrons) that have once been in
contact to retain a connection even when separated—the actions of one will
always immediately influence the other, no matter how far apart they are. Today
it is widely accepted that, in the subatomic realm, one quantum entity can
influence another instantaneously, over any distance, despite there being no
exchange of force or energy.
Physicists started moving toward this realization in 1935, when Einstein,
along with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, published a paper—the so-called
EPR thought experiment or EPR paradox—that showed that under certain
circumstances, quantum mechanics predicted a breakdown of locality.
According to this theory, a particle could be put in a measuring device in one
location and, through that action alone, would instantly influence another
particle an arbitrary distance away. Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen themselves
refused to believe this effect—which Einstein labeled “spooky action at a
distance”—and viewed the experiment as evidence that quantum mechanics was
incomplete. However, the EPR experiment set the basis for a potential scientific
proof of the existence of nonlocality.
Almost thirty years later, J. S. Bell proved mathematically that the results
predicted by quantum mechanics could not be explained by any theory that
preserved locality. In the forty years that have followed, countless experiments
using physical instrumentation have been performed to try to prove the EPR
experiment. In the empirical experiments of French physicist Alain Aspect in the
1980s (subsequently replicated in laboratories all over the world), a bizarre thing
took place. In the experiments, the correlation of spin state between two particles
was maintained—instantaneously—irrespective of how far apart the particles
were. (Theoretically this would apply if the two particles were on opposite sides
of the universe.) In Aspect’s original experiments, the speed of this transmission
was estimated at less than one billionth of a second, about twenty times faster
than the speed of light in empty space. In a subsequent experiment performed in
1997 by Nicolas Gisin, it proved to be 20,000 times faster than the speed of
light.
3 Many consider these experiments as “proof” of nonlocality. These
experiments also obviously put a dent in Einstein’s special theory of relativity,
which states that nothing can travel faster than light.
“Teleportation” experiments of the 1990s—where one electron has been
“teleported” to another position—have also been cited as “experimental proof”
of nonlocality.
4 And in 2004, two independent teams of physicists—one at the
National Institute of Standards in Colorado, the other at University of Innsbruck,
Austria—announced that they had “teleported” the quantum state of entire
atoms.
5 While nonlocality still has its skeptics who state that “sufficient
experimental proof ” has not been offered, today the concept of nonlocality is
assumed to be valid in quantum physics.
This realization was the deathblow for Newtonian physics as a model for
the whole universe, since matter could no longer be considered to be individual
and separate. Actions did not have to have an observable cause over an
observable state. Nothing (at the quantum level) can be considered independent
of anything else; all can only be understood in terms of their relationships to
each other. The quantum model proposes that the universe exists as an
interconnected web of relationships, forever indivisible, since nothing has any
meaning by itself!
Our great instruments, which we had built to confirm the solidity of the
universe and our concept of the world as a machine built of understandable and
predictable parts, now reveal that at its most basic level, the universe is as
ethereal and drifting as a dream and as solid as a mirage! Nothing is solid;
nothing is real; the universe is a seething field of energy and potential. What is
even more astonishing is the realization that we—the living consciousness that
observes “reality”—may be the most essential ingredient in this indivisible and
interconnected universe. The quantum physicists found something that could
have as profound implications for the destiny of the human species as anything
we have ever discovered. They found that: “the state of all possibilities of any
quantum particle collapsed into a set entity as soon as it was observed or a
measurement taken.”
6
To understand this we have to reexamine the model of the atom we were all
taught at school, which is that of electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets going
around the sun. This model has been proven to be completely incorrect. What
physicists now believe is that a cloud of “potential,” which can cause the
electron to materialize in any position, surrounds the nucleus. To visualize this,
imagine a race around a track where the runners “appear” at certain spots on the
course for a second or two, then disappear and reappear a hundred meters further
along—without having to physically cross the distance between the two points.
This happens for no apparent reason, nor with any indication as to where they
might disappear and appear again. Where this gets really weird, is that some
physicists now believe that the “force” causing an electron to appear in some
particular position—which is only a possibility and does not have to happen—is
the fact that a living consciousness is observing it.
At the subatomic level, where everything is a pulsating sea of electrical
charge and possibility, the universe takes physical form (which we call reality)
only because we are here to observe it. The act of observation “forces” the
electron to appear in a position out of that sea of possibility, and so by
observing, we cause “reality” to happen. Just as the Australian Aboriginals
believe that their ancestors sang up the world as they walked through the desert,
it is possible that through perceiving, we create the universe and everything in it.
These are the main foundations of quantum physics: nonlocality, the fact
that the observer cannot be removed from the equation, and that the observer
may actually be the reason a particular event occurs at all. At its most basic
level, the universe does not operate according to the laws of Newtonian physics;
those laws only apply to a small window of the universe we choose to call “our
reality.” Once you look past that point, things get peculiar. Energy moves around
without apparent rhyme or reason, possessing strange qualities like “charm” and
“spin,” while every electron in the universe appears to influence (and be
influenced by) every other electron in the universe, through “spooky action at a
distance.”
Many of the early contributors to quantum physics—Niels Bohr, Werner
Heisenberg, and especially Erwin Schrödinger—realized the profound
philosophical implications that their work presented, and they consulted the
Kabbalah and Eastern philosophy for help in understanding this new paradigm.
But the modern industrial world is built on the foundations of Newton’s physics,
as well as the ideas of economic thinkers—such as Adam Smith and John Locke
—who followed his mechanist philosophy. And while physics—the cutting-edge
of scientific philosophy—moved into the quantum age more than eighty years
ago, most other sciences have been moving far slower. Biological systems, for
example, were presumed to be dependent on predictable Newtonian laws, and
investigations into their quantum nature have only begun in earnest over the past
twenty-five years.
As a result, our society has not really considered the profound implications
of this totally different view of reality. Yoked to the needs of industry,
mainstream science is good at clinging to ideas that it believes it knows, putting
things it cannot understand aside for a later day. While we have utilized the
breakthroughs that quantum mechanics fostered (such as the processor chip and
atomic energy), we have largely ignored the philosophical implications.
Ninety-five percent of modern scientists are highly specialized technicians.
They are good at performing a single function, much like a mechanic who can
only fix transmissions and does not really know how the whole car operates.
Those few scientists who venture outside of the conventions that industrysupported universities allow have often been branded as dangerous mavericks
and have been aggressively disavowed (as seen in the fate of Nikola Tesla
compared to that of Thomas Edison). Hence, the philosophical implications of
quantum physics have mostly been ignored as we hold fast to the dying days of
the Newtonian worldview, still treating our severely ailing planet like some kind
of machine whose parts we can “fix” when they break down, instead of realizing
the truth inherent in the quantum model, which asserts that all life on Earth is
interdependent and impossible to regard as anything but a whole.
Only in the last couple of decades has the dominant Newtonian paradigm
begun to erode in the sciences outside of physics, thanks to our incredible
modern technology, which has produced both the instruments to achieve the
results and the computers to crunch the enormous amount of data that has been
provided. (More information will be produced by our society in the next twelve
months then in the previous 5,000 years! And our technical knowledge is
doubling every twelve months!)
7 Quantum relationships are now believed to
regulate all processes in the universe, whether it is atoms, cells, galaxies, or even
the ultimate human mystery of all: the source of our own consciousness. The
most elemental level of living things can no longer be considered as chemical
reactions, but as energy.
As Lynne McTaggart explains in her pioneering work The Field:
[Scientists] also discovered that . . . [on] our most fundamental level,
living beings, including human beings, were packets of quantum energy
constantly exchanging information with [an] inexhaustible energy sea.
Living things emitted a weak radiation, and this was the most crucial
aspect of biological processes. Information about all aspects of life, from
cellular communication to the vast array of controls of DNA, was relayed
through an information exchange on the quantum level. Even our minds,
that other supposedly so outside of the laws of matter, operated according
to quantum processes. Thinking, feeling—every higher cognitive function
—had to do with quantum information pulsing simultaneously through our
brains and [bodies]. Human perception occurred because of interactions
between the subatomic particles of our brains and the quantum energy sea.
We literally resonated with our world.
8
The Implicate Order
The first building blocks of a new philosophical paradigm that could incorporate
my 5-MeO-DMT experiences came when I discovered the major works of the
British physicist David Bohm. His complex theories of philosophy and physics,
most famously expressed in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, have
drawn praise from spiritual luminaries such as Jiddu Krishnamurti and the Dalai
Lama (who called Bohm his “personal physicist”).
Dr. Bohm proposed that mind and matter coexist in different dimensions,
unfolding and enfolding upon each other. In principle, then, reality is one
unbroken whole—an “implicate order” that includes the entire universe with all
its fields and particles. True reality is thus an infinitely multilayered,
multidimensional wholeness, while what we typically consider “reality” is only a
fragment of the whole. It is more like a dream or an illusion (or even a
hallucination), from which our consciousness may one day presumably awake.
This is an extreme simplification of a fully fleshed-out theory of physics by
one of the greatest Western minds since Einstein. Bohm’s idea would have been
hard for me to even begin to understand if it were not for the fact that it was—up
to this point—the best description I had found for what I experience at the peak
of a 5MDE. During the peak, I become pure consciousness, with no concept of
the normal boundaries of space or time. For that instant, I am a part of the
integrated wholeness (where nevertheless I still exist, even though not a shred of
my ego or identity remains).
Bohm’s theory is also eerily similar to many Hindu and Buddhist concepts
of the true form of the universe and its infinite manifestations. Hindu cosmology
depicts the universe as having virtually incalculable size and age, ideas that used
to be readily dismissed by Western scholars as deliberate gross exaggeration.
However, thanks to instruments like the Hubble telescope, recent discoveries are
proving that Hinduism is the only cosmology that is even close, while the
Greeks, Christians, Arabs, and others had all massively underestimated.
According to David Bohm, matter is “condensed or frozen light.”
9
Therefore, the entire physical world can be regarded as ordered forms of slowmoving light. This includes all organic life, whose existence and survival is
entirely sustained by light energy from the sun. Life on this planet is a
continuing process of light evolving itself into more complex forms of order:
first into the simplest of atoms and molecules, then into increasingly complex
forms of matter, then into exponentially more complex organic life forms
(thanks to the wonders of DNA and RNA), and now—most recently, in our
world at least—the latest evolution into conscious, questioning life forms.
The process of exponentially increasing complexity of order in a
(supposedly) closed system (which should be increasing in disorder) is called
negentropy. This process directly contradicts the second law of thermodynamics,
which states that all isolated systems must move from a state of order toward a
state of chaos (entropy). According to the Newtonian paradigm, this highly
improbable complex ordering of light has been the result of purely random
interactions. However, since the advent of the quantum sciences and the
invention of the tremendous number-crunching computers of recent years, some
scientists have begun to suspect that the mechanisms of “life, the universe, and
everything” (with apologies to Douglas Adams!) are much too balanced and
finely tuned to have been able to evolve by blind chance alone.
According to calculations by Roger Penrose, for example, the probability of
the evolution of our particular universe by a random selection from among the
alternative-universe possibilities is one in 10 to the power of 10 to the power of
123! This is an inconceivably large number, indicating an improbability of
astronomical proportions!
10 The universe is turning out to be so complicated, in
fact, that—according to David Bohm’s theories—it requires the existence of a
superior or implicate order of organization that defines the physical principles of
our universe and governs all known physical processes, including ourselves.
That led me to the more recent explorations of a vast field—analogous to
David Bohm’s higher dimension of mind—that fills the empty spaces between
other particles in the universe and contains far more energy than all the energy in
the known physical universe. This all-filling field goes by the mysterious name
of “the zero-point field.”
SIX
Enter the Zero-Point Field
“Bring me a fruit of that banyan tree. ”
“Here it is, venerable Sir. ”
“Break it. ”
“It is broken, venerable Sir. ”
“What do you see there? ”
“These seeds, exceedingly small. ”
“Break one of them, my son. ”
“It is broken, venerable Sir. ”
“What do you see there? ”
“Nothing at all, venerable Sir. ”
The father said: “That subtle essence, my dear ,
which you do not perceive there—from that ver y
essence this great banyan arises. Believe me, my dear .
Now, that which is the subtle essence—in it all tha t
exists has its self. That is the True. That is the Self .
Thou art that, Svetaketu. ”
CHANDOGYA U PANISAD, CHAPTER TWELVE
One who is in harmony with emptiness
is in harmony with all things
NAGARJUN
D
avid Bohm’s theories revived interest in an ancient concept that had been
abandoned by the end of the nineteenth century called “the aether field,”
and predicted that such a field must exist. By the end of the twentieth century,
numerous scientists working in different disciplines around the world had begun
to come to the same conclusion—that a previously disregarded “field-of-fields”
could explain many of the mysteries that quantum physics postulated. My own
introduction to the growing recognition of this field of “zero-point energy” came
from reading Lynne McTaggart’s pioneering and tremendously readable book,
The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe. It was in her excellent
layman’s descriptions of the timeless coherent nature of the zero-point field that
I would first find clear parallels to the strange dimensions of my own 5-MeODMT experiences.
The Aether Field
Although the zero-point field is a very recent idea, the concept of the existence
of an invisible substance that fills the whole universe (called aether/ ether) was
first suggested in the West by Aristotle (384–322 BCE). Interest in this aether
field reawakened in the seventeenth century, after English scientist Robert
Hooke endorsed it in his work Micrographia (1665), the first treatise on
microscopic principles and observation. Christiaan Huygens, one of the leading
proponents of the wave theory of light, also endorsed the concept of the aether in
his Traité de la Lumière (1690).
Numerous British physicists of the nineteenth century believed that ether
was the medium through which forces were transmitted, and the modeling of
ether was a major preoccupation.
1 Michael Faraday, William Thomson (later
known as Lord Kelvin), and James Clerk Maxwell posited that ether was the
propagating medium for electromagnetic forces.
Maxwell ultimately concluded that mechanical modeling of the ether was
too imprecise to be useful, but an unexpected implication of his work was “that
the velocity of electromagnetic waves propagated in the ether was found to be
identical to the velocity of light, leading Maxwell to conclude that
electromagnetic and luminiferous ethers were the same. In this electromagnetic
theory of light, light was considered an electromagnetic vibration in the ether.”
2
The final and most elegant development of the classical nineteenth century
ether theories is now known as the Lorentz ether theory, in which an abstract
(undetectable) electromagnetic ether replaced the older mechanistic model. In
his explanation Hendrik Lorentz introduced a strict separation between matter
(electrons) and ether, whereby ether is completely motionless and cannot be set
in motion by matter.
However, after the famous Michelson–Morley experiment (1888) failed to
detect the motion of the earth through the ether, and Heinrich Hertz’s
experimental detection of electromagnetic waves (1888) was regarded as the
definitive experimental confirmation of electromagnetism, the days of
examining the so-called ether field were numbered. When the mathematics of
Einstein’s special theory of relativity (1905) were able to mirror the mathematics
of the Lorentz ether theory without referring to ether at all, luminiferous ether
fell to Occam’s razor.
3
By the beginning of the twentieth century, electrodynamics had replaced
mechanics in providing the conceptual foundation of physics. Nikola Tesla, the
great Serbian-American scientist who is the father of modern communication
technologies, was the last major proponent of the ether field. As early as 1891,
Tesla described the universe as a kinetic system, which could be harnessed from
any location. When asked where electricity came from, he famously remarked,
“from the ether around us,” and Tesla spent a fortune trying to build a wireless
electrical transmission system based on these principles.
Shortly before his death in 1943, Tesla announced he was working on a
“dynamic theory of gravity” that presumed the existence of a luminiferous ether
that filled all space. He claimed that at speeds near the speed of light the ether is
thrown into infinitesimal whirls (micro helices) and becomes ponderable matter.
Unfortunately Tesla died before he revealed his own unified field theory and the
FBI confiscated all of his papers, which remain classified to this day. Most of the
remainder of the twentieth century elapsed before the idea of a universal ether
energy field was resurrected.
However, Einstein himself stated in a lecture he gave on May 5, 1920, titled
“Aether and the Theory of Relativity” that “more careful reflection teaches,
however, that the special theory of relativity does not compel us to deny aether,”
and “to deny the aether is ultimately to assume that empty space has no physical
qualities at all.”
4
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
The idea that empty space might not be truly empty resurfaced as a result of
what is known as the “Heisenberg uncertainty principle,” which “states that the
values of certain pairs of conjugate variables (position and momentum, for
instance) cannot both be known with arbitrary precision. That is, the more
precisely one variable is known, the less precisely the other is known. This is not
a statement about the limitations of a researcher’s ability to measure particular
quantities of a system, but rather about the nature of the system itself. . . .
Heisenberg was trying to show that this was not a flaw in his theory; rather, it
was a previously unknown truth—a deep, surprising aspect of the universe.”
5
This principle implies that no particle is ever completely at rest, but is
always in motion due to a ground state field of energy that is constantly
interacting with all subatomic matter. A field in this sense is a matrix or medium
that connects two or more points in space, usually via a force like gravity or
electromagnetism. Largely because of Einstein’s theories, we now believe that
[all] elementary particles interact with each other by exchanging energy
through other quantum particles, which are believed to appear out of
nowhere, combining and annihilating each other in less than an instant—
10
23seconds, to be exact—causing random fluctuations of energy without
any apparent cause. The fleeting particles generated during this brief
moment are known as “virtual particles.” They differ from real particles
because they only exist during that exchange—the time of “uncertainty”
allowed by the uncertainty principle.
This subatomic tango, however brief, when added across the
universe, gives rise to enormous energy, more than is contained in all the
matter in all the world.
6
Richard Feynman calculated that there is enough energy in one cubic meter
of “empty” space to boil all the oceans in the world! And David Bohm
calculated that the total field energy would exceed all energy in matter by a
factor of 10 to the power of 40—that’s a one with forty zeros after it!
7
Astrophysicist Bernard Haisch explains why, even though the extent of this
energy is enormous, the energy field that exists in the apparent emptiness of the
universe is called the “zero-point field.”
“Zero-point” refers to the fact that, even though the extent of this energy
is huge, it is at the lowest possible energy state. All other energy operates
over and above the zero-point state. Take any volume of space and take
away everything else—in other words create a vacuum—and what you are
left with is the zero-point field full of zero-point energy. We can imagine
a true vacuum, devoid of everything, but in the real world, a quantum
vacuum is permeated by the zero-point field with its ceaseless
electromagnetic waves.
An old adage states that nature abhors a vacuum. Actually nature has
nothing to abhor. The vacuum as a condition of complete emptiness, as an
absolute void, does not exist. Rather the laws of quantum mechanics posit the
seat of the zero-point field as a state of both paradox and possibility—a seething
sea of particle pairs, energy fluctuations, and force perturbations popping in and
out of existence.
8
In Lynne McTaggart’s words, “What quantum calculations show is that we
and our universe live and breathe in what amounts to a sea of motion—a
quantum sea of light.” What this means is that—whether it be stars and galaxies
separated by billions of miles of nothingness (or vacuum), or electrons
“orbiting” a nucleus with empty space in between—physicists now believe that
these empty spaces are in fact far from empty and “that the basic substructure of
the universe is a sea of quantum fields that cannot be eliminated by any known
laws of physics.”
9
Hal Puthoff
Initially, even though zero-point energy was assumed to exist, it was considered
both a mathematical by-product and an annoyance and was generally
disregarded. It was assumed that zero-point energy cancelled itself out—and
therefore mathematically could be regarded as a zero. This was the situation
from 1926 until the mid-1970s when a physicist named Hal Puthoff started
giving the zero-point field some consideration as a potential source of
inexhaustible clean energy. His contribution to our understanding of the zeropoint field (for which he undoubtedly deserves a Nobel Prize someday) was to
figure out the mathematics of our reality. He tackled one of the oldest problems
of quantum physics, which is the question of why atoms are stable, or why
electrons “orbit” around a proton.
In the solar system, gravity accounts for the stable orbit. But in the atomic
world, any moving electron, which carries a charge, wouldn’t be stable
like an orbiting planet, but would eventually radiate away, or exhaust, its
energy and then spiral into the nucleus, causing the entire atomic structure
of the object to collapse.
10
Niels Bohr provided an “explanation” by declaring that he wouldn’t allow
it. Bohr believed that electrons only lose energy when they jump from one orbit
to another. (These are the structured “orbital shells” that folks my age were
taught about in school.) But Bohr worked out the math to support his
perspective. His ideas regarding static orbits sparked assumptions about matter
and energy both having wave- and particle-like qualities, which eventually led to
the birth of quantum physics.
But what Hal Puthoff did was to show mathematically that Bohr’s dictum
was no longer necessary if the zero-point field was taken into account.
*23
Puthoff proved that electrons lose and gain energy constantly from the zeropoint field, keeping them “in a dynamic equilibrium, balanced at exactly the
right orbit. Electrons get their energy to keep going without slowing down
because they are refueling by tapping in to these fluctuations of empty space. In
other words, the Zero Point Field accounts for . . . the stability of all matter.”
11
According to McTaggart:
This constant exchange [of energy] is an intrinsic property of particles, so
that even “real” particles are nothing more than a little knot of energy
which briefly emerges and disappears back into the underlying field.
According to quantum field theory, the individual entity is transient and
insubstantial. Particles cannot be separated from the empty space around
them. Einstein himself recognized that matter itself was “extremely
intense”—a disturbance, in a sense, of perfect randomness—and that the
only fundamental reality was the underlying entity—the field itself. . . .
The existence of the Zero Point Field implied that all matter in the
universe was interconnected by waves, which are spread out through time
and space and can carry on to infinity, tying one part of the universe to
every other part. . . . Hal also showed by physics calculations that
fluctuations of the Zero Point Field waves drive the motion of subatomic
particles and that all the motion of all the particles of the universe in turn
generates the Zero Point Field, a sort of self-generating feedback loop
across the cosmos.
12
After proposing that the zero-point field (ZPF) was the source for the stability of
matter, Puthoff then began to consider what other mysteries might be solved by
factoring in its existence. He took a fresh look at a radical hypothesis that
physicist Andrei Sakharov had proposed in 1968. Sakharov suggested that
gravity might merely be a side effect created due to the zero-point field
becoming altered when it interacted with matter. This notion countered the
common assumption that gravity resulted from matter interacting with other
matter; Puthoff worked out Sakharov’s idea mathematically and ultimately came
up with a unified theory of physics that explained gravity (as well as
nonlocality), via the zero-point field. According to McTaggart:
Hal published his theory of gravity to polite and restrained applause. . . .
[What] he’d been saying in these papers in essence unsettled the entire
bedrock of twentieth-century physics. Quantum physics most famously
claims that a particle can also simultaneously be a wave unless observed
and then measured, when all its tentative possibilities collapse into a set
entity. With Hal’s theory, a particle is always a particle but its state just
seems indeterminate because it is constantly interacting with this
background energy field.
13
Hal Puthoff turned out to be equally talented as an inventor as well as a
theorist and went on to use his calculations based on the zero-point field in
conjunction with condensed charge technology to develop electronics
applications in very tiny spaces. In conjunction with a lab technician named Ken
Shoulders, he invented
a special device that could fit an X-ray device at the end of a hypodermic
needle, enabling medics to take pictures of body parts in tiny crevices, and
then a high-frequency signal generator radar device that would allow radar
to be generated from a source no larger than a plastic credit card. They
would also be among the first to design a flat-panel television, the width
of a hanging picture. All their patents were accepted with the explanation
that the ultimate source of energy “appears to be the zero-point radiation
of the vacuum continuum.” . . . [Along the way, the Pentagon] listed
condensed-charge technology, as zero-point energy research was then
termed, as number three on the National Critical Issue List, only after
stealth bombers and optical computing. A year later, condensed chargetechnology would move into the number two slot.
14
Newton Meets the Zero Point Field
Hal Putthof’s ideas would attract little attention for the following two decades
until, in 1993, mathematician Alfonso Rueda was able to derive Newton’s Law
F = ma (force = mass x acceleration) by using zero-point calculations in proving
an idea proposed by colleague Bernard Haisch. Now to most of us, that
statement means absolutely nothing. It’s a shame that we live in an age where
the first skateboard 1080 makes front page news worldwide, while the first
radical reinterpretation of one of the most unassailable postulates of physics
since 1687 passed by mostly unrecognized.
F = ma is the second most famous law in physics, only recently superseded
by Einstein’s E = mc
2
, and laws like this are not proven, they simply are. Yet
Rueda’s math “proved” that the property of inertia possessed by all objects in the
physical universe was simply resistance to being accelerated through the zeropoint field. This in turn implied that the hard stuff of matter was, in fact, illusory:
an “effect” caused by the slowing down of light due to the resistance of the zeropoint field. Here is Bernard Haisch’s explanation of this radical redefinition of
our physical reality.
Esoteric traditions attribute primacy to light rather than to matter, which is
intimately connected with space and time. Arguably, matter cannot exist
apart from space and time, and is dependent upon them. Einstein’s
relativity theory also suggests that space and time are defined by the
propagation of light. So the key to creation does seem to lead back to
light, in the context of both ancient traditions and modern physics. . . .
A beam of light, or the smallest quantum bundle of light called a
photon, moves through space and time at a fixed pace of 186,000 miles
per second—at least from your material perspective. From its own
perspective, however, there is no space or time. Herein lies what I suspect
is a profound connection between the basis of space and time, and light in
the form of the zero-point radiation of the quantum vacuum. I propose that
light may be the progenitor of an apparent universe of matter. In some
sense, “slowing down” ever so minutely from that privileged, timeless,
spaceless reference frame of light manifests a realm of space and time. In
other words, space and time are created when you leave the reference
frame of light.
Einstein’s special relativity theory tells us that light propagation
defines the properties of space and time. I argue that light propagation
may actually create space and time. The zero-point field inertia hypothesis
implies that the most fundamental property of matter, namely mass, is also
created by light.
15
Rueda and Bernard Haisch then coauthored a paper with Hal Puthoff that
presented this mathematical proof of Newton’s Law. The paper was published in
the journal Physical Review in 1994, and it was received in the same way that
radical new ideas that rewrite our definition of reality are generally received: to
considerable criticism from the scientific establishment, criticism that created a
degree of professional notoriety—the journal Science called it “a grand claim
based on obscure theory.”
*24 Undeturred, a year later Haisch received funding
from NASA to support a three-year study on inertia. Rueda and Haisch then
published two new papers that confirmed that the inertia of matter can be traced
back to the zero-point field. In these two papers they achieved a completely
different analysis that used Einsteinian relativistic physics instead of the classical
Newtonian physics approach that they had used in their original proof.
†25 Now,
after four hundred years of Newtonian physics, the mystics and the ancient
Egyptians have been proven mathematically correct. We are indeed all beings of
light.
E
SEVEN
Toading
Within thirty seconds, there will be an onset of almost overwhelming
psychedelic effects. You will be completely absorbed in a complex
chemical event characterized by an overload of thoughts and
perception, brief collapse of the EGO, and loss of the space-time
continuum. Relax, breathe regularly, and flow with the experience.
ALBERT MOST, BUFO ALVARIUS:
THE PSYCHEDELIC TOAD
OF THE SONORAN DESERT, 1984
very time my quest has taken another twist or turn that appears to bring me
closer to the core of the matter—to that place where what I feel is
instinctively worth more than what I might think—then my focus tends to move
from the outer limits of the modern psyche (alien species, impending end-times,
quantum physics, and so on) back toward the sacred and ancient occult
knowledge (communicating with departed souls, precognition, and belief in the
mystical union with G/d).
So it is now, as this adventure turns from the theoretical imaginings of the
modern physicist to the real-world entheogenic adventure I embarked on while
investigating the interspecies relationship between human beings and the Bufo
alvarius toad: the potentially shamanic pastime of smoking toad venom.
The Bufo toad (and related genera) has held a place in humanity’s
archaic consciousness since time immemorial. The earliest
representations of Bufo toads (and toads generally) go back thousands
of years. The appearance of toad-based artifacts is prehistoric and
possibly protolinguistic, being portrayed in ancient pictographs,
paintings and small sculpture . . . [Anthropologist Peter] Furst . . .
places the uses of Bufo toad venom “all the way back to Neanderthal
Man one hundred thousand years ago.”
THOMAS LYTTLE, DAVID GOLDSTEIN, AND
JOCHEN GARTZ, BUFO TOADS AND BUFOTENINE:
FACT AND FICTION SURROUNDING AN
ALLEGED PSYCHEDELIC, JOURNAL OF
PSYCHOACTIVE DRUGS, 1996
Humankind and toads have been in close contact with each other ever since the
first Homo sapiens irrigated a field, and it has even been suggested that toad
venoms might have inspired the first Indo-Uralic or “Ur” religions of the Stone
Age.
1 Sculptures, pictographs, and, most tellingly, the skeletons of Bufo toads
have been found in remarkable numbers at ancient grave sites in both Europe
and the Americas.
The toad’s amphibious nature clearly influenced the many different guises
in which it has been depicted: “as a fertility symbol, chthonic symbol, symbol of
transformation, and psychopomp.”
2 The toad has also been viewed as the Great
Earth Mother, “an image of transformation, death and regeneration, harbinger of
the seasonal rains and protector of crops is a potent mythic complex found
throughout the Americas.”
3 To the superstitious early civilizations who
cohabitated with the toad in the mud of their fields, its sudden appearance “out
of nowhere” was deemed supernatural, giving the toad an exalted position in the
magical shamanic realms.
4 Starting with Roman times, an abundance of
European literature testifies to Bufo toads’ reputation for use in poisons
5 and as
part of “witches brews.”
6 The Chinese have used preparations made from toxic
toad secretions as medicines for centuries if not millennia.
An ancient and pervasive link also exists between Bufo toads and
psychoactive mushrooms. Bufotenine (N,N-dimethyl-5-hydroxytryptamine or 5-
HO-DMT), the first indolic base isolated from toad venoms, has also been found
in half a dozen varieties of Amanita mushrooms, including Amanita muscaria,
7
the infamous Siberian entheogen. This curious correlation between toads and
mushrooms can be found in many languages, such as the English word
“toadstool.” Mushrooms are named after toads in a number of other languages,
including Welsh, Dutch, Norwegian, French, Ukrainian, Basque, and Chinese.
*26
The Bufo toad plays a substantial part in the mythology of the ancient
Mesoamerican civilizations of the Olmec, Mayan, and Aztec, and can be found
represented in these cultures’ art as far back as 2000 BCE.
8 Large quantities of
Bufo toad skeletons have been found at Olmec ceremonial sites. There is some
debate over whether or not they were a food source, as certain toxins in their
skin are deadly. Some anthropologists have proposed that these toads were used
as an entheogen source, and “evidence” for this view comes from toad
representations in Aztec art. Many of these depictions focus in detail on the
toads’ parotid glands, where the major supply of their venom lies.
9 These
include a sculpture in Mexico City’s incredible National Museum of
Anthropology and a glyph at the palace in Palenque, in which three circles down
the toad’s back represent parotid glands.
10
Originally, the large Bufo marinus toads common to the marshy regions of
the Yucatan—the original homeland of the Olmecs and Mayans—were
considered to be the toad represented in Mesoamerican mythology. Bufotenine
had a significant reputation (from Europe) as a hallucinogen, and not one
anthropologist seemed to doubt that eating Bufo marinus would provide the
necessary “entheogenic” punch. Perhaps, these anthropologists suggested, the
ancient Mesoamericans had a manner of preparing the Bufo marinus that
removed the more deadly of their toxins, while retaining psychoactive effects.
There is scant evidence of folk preparations among the Maya, where toads were
steeped in fermented beverages to produce an extra kick.
11
A smattering of unconvincing ideas was proposed on how the
Mesoamericans might have mitigated the toads’ toxicity. One graduate student
in anthropology—Alison Bailey Kennedy (perhaps more well-known under the
moniker Queen Mu, as the editor and publisher of Mondo 2000 magazine)—
even won a prize for her paper suggesting the highly speculative notion that the
Mayans fed the toads to ducks, and then ate the ducks to get high.
Kennedy proposed that ducks, which have unusually efficient livers, could
have “served as bio-processors or bio-mediators of the toad venom, rendering it
both more potent and less toxic, by converting it into certain metabolites in their
livers.”
12 She even went so far as to feed fifteen young toads to some ducks at
the San Antonio Zoo, but she stopped short of getting any definitive answer to
her far-out proposal, as she did not test her hypothesis by actually butchering and
eating the ducks.
There is one major problem with this widely speculated anthropological view.
Licking a cane toad (as the Bufo marinus is commonly known) doesn’t get you
high. Bufo marinus venom doesn’t contain any 5-MeO-DMT, or even any
bufotenine apparently. It does contain the quaternary amine salt
dehydrobufotenine.
13 The human pharmacology of this compound appears to be
unknown, but potentially unpleasant: given subcutaneously, a lethal dose in mice
is around 120 micrograms, and death occurs with clonic convulsions.
14Bufo
marinus venom also contains bufothionine in quantities ranging from 100–100
micrograms per gram of skin.
15 The activity of bufothionine isn’t known and
may be “doubtful.”
16
Apparently none of the anthropologists debating the methods cultures of old
may have used to ingest B. marinus venom ever considered the idea that it might
be smoked. While the safety of such a proposal is vastly unknown— and I
certainly don’t recommend that any of my readers try this—there has been a
single report of smoked B. marinus venom “leading to psychotropic effects.”
Under no circumstances should anyone ever lick this or any other toxic toad!
Licking, or even worse, eating Bufo marinus toads—or licking or eating any
species of toad (or frog) for that matter—will only cause illness (at best) or death
(at worst), due to the extreme toxicity of certain alkaloids in their venom.
*27
As pervasive and popular an urban myth as toad licking has become, there
are no grounds for these reports. Those few unfortunate souls documented as
trying it undoubtedly did so after hearing sensational reports from the
mainstream media. As Alexander Shulgin put it, “Of course the [toad] licking
myth is newspaper hype—it is the venom that is active, and it is smoked.”
17
While hallucinations and convulsions could undoubtedly result from ingesting
Bufo marinus toads—and might be taken to have some entheogenic force by
onlookers—true poisons are rarely employed as entheogens, for the simple
reason that they can be lethal.
In entheogen-rich Mexico—with a long history of ritual use of psilocybincontaining mushrooms, mescaline-containing cacti, lysergic acid amide–
containing morning glory seeds, and Salvia divinorum—it seems unlikely that its
culture would develop an affinity for the exceptionally unpleasant and
potentially lethal venom of Bufo marinus.
According to Davis and Weil, over two hundred psychoactive plants have
been identified, and “their significance to indigenous cultures has been justly
celebrated,” but “for ethnopharmacologists the discovery of a psychoactive toad
would be astonishing, because it would be the first proven instance of the use of
a hallucinogenic agent from the animal kingdom. To date, all known and
deliberate human use of natural hallucinogens has involved derivatives of higher
plants and fungi.”
18 Davis and Weil do note a few reports in the
ethnopharmacologic literature of other putative psychoactive animals—a moth
larvae and some fish. There are also scattered reports of others that they don’t
mention: ants, salamanders, scorpions, snakes, and spiders. However it is
doubtful that any of them produce an entheogen comparable in effect to 5-MeODMT.
In their paper, “Identity of a New World Psychoactive Toad,” Davis and
Weil propose that the toad so venerated in the Mesoamerican mythology and
iconography might not be the Bufo marinus indigenous to the wet Mexican
coastal-lowlands, but the physically similar Bufo alvarius whose habitat lies
thousands of miles away, in the vast Sonoran Desert.
19 This is the creature of
interest to us, since it is the only animal on earth that carries 5-MeO-DMT in its
venom (and the only animal other than the human known to produce it). It
resides in the Sonoran Desert of old Mexico, an area that runs into western
Sonora, Mexico, up through southwestern Arizona and southeastern California
to northwestern Baja, California.
Bufo alvarius is North America’s largest toad; it can grow up to sevenanda-half inches in length and weigh several pounds. Due to its large size, squat
body, and flat broad head, the B. alvarius is reasonably easy to identify, with
smooth and leathery skin that can range from a dark brown to olive or grayish
green.
20 But by far its most distinguishing feature is the presence of the large
parotid glands on its neck and limbs—the same glands that are so conspicuously
represented in Mesoamerican art.
Unlike most toads, Bufo alvarius is semi-aquatic and needs a dependable
water source to survive (a requirement that would seem detrimental to the
survival of a species that resides in one of the driest places on Earth). The B.
alvarius has thrived however, mostly within the drainage areas near the
permanent rivers and streams of the Sonoran Desert. These toads also take
advantage of a network of canals built by the ancient and mysterious Hohokam
Indians over fifteen hundred years ago, which diverts water from the Gila River,
irrigating more than 1.5 million acres of the desert.
21 The toad lies dormant in
the mud of the desert from September through to April and then comes out in
considerable numbers with the first monsoon rains of the summer, usually in
June. Bufo alvarius is unique within its genus in that it possesses an unusual
enzyme—O-methyl-transferase—that converts bufotenine into 5-MeO-DMT in
the toad’s parotid and tibial glands. This 5-MeO-DMT accumulates in the toad’s
venom, which contains up to 15 percent by volume.
22 The fact that the same labmade compound that had been responsible for my spiritual epiphany was also
available as a naturally produced venom fascinated me, and I was determined
that I should experience it to see how similar the two really are. So it was the
Sonoran Desert toad that I set out to find.
Do not be amazed by the true dragon.
DOGEN ZENJI, FUKANZAZENGI
How should I relate my experience of toading? Should I tell the whole mad tale
of that supreme entheogenic adventure? The nonstop insanity that began the
moment Yaron’s olive-green bio-fuel bus screeched to a stop outside the
terminal at LAX, and I stepped aboard and walked right past him at the wheel,
since he had shaved off his beard and hair and I didn’t recognized him from our
ten minutes together in a Los Angeles taxicab eight months previously? Need I
write about the hours we scoured the Sonoran Desert in a fruitless search, until
we were forced to think like toads—become toads—lying for hours at night in
the hot mineral springs of Paradise trying to decide where to search for our
subterranean gods, then driving for miles each day in the searing hot sun on tips
or Yaron’s wild hunches?
Hunches that took us to places like the blind canyon where we drove up
into some desert version of Deliverance and an ancient naked hippy—whom
Yaron claimed to know—emerged from an animal-hide clad dome, his baggy
skin brown as dirt from the sun. Who, even though he didn’t seem to recognize
Yaron, still took us down to visit his friend who knew about toads—an asexual
crone of considerable size who had obviously suffered from a life of wear and
tear.
She told us that the Bufos came out like flies when she watered the gardens
in the morning. And that she had a pet toad who often lived under the very seat
that I was sitting in, which she wouldn’t have minded us milking, but he had
disappeared a day or two before. Upon seeing the obvious disappointment in our
faces, she then informed us that she had stopped smoking toad venom herself, on
account of the fact that it made her want to do LSD, and there wasn’t any more
good LSD around—at least not in those parts. As if that might be some kind of a
consolation.
I could tell you all about that first fruitless week of toad hunting: about
living on the bus, about Paradise and the incredible complex of hot springs there.
Or how I accidentally killed the first Bufo we found, hitting it on the road in a
rental car at dusk while on our way to one of Yaron’s “secret” toading sites. This
event so completely freaked out the superstitious hippies I was with, who were
convinced that I had doomed our expedition entirely, that we had to bury the
giant toad unmilked, along with some of Yaron’s most precious crystals.
But none of that story really belongs here. That all belongs in some other
yet-to-be-written book, one that I tell friends will be called The Lunatics I Have
Known. What I will relate is how we found our first big living Bufo alvarius, just
minutes after I had declared that it didn’t really matter if we found any toads at
all—since the trip to Mexico on my Israeli host’s bus had been crazed adventure
enough for anyone—and that I no longer cared whether or not we found the
living source of the most powerful entheogen known to humans.
Less than half an hour later, there he was—sitting right beside the giant hot
pool that we had been swimming in every night—a fat green toad as big as a
soup plate. After the days traversing the desert, we were shown that we hadn’t
needed to move inches, let alone a mile. He just sat there looking at us, at well
past midnight, even though Bufos generally come out at dawn and at dusk. What
this fellow was doing up so late, I will never know. Not fifty yards from where
we had ceremoniously buried the toad I’d accidentally killed, this very living
Bufo obligingly jumped between us, as Yaron and I shouted and laughed like the
pair of naked fools we were until we finally managed to grab him.
Taking him straight back to the bus, we milked his venom over a pane of
glass, pressing on the glands behind the head and on the legs until the milky
white liquid spewed out as if we had popped a massive pimple. It formed
puddles that dried by morning into a white crystal more synthetic looking than
anything I had ever seen. Yet it was purely organic and contained up to 15
percent 5-MeO-DMT. We knew that we could carefully milk him twice within a
twelve-hour period and then let him go (apparently after two milkings the glands
are empty and require four to six weeks to refill fully).
23 Even after such
treatment the bored ancient seemed utterly unperturbed by the whole affair,
perhaps only thinking, “Here we go. Bloody humans again!”
Our first Bufo alvarius netted us half a gram of dried venom. From then on
we would find a couple of toads a day until we left, by walking the perimeters of
Paradise with a flashlight and a cooler at dusk and dawn. Eventually we had two
or three grams of the crystallized venom—enough so that we could sit down by
the pool and think about smoking something sacred, something that had not been
bought from any dealer, nor isolated by any chemist, something sought after and
hard-earned, one of the rarest treasures known to humanity. We had milked an
ancient and carefully scraped up crystals more precious than diamonds: our
alchemical white gold.
When the flame hit the venom in the pipe, we could smell that same
unmistakable smell and experience that same unmistakable gateway, that same
intense fractalization of reality; but somehow it was miraculously softer,
smoother, and—dare I say it—more organic. Somewhere between my intake and
my transportation to that other land, while I was holding my breath with the
smoke tickling my lungs, with that transportation just a moment away, I realized
—no, I knew—that I had reached the tip of the entheogenic iceberg.
It was as if I was being told: “You have followed the great road, and this is
the reward for your diligence—these are the wonders you will be shown.
Everything in your life has led up to this one moment. You are following the
most sacred of paths, and if you are fortunate, you will realize a timeless truth—
one that can only be experienced, not explained. Words just cheapen it, because
it really just is, and you can become One-with-That. Now you must relax and let
go—into the light. And that which can be so difficult on the rocketship of pure
5-MeO-DMT is as light and easy as a cloud on the grace of nature’s gift from the
venomous toad.”
Aum . . . breathe .
Aum . . . be .
Aum . . . breathe .
Aum . . . be .
Aum . . .
What good is quantum physics compared to that you might ask? What good
are all the works of genius, compared to going out into the desert and milking
Bufo alvarius toads, sitting by a pond, and for a brief window in time
experiencing a truly different dimension of reality—perhaps even marveling in
the wonder of becoming one with G/d?
When you smoke the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad, you enter a realm
beyond the limitations of any human language, a place where even the wildest
ranting of an afflicted mystic or the maddest fantasies of a theoretical physicist
both fall universes short of describing the knowledge implicit in that omniscient
tryptamine zone. In this place, all the words in the world are like a desperate
message in a solitary bottle, thrown into an endless sea.
Inspired by what I had found, I had intended to make this part of my literary
adventure a D.I.Y. manual on practical toading, breaking the whole process
down from start to finish, to help those readers who might want to search for the
ultimate organic entheogenic prize. But I decided against this, since the relevant
information about “how to toad” is readily available on the Internet (see
appendix 1), and there is nothing more of much value I could really add. Just
remember that the toads come out with the first good rain, and the window of
opportunity to interact with them is very short.
After my experience in the Sonoran Desert, I was fascinated by the murky
history of this craft. Who first thought of milking a Bufo alvarius toad to smoke
its venom, and why? I was captivated by this seemingly unanswerable question.
I started questioning whether it was possible that pre-Aztec Indian shamans had
made this discovery and incorporated it as a significant part of their culture. Or
was it a modern discovery, a by-product of the confluent emergence of the
sixties’ “psychedelic culture” and the coincidental discovery during that decade
of 5-MeO-DMT in B. alvarius venom?
The written history related to toad venom smoking is nonexistent, and the
archaeological history isn’t much better. No toad-venom–containing vessels are
left, nor pipes that have been shown to contain venom residue. With the lack of
an identifiable physical record, it is impossible to accurately say when a practice
might have first started, or even whether or not it is ancient in the first place.
Still, I wonder what knowledge was traded on the face of the Earth during
the same era that the Greeks revered kykeon, the Vedas deified Soma, and the
great southern shamans intuited the complex formula of ayahuasca and the idea
of blowing entheogenic snuff up someone’s nose with a hollowed-out bird leg
bone? Vast stores of tryptamines have been unleashed into the minds of humans
via Amazonian plants and seeds. Could toads have been used to similar effect?
Indians in Peru use the venom of a certain species of tree frog to cause a
psychoactive effect by burning their skin and then rubbing in the venom.
Neither the milking of toads (or tree frogs), nor the invention of a
sophisticated brew such as ayahuasca, which utilizes the chemistry of one plant
species to activate the chemistry of a totally different plant species, could be
considered events that erupted spontaneously. It is possible to imagine
accidentally eating a magic mushroom or two, as R. Gordon Wasson and
Terence McKenna espouse, but how could someone “accidentally” milk an
amphibian and then figure out how to safely ingest its venom, or spontaneously
brew some pounded lengths of vine and a shrub’s leaves for twelve hours? Or
decide—just for the hell of it—to try blowing a bunch of ground bark or seeds
up someone else’s nose?
An oft-repeated refrain is that the shamans in South America claim that the
plants told them. Perhaps all really can be known if you listen to the plants and
your dreams. Alas, the great shamans of the north are long gone, leaving few
traces behind other than the occasional marking on an ancient rock wall. And as
much practical information as I could find on the Internet about toading, I could
find virtually nothing about its history or origins. Like the origins of tree-frog
poison use in the Amazon, or the invention of ayahuasca, its conception is
almost as great a mystery as the state produced by the venom itself.
Mystery that it will remain, I personally like to believe that the archaic
tribes of the Sonoran Desert first started the practice of smoking toad venom.
Modern Huichol Indians represent the toad colorfully in both their cosmology
and in their psychedelic beaded art. I have been unable to locate anything
indicating that the Huichol of old knew about smoking toad venom, although it
would not be surprising if such a tradition had been kept secret due to the
relentless persecution of Amerindian cultures.
While there is no physical proof that the tribes of Mesoamerica knew that
Bufo alvarius possesses venom that is psychoactive when smoked, there is some
pertinent circumstantial speculation. From the wide diversity of entheogenic
plants that these tribes used, it is clear that their shamans actively searched for
such things, curiously experimenting with numerous natural substances, often at
the risk of their own injury. According to Davis and Weil, “Many Indians
regarded smoke as sacred essence, a vehicle to the spirit world. The use of
tobacco established a pattern of consuming psychoactive drugs by smoking.”
24
They also quote the anthropologist Peter Furst:
The area to which Bufo alvarius is presently native was once inhabited by
archaic desert cultures; it is also the putative homeland of the UtoAztecans, from which they expanded southward into Mexico as early as
1500 B.C. Was it the shamans of the pre-agricultural desert cultures who
discovered the potent psychotomimetic effects of toad poison and whose
ecstatic trance experiences gave rise to the now widespread beliefs in the
toad as a transforming shamaness . . . ?
25
The “archaic desert cultures” that Furst refers to are the Hohokam Indians,
who are known to have traded with ancient Mesoamerican cultures to the south,
and whose own culture—with ball courts, pyramidal mounds, and pottery
decorations—reflects an influence from those southern contacts (including their
probable cultivation of tobacco, the seeds of which likely came from
Mesoamerica).
26 Davis and Weil point out that, like plant seeds, light-weight
and durable toad venom would have been easy to transport over the welldocumented, extensive trade routes that were available.
27 And the greater an
entheogenic force that a substance provided, the greater its trade value would
have been. Since it is only found in the Sonoran Desert area, this could have also
added to its worth.
It seems easy enough to believe that the Indian tribes of the Sonoran Desert
could have identified Bufo alvarius venom as a potent entheogen and traded it to
their southern neighbors. Perhaps the possession of such a potent link with the
Divine is what ultimately caused the Aztec nation to believe in its own manifest
destiny, sparking their subsequent conquest of much of what we now call
Mexico. Could this venom have been a sacred treasure from their homeland,
whose mythical properties they celebrated repeatedly in their art and mythology,
even going as far as to pointedly represent the Bufo alvarius toad’s parotid
glands in their sculpture and pictography?
We can never really know for sure. But consider this description of
Tlaltecuhtli, the Aztec Toad “Owner (Guardian) of the Earth,” in her monstrous,
devouring form: “Tlaltecuhtli is of course not just a toad. . . . She is . . . an ideal
image of the mediator, by which otherwise apparently disparate states are united
—life and death, air and water, death and rebirth . . . at once impressively fertile
and also cannibalistic . . . metaphor for the earth as the Great Mother who is at
once giver and taker of life.”
28
While this couldn’t be submitted as even speculative evidence, it sure
sounds like the experience of smoking Sonoran Desert toad venom to me. And
there is no doubt that at least one contemporary American Indian has learned
about this practice and related it to the shamanic practices of his ancestors. The
artist Cristobal González wrote about the vision he received from smoking Bufo
alvarius toad venom:
The symbol of brother toad and mushroom, which are Gods . . . to give
wisdom of the shamanism, and how to study; how to be able to
communicate and be able to receive direction. And encounter the sacred
spaces that exist. Because not all (places) serve for that which one wants
to know.
For the Gods say in which place, one can ask for that; which a person
“living in reality” wants to know. To be able to learn here, is when the
shaman are in the sacred places with their candles, praying to wait for the
hour when God arrives . . . to be able to communicate for their powers and
ask for luck for their shamanism. And when that hour arrives, they see the
candles surge . . . the life-force appears, as if it explodes . . . And from the
sparks, the force which comes out is seen, and that is the way it is, where
the transformation occurs. It is power which the brother toad and the
mushroom have. Because in this way . . . the Gods speak.
29
All I really know for certain is that going into the desert for days on end
searching for toads, catching them, milking them, and seeing that thick venom
turn into white crystal in the morning—and then ultimately experiencing actually
smoking it—is a great deal different than hanging out with your bros and doing a
bunch of random drugs that someone purchased from an anonymous dealer and
whose origins you will never really know.
Legally produced and purportedly 99.5 percent pure synthetic 5-MeO-DMT
was responsible for my true epiphany, my moment of clarity, during a rare
window of opportunity in this repressed “drug war” culture. But toading closed a
circle that began in a laboratory and ended out under an endless starry sky in the
Sonoran wilderness. Voyaging to a timeless place of eternal knowledge—no
different now than it was ten thousand years ago—granted exactly the same
understanding to a modern seeker as it would have to the high-plains shaman of
old: the knowledge of G/d generated within. Our society has spent so much time
trying to quash the production and sale of LSD, yet all the while, sitting in the
mud on the side of the road, there is a natural tryptamine that makes acid look
like training wheels. The ghost of ancient shamanic knowledge moves across our
times like a warm wind: calling up the past, calling up the future; trying to bring
us back to the path, back to experiencing the true knowledge of G/d.
To close another circle, I took a small amount of the toad venom I had gathered
to share with the friend who had originally turned me on to 5-MeO-DMT, and
who had given me the instructions that initiated my first 5MDE. He is of
northern Mexican Indian stock, so perhaps the blood of the original toad hunters
runs in his veins. When he smoked the venom, he lay back and arched his back
and howled like a wolf at the top of his lungs for at least ten minutes before
beatifically coming out of the trip and declaring that it had been “the most
peaceful thing in his life.” The next morning I went into town to check out the
bookstores. I saw a calendar of Alex Grey’s artwork on display, and as I flipped
through it I suddenly recognized with a shock one of the paintings, titled Bardo,
from my own journey the night before. Of course I bought it and took it home.
When my friend came home from work, he checked out the calendar I had left
on the table. From where I was in the other room, I heard him excitedly shout
out: “That was what I saw last night!”
A week later I was in London, England, on my way to India. I stopped into
a shop called The Great Frog, located just off Carnaby Street, to check out the
work of Paterson Riley, an infamous jeweler who has made rings for clients like
Keith Richards, Billy Idol, Kate Moss, and the Harry Potter films. As soon as I
saw it, I purchased a ring with a massive, silver bulging-eyed head that looks for
all the world like an ancient, bored Bufo alvarius. It is without a doubt my
favorite ring, and I rarely take it off. When people ask me about it, I tell them
that it’s how I found G/d. And the crazy thing is that it’s true.
A
EIGHT
Burning Man
The Gnostic of today could no longer be a preacher of salvation, a holy
man living a solitary existence on his mountain-top, nor some
illuminated spirit living in a great city and devoting himself to his
beloved ancient texts, but rather a perceptive man, his eyes turned
towards the present and the future in the intuitive conviction that he
possesses above all within himself the keys to this future, a conviction
he must hold steadfastly against all the reassuring mythologies, the socalled salvatory religions and disalienating ideologies which serve only
to hinder his presence in the true reality. For the important thing today
is not so much to discover new stars as to break down the new frontiers
that constantly arise before us, or which are delineated within
ourselves, so that we may cross over them, as into death, with our eyes
wide open.
JACQUES LACARRIÈRE, THE GNOSTICS, 1989
fter our toading adventure ended, we headed north on the bus until we
reached Black Rock Desert and Burning Man, the greatest counter-culture
celebration of our times. The Burning Man festival is held each year over the
week leading up to Labor Day weekend in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada,
reputedly the flattest place on earth. I had been to Burning Man before in the
nineties and reveled in its glorious anarchy then, but now I went with a purpose:
to look for answers, fellow seekers, and a community of enlightened 5-MeODMT smokers whom I believed must exist. But all I found were shadows and
rumors amid a culture of happy drugs and mood enhancers. Most people are too
busy trying to have fun to want to look into the depths of their own souls, and no
one (apart from our bus) appeared to possess any heavy tryptamines. While I
was sure that there were pockets of 5-MeO-DMT aficionados scattered among
the camps, I did not come across any of them.
DMT was on everyone’s lips—everyone had their own DMT experiences,
and I saw more than one copy of The Spirit Molecule being read—but no one
apparently had any. No doubt there were some mature and sensible tryptamine
heads who quietly smoked their sacrament in their private domes in the company
of their tribe. But among the more hectic, public drug culture at Burning Man in
2004, there was no sign of DMT or 5-MeO-DMT.
*28
If some had been available,
it probably would have come our way, since we occupied a prominent
psychedelic enclave somewhere between a group of original Pranksters turned
fisherman and the Oregon Country Fair camp. (You know you’re with the old
school when Wavy Gravy and various Kesey kids are wandering around.) But
there was even a dearth of decent LSD.
†29 Rumor had it there were four vials in
the whole of Burning Man, and at the time I wondered if acid might actually
become “extinct.” Maybe this was why 5-MeO-DMT had suddenly become so
easily available (via the Internet): to replace LSD in its unique role of jolting the
consciousness of the Western world.
I had gone to Burning Man looking for teachers, and I ended up putting on
that mantle myself, which was probably the unconscious germination of this
book. Over the following days, I had the opportunity to guide a number of
people—both friends and strangers—through that gateway and into the tunnel of
light that marks the end of the searching and the beginning of something much
more.
I have continued to learn about 5-MeO-DMT by witnessing the journeys of
friends and strangers, but I have also come to realize—through the reactions of
people who claimed to be “regular DMT smokers” and could wax eloquent
about the chemical complexities of tryptamines—that very few people in modern
times have experienced a full-blown 5MDE, no matter how often they may have
sucked on a normal DMT pipe. Further confirmation of this belief was revealed
by the inner workings of life on our bus, and how a timely dose of 5-MeO-DMT
turned a near tragedy into a rare success.
By the time we settled into our camp at Burning Man and got rid of the
inevitable stragglers who had caught a free ride on the bus, we were down to a
crew of six: myself; Captain Urquhart, a close friend from New Orleans who had
joined us on the bus for Burning Man; Mr. Burner, a psi-trance DJ from the
West Coast; Millie, a seventeen-year-old English lass who seemed the most
mature and wisest among us; Yaron; and Wisconsin, a big, good natured redhaired country hippie acting as Yaron’s designated “bus boy.” (This meant he
had gotten a free ride in turn for being Yaron’s indentured servant—an
arrangement Wisconsin revolted against not long after camp was struck.)
Wisconsin had been with us through the entire toad escapade, and he and I
had struck up a solid bond as I tried to defend him against the worst of Yaron’s
excesses. I could not help but think he would have been an immediate candidate
for the original Prankster bus, with Cowboy Neal behind the wheel. Wisconsin
was the prototypical Kesey farm hippie. He didn’t hesitate to get his hands dirty
—true Rainbow stock—and was exactly the kind of hard-working cat you want
around your camp.
Mr. Burner and I had previously gotten to know each other over the course
of a few random meetings, due to our fraternal interest in a long-gone band of
fiends called Crash Worship. His dry wit and encyclopedic knowledge about the
inner workings of the music scene at Burning Man made him another ideal camp
mate.
Millie was new to us all. As soon as Wisconsin saw her, he was in love. She
spent the following ten days torturing him, much to the amusement of the rest of
us. (“She’s tough, that one,” Wisconsin confided in me with a shake of his hairy
teenaged head.) She took everything that came her way so much in stride that it
actually gave me hope for the latest generation. I just hope that there are more
like Millie around. Having a couple of mature teenagers on the bus was bizarre,
but rewarding, and somehow made us feel more like a family.
The only problem on the bus turned out to be Yaron, whose domineering
thousand-mile-a-minute style tends to run right over people. The bus had
encountered numerous problems with its fuel filters as we hauled our way
through California, and at one point, I had driven for over forty hours, desperate
to get to Reno. So I was already exhausted by the time we arrived in Black Rock
City, and the nerves of everyone on the bus were strained and thin. Yaron
managed to aggravate the situation with his habit of pulling groups of random
acquaintances onto the bus for big puff sessions—while the rest of us were in the
middle of trying to erect our structure and set up camp—and then screaming at
us if we took a break ourselves. His shouting and general lack of calm threatened
to ruin our time at Burning Man, and before long virtually everyone (and
especially Wisconsin) was ready to kill him.
By the second evening, the work was finally done. Camp was erected and
looked strong enough to stand up to the harsh desert winds. Yaron had
mercifully disappeared with a group of followers on an art car, and he did not
seem likely to return for some time. Peace reigned on the bus as we enjoyed the
first true moments of relaxation since we had arrived on the playa. As
conversation turned toward our plans for the evening, someone suggested that
we kick off the week properly with a 5-MeO-DMT ceremony and I readily
agreed. My friend Captain Urquhart had sat with me through more of my own 5-
MeO-DMT sessions than anyone else and was well aware of the liberating effect
it had had on my consciousness. However, the few times he had tried smoking it
himself, he had seemed unwilling to really draw on the pipe and hold the smoke
in and had only received lower-level effects. When I had mildly pressured him
abut trying it again most recently, he had responded that he was “waiting to get
to Burning Man,” and now that we were on the playa, I was eager for him to
finally experience a full 5-MeO-DMT release himself.
Everyone agreed it seemed like a fine idea, although Captain Urquhart
expressed the concern that Yaron might return while one of us was entranced (so
to speak). I assured him that Yaron seemed like he was gone for the night, and
Wisconsin agreed to lead the way. The only problem was, by the time I got
everything organized, Wisconsin was sound asleep after all his hard work, and it
didn’t seem that we could rouse him.
This put Captain Urquhart up next, so he slid into the astronaut’s chair and
took his first solid 5-MeO-DMT hit. I could tell that this was going to be the one
that would send him. But as bad luck would have it, Yaron noisily returned with
a group of strangers just a few minutes later, and walked straight through the
ceremony we were holding beneath the considerable awning in front of the
entrance to the bus—despite the fact I asked him to be quiet since Captain
Urquhart was obviously deep into his journey! Five minutes later—just as
Captain Urquhart was coming back, in a confused state from his experience—the
whole group came traipsing out, straight through our ceremony once again, with
Yaron loudly explaining to his friends that we were smoking 5-MeO-DMT. The
group departed as abruptly as it had arrived, leaving only Yaron behind in the
tattered remains of what had began as a peaceful and serious attempt at ritual.
Setting and Ceremony
The more I smoke 5-MeO-DMT, the more I realize the necessity of
presenting this unique entheogen in a ceremonial setting. This is
not only because this is a compound that can lead to the ultimate
mystical realization and as such is sacred, but also because the
ceremonial setting is the safest and most effective way for a
person to experience a 5MDE. If you are surrounded by a
protective circle of genuinely loving people who respect the
seriousness of what you are doing, then you will experience the
least fear and the greatest chance of achieving the highest result.
Other than that aspect, the nature of the setting is not as
important as it is with other psychedelics, since—at the higher
dosages—the 5MDE is a true out-of-body experience. However, it
is good to be in quiet comfortable surroundings with enough room
to lie down. Indoors is generally best. Soft instrumental music can
be a good lifeline for people as they return from a 5-MeO-DMT
journey. (I like Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, or some Krishna Das.)
Music can also help cover outside noises, if you are in an urban
environment.
I usually turn the music on at a low level a few minutes into an
individual’s experience, especially if the person seems to be
having any physical tension or difficulties. Tensing up during a trip
is usually the first sign that someone may be having problems. If
that happens to someone you are with, quietly and repeatedly tell
him or her to relax and breathe, and, if it is not already playing,
turn the music on. If the person looks really tense, it can be useful
to touch his foot and talk to him. A small amount of physical
human contact is one of the best ways to start bringing someone
back toward this reality. It is very important to give people some
time after they have “come down” from the peak of their 5MDE,
since they are still receptive to the greater energies of the
tryptamine universe. This is also the period where the participant
can reveal extraordinary wisdoms to the circle, only to forget that
they ever uttered them.
Generally, the smaller the number of participants, the better. The
exception to this is in a larger ceremonial space, such as a
specifically designated dome at Burning Man, with a group of
participants who recognize the sacred nature of the quest. In such
a setting, using the group for support, the circle can be as large as
fifteen or twenty people (although less is better). Otherwise, five is
my maximum number for a room, preferably with all the observers
being participants at some point. I have found three people to be
the ideal number for a ceremony, with one of the two people often
being a close friend of mine, while the other is a stranger (usually
a friend of my friend). One of the many anomalies of the 5MDE is
that it is often this person—the stranger to me—who achieves the
greatest entheogenic effect during the session.
Make sure all possible interruptions will be avoided, such as
telephones, animals, or people suddenly coming in. If you are
leading the ceremony, and the person about to smoke the 5-MeODMT has a significant other with him or her, then everyone must
understand that you will be the guide for the person smoking, and
that everyone else should resist getting involved or touching the
participant during his or her journey—unless you ask them to. It is
better to clarify things at the start, than to have a situation in the
middle of an experience where the observers become freaked out
because of the weird things that they are watching their loved one
do. Watching a physically heavy 5MDE can be more stressful then
actually going through it, since the person who is having the
apparently “bad trip” often does not remember any of the difficult
part at all, and sometimes thinks that he or she has had nothing
but an amazingly loving and peaceful experience.
If you become experienced enough in smoking tryptamines you
may start smoking them alone. A 5MDE becomes an intensely
personal thing—it can be your dialogue with G/d—and I now have
a hard time letting my friends—let alone strangers—see my fear
and wonder when I come out of it. But when the 5MDE is
presented as a sacred ceremony, such as some do within the
billowing domes of Burning Man, it is one of the most powerful
ways to help build unity within the tribe, because then all are
common witnesses to something remarkable, and a group of
minds can in some way “mesh,” for both participant and
nonparticipant alike. Smoking 5-MeO-DMT can be one of the most
important events of your life, and, as is common with any lifechanging event, those who accompany you on that journey can
become as close to you as family, unified by the cosmic field of
One Love. This is not something you quickly forget.
Captain Urquhart is one of the few people I know who believes that the 5-
MeO-DMT experience was bad for him as he would suffer from what he
believes to be lingering effects over the months to come. (See appendix 6.) He
was very disoriented when he came out of his voyage, a situation only made
worse when he discovered he was surrounded by curious strangers. As I
witnessed my friend’s obvious distress I became truly furious with Yaron, who
as usual seemed oblivious to the damage he had just caused. Once Captain
Urquhart had calmed down I went into the bus without saying anything and
packed a massive 30 mg hit into the bowl, then took it back outside and handed
it to him.
“What’s this?” Yaron asked. I told him it was his introductory 5-MeODMT hit, and he immediately agreed to do it with the same lack of forethought
that seems to accompany all of his actions.
Now—although my portrait of Yaron so far may seem less than kind—he
is, in his unique way, a remarkable cat who lives by his own peculiar set of rules.
At this time, he was something of a West Coast counterculture fixture, on
account of the uncompromising way he lives his life (and the fact that he once
managed to start a full-blown riot). When I first met him, and then when his
name came up again while talking to mutual underground friends, I had high
hopes that he would be my introduction to the West Coast society of enlightened
5-MeO-DMT users that I was sure existed. (I had naively hoped that if I could
just get in touch with this group, then all my questions could be answered.)
Outwardly, Yaron initially had seemed like the ideal candidate: he was willing to
take me toading, knew about the literature on tryptamines, and had established
his own personal DMT mythology based on his apparently numerous
experiences.
However, once I went to Mexico with him, I realized that Yaron’s
introduction to toading had been by chance, through a much older English
underground chemist—a character who had lived in the desert for years and
obviously had nothing to do with any “West Coast tryptamine society.” In fact,
Yaron actually knew only the barest basics about toading (all of which were
readily available on the Internet), and our trip was his first fairly successful
venture since the death of his mentor, who had been shot dead by the local
police. He caused us to buy a lot of equipment that we did not need (making the
venture unnecessarily expensive) and to drive all around the Mexican desert,
before we realized we just had to pay more attention to where we already were.
Still, he was able to identify the correct toads (there are a surprising number of
different toads out there, once you start looking). And he had milked them of
their venom before, which is as weird a specialized occupation as one can
imagine (all you trimmers and fluffers bow down!).
But as much as he talked about DMT and 5-MeO-DMT, and as much as he
knew about the drug culture in California, he did not know the one piece of
information I had taken for granted would be common knowledge among the
psychedelic community on the West Coast. That was the simple fact that 5-
MeO-DMT was not a scheduled compound, and it was readily available (at that
time) for purchase from several Internet-based vendors. Nor did anybody else
that I discussed this with at Burning Man seem to know that this was the case. I
began to realize that somehow I had fallen into the world of easily available 5-
MeO-DMT fairly early and that at that point, due to my insatiable curiosity, I
undoubtedly knew a lot more about the compound than most.
That evening at Burning Man, as I angrily handed Yaron a pipe packed with
as high a dosage as I would dare give anyone, I acted as close to malice as I ever
have with a tryptamine pipe. But I was determined to drive something into his
hardened skull, and I was clinically curious what he would make of the
experience. He sucked hard on the pipe while sitting cross-legged on the
mattress we’d laid under the awning of the bus, then instantly coughed out a
thick cloud of smoke and was out cold before he hit the ground. Managing to
wrest the pipe from his hands as he fell back, I looked into the bowl with the
flame of the lighter to assess how much he had taken in and saw that there was
still a fair residue of the orange powder. So I took a hit, which I could
immediately tell was going to be 100 percent effective. I then collapsed beside
Yaron, who was lying there with his eyes wide open, but was obviously
completely “gone.”
After an unknown period of time and a full-blown 5MDE of my own, I
came around with my head lying on Yaron’s legs. The first thing I noticed was
the thump of the generator and a faint smell of diesel in the air. I struggled to sit
up and saw the stars through the entrance of the awning and then immediately
suggested that we go outside to get some fresh air. Captain Urquhart put his
hand on my arm, laughing, and told me to listen to what Yaron was saying. I
suddenly remembered that Yaron had taken a hit of 5-MeO-DMT as well. I
looked around confused, noticing that everybody looked like they had been
laughing their heads off. Mr. Burner, Millie, and Captain Urquhart were all
wide-eyed and smiling, and I realized that something special had been going on.
Focusing my attention on Yaron, who was now sitting up beside me, I heard him
say:
“If I say anything harsh this Burning Man or worry about anything—any
bullshit, money, anything at all—I want you to take me out in the desert and
shoot me. Just shoot me and bury me in a hole in the ground. ’Cause none of it
means anything!”
He threw his hands up in the air and laughed. “It was a pleasure to die with
you people,” he exclaimed. “And this guy, this crazy fucking guy,” he declared
as he wrapped me up in a big ugly Israeli bear hug and kissed me on the cheek,
“I love this fucking guy, and his crazy fucking DMT! I have smoked plenty of
DMT before, but I have never experienced anything like that!”
So spoke one of the most hardened and jaded of West Coast heads, further
supporting my supposition that it’s all about the delivery and the dosage and that
a lot of people who think they have experienced DMT or 5-MeO-DMT have
only played around on the edges. The rest of the bus had tears streaming down
their faces by now, and this shared experience would set the “ground state” of
our camp for the next week and a half. We would all come and go, but we were a
family because of what we shared that night, and the bond stayed strong between
all of us. Yaron completely chilled out from that point on—at least as much as
was possible for him—and seemed to actually try to show some respect for the
rest of us living on the bus, which was a great relief to everyone.
Wednesday night at Burning Man, there is no better place to be in the
counterculture world. Most of the hard work is done, camp is built, and the next
night the gate is closed for the rest of the event. Tomorrow the “week-enders”
will stream in, more than doubling the size of Black Rock City—these days to
somewhere in the vicinity of 50,000 freaks. Wednesday night is the line, it could
be argued, between the Community and the Curious, since the majority of the
people who create Black Rock City come for at least ten days, while many of
those who come only for only the weekend tend to treat the event like a glorified
rave (my apologies to those true Burners with inflexible work schedules!).
That night, once Yaron and I had recovered sufficiently from our shared 5-
MeO-DMT experiences (and Wisconsin had groggily awoken, after missing the
whole show), we took our bicycles out onto the open playa—a gigantic
horseshoe-shaped plain of pancake-flat desert outside of the camping area—
which contains the Man, the Temple, and the majority of the art installations.
Before we left the bus, Captain Urquhart and I had split three of “Dr. Hofmann’s
Sweet Tarts” that we had been gifted. As soon as we got out onto the playa, I felt
the juice hit me like a ton of bricks—the lights blurring and streaming like a
heavenly video game, as I began laughing and howling like a lunatic. Burning
Man was on!
Our intention was to cruise around as a group, but now full fiendish
madness had come down upon me and I found myself concentrating on every
random event with increasing intensity. “Fuck,” I thought to myself, “This is a
hit-and-a-half? I haven’t been this twisted in years!” Suddenly Mr. Burner’s
calm monotonic voice reeled me in, as we cycled past a sound system that
looked vaguely like Stonehenge, the music pulsing out of it with the astonishing
clarity of pure energy.
“Oh yeah, I forgot about these guys, their sound system is probably just as
sweet as ours,” I heard him say, and then the next thing I knew, I was standing in
the center of Stonehenge, with the music lapping over me like waves of light,
surrounded by new people and completely separated from my group of friends,
whom I would not see for the rest of the night. So began one of the great
psychedelic (as opposed to entheogenic) nights of my life, which reignited my
personal love affair with Dr. Hofmann’s “Problem Child.”
The events of that night are far too long to entirely recount here, although I
must mention having a neo-religious experience on my knees alone at the
Temple of Stars, as somewhere deep within my soul I realized the genius and
sheer beauty of that immaculate structure, and cried out in astonishment and
disbelief that we would burn it down in four short nights. (Respect to the Temple
builders!) But many hours later, after I had witnessed an indescribable sunrise
with my family of thousands and then, unwilling to let such a magical night end,
had dallied until it had grown too hot to be outside any more, I finally returned
to the bus, still cackling away to myself.
“Here he is!” I heard Captain Urquhart shout, as I came around the front of
the bus and found Mr. Burner waiting for me—his face in the early morning
light looking extraordinarily serious and appearing entirely purple to my twisted
eyes.
“I just want you to know,” he said, “I think we can find some of the world’s
finest LSD today.”
“Acid?!” I laughed, laughing down deep inside from the joy and wonder of
the night I had just lived through and the sunrise I had just seen. “Who needs
that stuff?!” Laughing like a madman, I bee-lined toward Captain Urquhart and
the bong, leaving a somewhat confused Mr. Burner standing in my demented
wake.
My point in all this is the fact that smoking the 5-MeO-DMT right before I
took the “sweet tarts” produced an effect so powerful that it was almost as if I
were trying them for the first time. Captain Urquhart’s experience mirrored mine
and caught him equally by surprise. Since we had eaten these particular “sweet
tarts” numerous times before, we thought we knew what to expect! But the
power of the experience that night was far greater than we would ever have
expected from one-and-a-half hits apiece. It is generally accepted DMT lore that
this effect works in reverse also—that is, taking even a very small dose of LSD
or psilocybin can result in considerably amplified DMT (and 5-MeO-DMT
experiences).
This experience was added to the others that ultimately sent me on a search
into the quantum realm for explanations of what was truly taking place in my
brain. Although at the time I had never heard of things such as “Bose–Einstein
condensates” and knew little of the physics concept of coherence, it was in those
terms that I believe I finally found a deeper understanding of what I was
experiencing. At the time, however, I simply reveled in having had one of the
great psychedelic nights of my life. It was also my personal night of commitment
to becoming a bona fide member of the Burning Man community, which also
inspired the production of this book. Its creation, construction, and continued
distribution is both my act of “radical self-expression”
*30 and my humble
contribution to the community of this unique and necessary event, my gift to my
Burner brothers and sisters. May our construction of the New Jerusalem continue
unhindered and may the lessons we learn there—about art, love, G/d, and the
strength of the tribe—spread out across our mad and dying world.
A
NINE
India
A wise man will not go out of his way for information.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU,
JOURNAL ENTRY, MARCH 18, 1852
s my fate would have it, I had a trip planned to India to realize a longtime
dream of flying a paraglider in the Himalayas, and this seemed like the
perfect place go after the mad adventures of toading, Yaron’s bus, and Burning
Man. The wisdom of this plan only seemed confirmed when I found out, to my
surprise, that Bir—the small town in northern India where I would be staying—
was the site of a significant Tibetan refugee population and the home of a
famous teacher, Khyentse Rinpoche. Life seemed to be moving me in the correct
direction without any discernible effort on my part (other than interpretation),
and I was sure that this trip to India would open up new regions of both my mind
and my soul for further exploration.
I had been to India once before, to attend the Maha Kumba Mela, the
famous religious gathering that happens once every twelve years on the banks of
Allahabad and is said to be the largest gathering of humanity in the world. On
that occasion I had more interest in the spectacle as a photographer than I had in
any sort of spiritual quest. Yet I had been undeniably moved by the intense
religious belief I witnessed there and by the relevance of spirituality to the lives
of the Indians themselves.
As the birthplace of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism and the home to
millions of Jews, Zoroastrians, Christians, Muslims, and just about every other
religion you can possibly think of, India is the “DMT of spirituality.” There is no
other more amazing cauldron of religion, ritual, and philosophy than is contained
within those borders, since India is, in itself, worlds upon worlds upon worlds.
India and its religions are inseparable, just like the wave/particle phenomena of
quantum physics; take one away from the other, and you have nothing left. India
is religion, with all its divine blessings and all its glaring faults, and like many a
naive and hopeful Westerner, I went there flying high on my discovery of G/d,
fantasizing that among India’s many philosophies I might find some answers to
my own, only to have the sheer weight of India’s history and its harsh modern
reality send me crashing back down to the ground.
Before I even made it to India, I injured my back lifting a heavy bag in
Heathrow airport. Then I got the worst case of food poisoning in my life within
forty-eight hours of landing in Delhi. For over a week I lay in a dollar-a-night
stone room in Bir, suffering the unseasonably cold weather, shitting and
vomiting, and in severe pain every time I had to get off my cot and lurch into my
(mercifully) private bathroom. Finally, thinking that I might actually die in this
barren hotel if I didn’t do something, I decided that a change of scenery might do
me some good. So I took a taxi and a six-hour bus ride to Manali, where I found
a pharmacy that sold me some pills that cured whatever was wrong with me.
(The pharmacist took one look at me and immediately reached under the counter
for the correct medicine—some kind of heavy antibiotic I presume.)
I spent a couple of days lying in a modern hotel room with an astonishing
view of the mountains, since it had just snowed in the Kulu Valley, closing the
pass north to Leh and Ladakh for the winter, and now all the peaks lay buried in
white. I was incredibly weak from not being able to hold down any food, and my
back was still so badly fucked-up that I had a hard time walking, but at least I
was alive. Eventually I managed to haul myself out of bed and slowly made my
way up to one of my favorite places in India: Jakhu Temple (also known as the
monkey temple), just outside of Old Manali. The snow had melted off the
ground down low, and I walked unsteadily along a trail between towering pine
trees, with the whole lower valley a vibrant patch of living energy among the
white sparkling fields of the Himalaya. This Hindu temple is a beautiful carved
wooden structure dedicated to Hanuman, the Monkey God, and locals claim it
has existed since the times of the Ramayana epic (somewhere between 500 and
100 BCE), in which Hanuman plays a significant role. I sat outside the temple in
the sun, grateful just to be there, and still too shy to the alien world of India to go
inside, make my offering, and ring the temple bell.
I had come to India to fulfill a dream of paragliding in the greatest
mountains in the world, and now I considered myself lucky to be able to
accomplish a twenty-minute walk up a moderate hill in an hour and a half.
Physically, I felt the weakest I had in years—maybe ever. While my mind was
light and clear, it seemed as though I was waking up from a long dream (or a
5MDE) and was just discovering that I possessed a physical flesh-and-blood
form. I realized that in the year and a half that had passed since I first smoked 5-
MeO-DMT, I had forgotten about my body. I had been increasingly living in my
mind and ignoring the obvious realities of my physical well-being. For example,
I had stopped practicing yoga after a number of years—undoubtedly the root of
the return of my back problems. My condition effectively hammered home to me
that while I might be able to escape the boundaries of the physical world during
a 5MDE, back in this world I was inextricably linked to my own flesh, blood,
and bone, and the health and vitality of that body could not be maintained by the
realm of the mind alone.
Body/mind, particle/wave, male/female, yin/yang—our limited view of
reality asserts that we live in a world of opposites and totally misses the point:
that one without the other is not whole. This is the quantum view, the only
paradigm in the twenty-first century that has any hope of making a difference.
And nowhere is it more obvious than within the living example of our own
being. Whatever the meaning of life may actually be (and I don’t believe that
there is a concrete answer), it lies in the fact that there is life—that the balance
between wave and particle, between mind and body, has found a way to exist.
Space and time are purely products of that interface; one without the other would
be only the void.
Evolution, termed “the arrow of time” by Ilya Prigogine, is the ongoing
perfection of that process—the advancement of the capabilities of that interface.
The only significant evolution of the human species over the last 40,000 years
has been the advances of our consciousness, since we have changed very little
physically over that time, other than the enlargement of the frontal lobe of the
brain. As we are beginning to realize the true scale of the observable universe—
our probing telescopes finding it larger and older than we had ever imagined—
we have made ourselves smaller and smaller. The more we learn of the universe,
the more we are taunted by the unbelievably brief span of our own existence and
our (seemingly) unique
*31 ability to question why. Stretching its growing
muscles, mind keeps banging against the limitations of its physical form.
But mind cannot live without body—or at least not in this realm of space
and time. One good bout of dysentery clears you of any fantasies about that, as
the mind struggles with the fluctuations in the temperature and plumbing of its
bodily function like a person drowning. India taught me that much at least, and
over the next few months I struggled to regain my physical balance. My illhealth amplified India’s faults and scabs and challenged my worldview and
beliefs at every turn, while my ego was slowly chipped away.
India did not want to go easy on me. I guess there was a lesson I had to
learn, perhaps simply one of humility. But it seemed that for every step I took
forward over the next few months, I took two steps back. My general lack of
health and lingering stomach and back problems meant it was some time before I
was able to paraglide. When I finally did get in the air, I was still too sick to
really enjoy it, so I ended up spending a lot of my time just hanging around the
Tibetan village of Bir. (Bir is actually comprised of two villages—one Indian
and one of Tibetan refugees and their Indian-born families.) Being in Bir wasn’t
necessarily a bad thing, but was rather frustrating for a person generally used to
good health. Then, to make matters worse, I was involved in a head-on collision
with a taxi while riding my rented Royal Enfield motorcycle, and still later had a
heavy down-wind landing with my paraglider, so I just kept piling on the bruises
and injuries. Compared to the heady days of the previous summer, when the
combination of voracious reading and my 5-MeO-DMT intake had me nearly
convinced that there was some way to completely escape physicality, I was
being brutally reminded of how necessary my “meat” really was.
My philosophical quest was not going much better. My reading had moved
on by now, from McKenna, Shulgin, Strassman, and other tryptamine experts, to
a heavy diet of Buddhist and Hindu philosophy that I had purchased in Delhi.
(India is the third-largest publisher of books in English in the world, and the
bookseller’s alley in Delhi is a metaphysical book lover’s dream.) As I learned
more and more about the significance of the daily activities I was observing—
the centuries of belief layered in the countless temples and monasteries with
their constant ritual and ceremonies—I felt myself becoming increasingly
entranced by India’s intoxicating religious spell. But when confronted with the
sheer enormity of the Hindu and Buddhist philosophies, my own ideas often
seemed like shadows passing over the surface of the pond—so illusionary they
might as well be useless. It became harder and harder for me to know what I
really believed. I could see plenty of parallels between the Eastern philosophies
and various aspects of the 5MDE, but in the end, what good did that really do for
me? What truths unfolded? Nothing new at the time, that’s for sure—just a
deeper understanding of the values of compassion, tolerance, clear thought, and
the importance of the search for meaning.
I didn’t need texts or teachers to be reaffirmed of that, as the ordinary
Tibetan people whose presence I was living among taught it to me daily. Their
humility and humor was more impressive to me than the hordes of red-robed
monks from the various neighboring monasteries. Time spent with Tibetans
made me quickly realize how spoiled and ungrateful the rest of the world has
become—how soft and dull and disinterested. The unflagging optimism and
constant good nature of the Tibetan people challenges us to identify the source
of our misery and discontent. Most of the time when we examine it, we realize
we have little to be upset about at all. It is simply our lack of control over our
own lives that causes us the majority of our own suffering. Attack the real root
of the situation, and we can solve the problem. But any other action simply
causes more problems.
Many of the lessons of Buddhism (in particular) can be described as
“sensible philosophies”—practical methodologies for navigating our way
through life. They make our own life, and the lives of those around us, easier and
more fulfilled. The tenacity and optimism of Indian Tibetans is the ultimate
proof of the solid value in their worldview, and the grounded nature of their
beliefs seemed a million miles away from the wonders of smoking toad venom.
It was only the esoteric, far reaches of their philosophy—among the demons and
visions depicted in the tantric thangkas adorning monasteries’ walls—and their
commitment to the importance of the moment of dying, with the intricate
descriptions they have of that “final” process, that seemed to have any relevance
to the 5MDE. And these seemed unimportant, compared to the vitality of the
everyday existence of the Tibetan people and their remarkable refugee story. But
I also knew it was from their faith in the truth of their esoteric vision that the
Tibetan people drew their great strength.
As I battled with the daily contradiction that is life in India, I tried to make
some sense of the mess I had gotten myself into. Smoking 5-MeO-DMT had
opened me up like nothing else ever before and shown me the wonder of G/d,
and now India was making me realize the wonder of life again and how fortunate
some of us really are. But recognizing the existence of G/d is completely
different from making sense of the fact that G/d allows us to make such a mess
of this world. Nowhere is that contradiction more evident than in India, the most
religious, most populated, most polluted, and most terminally stone-crazy
country on the planet.
When I called India the “DMT of spirituality” earlier in this chapter, I really
could see that descriptively while I was there, what with the bizarre mélange of
shapes, colors, smells, sights, smoke, and sounds that is religion in India. Thanks
to my friendship with a remarkable Sanskrit scholar from England and his lovely
wife, Jim and Claudia, I have been fortunate to experience India from a very
“Indian” perspective. Jim is a tall thin English viscount with dreadlocks down to
his ass. A Ph.D. in Sanskrit from Oxford, he speaks fluent “BBC” Hindi and has
studied in India with a saddhu (Hindu holy teacher) for many years. Because Jim
reads Sanskrit, something that most of the saddhus can no longer do, he is
somewhat of a novelty and is well known and treated favorably by India’s elite
saddhu hierarchy. Common Indian people often treat him as if he is a saddhu,
touching his feet and giving him money (which he then gives away again about
ten feet down the road). A journey with them anywhere in India inevitably
involves giving puja (offerings) at numerous interesting temples and smoking a
lot of Parvati Valley hash with the astonishing variety of saddhus found along
the way—most of whom claim to have met Jim at some Mela somewhere.
It was thanks to Jim and Claudia that I was able to experience the Maha
Kumba Mela on my first trip to India, since they had invited me to camp with
them and their saddhu, Sri Ram Balak Das, who is the leader of an ancient sect
of Ram Baba (a monastic sect of saddhus devoted to the Hindu God Lord Rama,
the great hero of the Ramayana epic). Due to the fact that we were with such a
prestigious sect, we were allowed to march in the Royal Procession with the
thousands of holy teachers and bathe in the Ganges on that most prestigious day
in 144 years. Only a handful of Westerners were allowed this honor, while 15
million ordinary Indians watched and waited for their signal to bathe. Jim
explained to me that by bathing at this particular moment it was possible to wash
away 144 x 144 lifetimes worth of bad karma. Two years later, with my mystical
connection to 5-MeO-DMT firmly established, I looked back on that day of
bathing in the Ganges (an act I undertook in complete faith, since I figured 15
million people couldn’t be that wrong) and wondered exactly what did get
washed away that magical day.
Thanks to my friendship with this pair of informed and enthusiastic
Hindiphiles and the places they took me where we never saw another white face,
I was able to experience India at times at a virtually magical level—lost among
the frenzied energy of religious devotion pulsing through the ancient temples of
India with their vast throngs of fervent believers. Every temple carries with it a
unique, palpable aura, a sense of being that is different in each location. A
distinct identity that can only be realized once you step from the elevated
vantage where you enjoyed a view of the architecture to that below, into the
crush of daily life where you are lost, submerged in the sea of humanity—a press
of bodies that push forward as One, deep into the bowels of the Mystery itself.
At the end of my time in India on this latest trip, I ventured alone to Balaji,
Rajasthan, to visit a little-known temple that performs mass exorcisms—try and
imagine a couple of thousand people all smoking 5-MeO-DMT at once and you
kind of get the idea. After a lifetime of seeking out the unusual, this is probably
the strangest place I have ever been. (Beating out the Rat Temple in Karnakata,
India, where they have been feeding thousands of sacred rats for hundreds of
years.) An Indian who was explaining the various bizarre goings-on to me
pointed out the small temple that contained three painted rocks that had been
venerated as gods for over three thousand years. There was a throng of people
trying to get in to make offerings to them, and the Indian remarked, “See, this is
why our religion is superior to yours. Here we can see our gods.” This is the
strength of religion in India: it is a tangible thing. You can touch it, smell it, taste
it, and throw offerings into its flames. There are countless Hindu gods, with new
ones being created every day, and India finds myriad ways to celebrate and
honor each and every one of them. This is a kaleidoscopic, multifaceted vision
of G/d that in its entirety resembles the visions I see in a 5-MeO-DMT
experience.
But for every vision of heaven that they might represent, each of these gods
looks down upon a living hell. It is no wonder the Buddha saw life as suffering.
For in India, the sacred and the downright cruel walk down the street hand in
hand. You see poverty and deformity that would sicken you if it were not for the
strength of the smiles on the afflicted. India constantly does your head in,
because you know that you are not as strong as these people; you know you have
so little faith. There are days in India when life seems like the most vicious of
jokes—yet a joke that somehow the Indians instinctively understand. Which is
why they can always be laughing, mocking you for your lack of spine, for how
easily you can come apart in a “meltdown” that is commonly known by foreign
travelers as a “bad India day.” Bare ideas seem like the flimsiest of constructs
here, because they lack passion, commitment, faith. India feeds on ideas like
wood feeds a fire: the flames may get a little higher, but the fuel is all used up
and turned to a powdery ash in your hands that is impossible to grasp, leaving
you struggling to find an answer among the rapidly cooling remains.
Consider, for example, my single strange meeting with the renowned
Khyentse Rinpoche. Since I had been too ill to paraglide, I had spent my time
taking a lot of photos. As I wandered around the village and monasteries, several
people approached me to see if I would be interested in taking photographs at the
dedication ceremony of a huge new university built by Khyentse Rinpoche,
which had just been completed. The Dalai Lama was coming to open the school
—which was going to be a very prestigious event—and the entire Tibetan
population of the area was excited about the visit by His Holiness. I said that I
would be honored to help out, and was told that I should visit the Rinpoche at his
house just outside of Bir to offer up my much-needed services.
During this period I had been deeply moved by Sogyal Rinpoche’s modern
classic The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and I had started to read a number
of other Buddhist texts. Repeatedly, I came across the immutable Indian belief
that you cannot achieve enlightenment without a teacher, and I found myself
wondering about Khyentse Rinpoche, who I knew had a reputation as a scholar
and a filmmaker. He had been Bernardo Bertolucci’s assistant director on Little
Buddha, and had himself just finished directing and producing Travelers and
Magicians, which would prove to be popular on the art-film circuit.
Everything I heard about the man was impressive, and I wondered if
perhaps fate intended for me to be his student. Maybe this was why I had ended
up in Bir without the stomach (literally) to fly. So I trekked down to a large
house that was still being constructed and was told that the Rinpoche was in
Europe and that I should come back in a week. The next time I went I was told
that he was in the United States and that I should try again in a week, the next
time that he was in Delhi, and that I should try . . . well, you get the picture.
Finally, on the fourth or fifth time that I went down, I walked in and saw a
middle-aged man in a simple robe standing there. I had gotten used to speaking
in simple clipped phrasings while trying to communicate with the Tibetan
construction workers that I would find there and, without thinking, asked him in
a sing-song pidgin English (something I almost never do) if the Rinpoche was
around.
“I am the Rinpoche,” he answered in perfect English, while coolly looking
at me with quizzical eyes.
I heard a shriek of laughter, and realized that two twenty-something
European girls were watching us. One of them came over and stuck a video
camera in my face, recording my stammering efforts to explain to the Rinpoche
about the request for a photographer. The woman with the camera was quite
obtrusive, and the other girl clearly thought this was hilarious, while the
Rinpoche said nothing and seemed to be gauging my reaction to this somewhat
bizarre scenario.
“I don’t think we need a photographer,” he said. “We have plenty of
photographers don’t we?” he asked the girl with the camera. She answered back
with a quick, “Yes, Rinpoche, we have plenty of photographers,” all the while
continuing her obtrusive filming, with her camera uncomfortably close to my
face while the Rinpoche stood there smiling at me in silence. I stammered an
apology and made my retreat, with the girls’ laughter still echoing in my ears as
I exited the driveway. Every other time I had come down to the house, I had
been treated with the utmost respect and politeness: I generally was asked if I
wanted a cup of tea and some biscuits and was thanked profusely for even
offering my services. Thus the entire tenor of this last encounter with the
Rinpoche himself was rather unsettling and odd.
*32
As I considered the possibility that this was a test of some kind (which I
undoubtedly felt like it was), I remembered that a Rinpoche is different than a
Lama, in that he does not have to take a vow of chastity. Rinpoches have been
known to engage in numerous liaisons, sometimes with European women. I had
already met a few European “followers” of the Rinpoche, all of whom seemed
somewhat star-struck and needy. One follower, an intelligent psychiatrist from
England, told me that “it was great to hang out with the Rinpoche in London,
because he has an apartment there in the West End, but there is no center for him
in London, so only his closest followers get to see him.” (Along with Bernardo
Bertolucci and assorted Hollywood types, I was guessing.)
Walking away from Khyentse Rinpoche’s house, I decided that I wasn’t
sure what it was that he was teaching, but I was pretty sure I could do without it.
Maybe he knew that as well, who could tell? And with that decision, it occurred
to me that if there had been a test of some kind, I had just passed. The
accomplishments of Khyentse Rinpoche left no doubt that he was indeed a
remarkable man. Still, my path, it seemed, was truly my own: investigating a
modern brand of mystical knowledge. Apparently no one other than myself was
going to be able to help me understand it.
I smoked 5-MeO-DMT only once while I was in India. The experience is worth
mentioning, mostly because of events that occurred a few weeks later, which by
a strange twist of geology are linked even though they occurred in different
countries. Because of this fateful linkage, I will quickly relate this particular
5MDE, and later on in this book, you will be able to see the connection.
We were in the Kangra Valley, a couple of hours from Dharamsala, visiting
a small temple carved out of the side of a cliff that had a deep stone pool fed by
a hot spring at the base of it. To get there we had hiked down a river for close to
an hour before crossing it to arrive at the temple just outside of a small village. I
went there with Jim, Claudia, and a couple of Italian paraglider pilots we knew
from Bir. There had been some talk of smoking 5-MeO-DMT at this spot, and so
I had prepared a few doses before we left, but by the time we finally got there it
was nearly dark, and the pool was far more inviting. We soaked for a number of
hours and then slept outside on a concrete pad underneath a giant banyan tree.
Women came and went from the village to take water from the pool, but they
never approached us. It was the only place in India I ever went where the people
simply left us alone. (It’s mighty hard to get a moment’s peace in India.)
I awoke the next morning to an ethereal misty dawn punctuated by the
temple keeper’s ritual ringing of the bell as he performed the morning’s opening
prayers and offerings. There was a timeless, mystical quality to that dawn, which
encapsulated everything I had come to India looking for—the magic lay like dew
on the ground—and I remember lying in my sleeping bag wishing that the
moment would never end. It passed in a few breaths, the sun rising an inch, the
temperature climbing a degree or two . . . and then Kiko, one of the Italians,
began packing the day’s first chillum (smoking pipe) while putting on water for
the first cup of chai.
We were all awake by then, some of us with blankets wrapped around our
shoulders, some still in our sleeping bags. All of us huddled around the morning
fire, waiting for our tea under the branches of a gigantic tree that you could
easily imagine the Buddha sitting beneath. When drops of water began to fall off
the leaves of the tree and the ground began to shake, the others looked up from
the chillum and chai cups, unsure. But I had been through these in enough
countries that after a second I recognized the tremor and named it out loud as the
shaking picked up in force and tempo:
“Earthquake.”
Everyone just sat there, waiting, as the thick concrete pad twisted and
moved for thirty seconds or more. There was nothing else we could do. Finally
the force of the tremors subsided, and the temple keeper’s son ran up wide-eyed
as everyone began to speak excitedly at once. It turned out that I was the only
one who had ever experienced an earthquake before.
Another chillum was hastily packed, and another pot of water put on the
fire for more tea. Jim went off to the edge of the stream to meditate, while the
rest of us sat drinking chai and discussing how strange it is to feel the earth
move. Then I remembered that I had brought my 5-MeO-DMT smoking kit with
me, and it suddenly seemed like the perfect time to engage in a 5MDE.
One of the Italians took me up on the offer, the exotic setting undoubtedly
an attraction, and he enjoyed a peaceful and harmonious introductory 5-MeODMT experience. No one else wanted to try it, so I loaded myself a pipe, and I
remember the world dissolving away before I even exhaled. It was an
exceedingly powerful experience, full of dark energy and turmoil. There seemed
to be a clear message behind it: that I needed to stop smoking 5-MeO-DMT for a
while, or maybe even forever. I couldn’t tell.
I emerged in a state of shock from my heavy experience, sure that I must
have been screaming at some point. But my friends told me that I had remained
sitting cross-legged for most of the experience, which Kiko found very unusual,
as he had never seen anyone who was able to remain seated after smoking DMT.
Outwardly I was totally peaceful, and toward the end I had lain down without
them noticing. At no time did I make a sound. Apparently I have learned how to
leave my body behind with virtually no resistance, clinging to nothing as my
mind flashes further and further away—deep into the void.
As peaceful as I may have appeared, I was shocked by the awesome power
of what I had just experienced. I lay there on the concrete pad, looking at the
myriad leaves fanning out above my head and hearing the sounds of women
drawing water from the temple well, with the chants of the temple-keeper and
his son behind them. I wondered about my compulsion to continue pushing into
that unknown energy, searching for the power and coming back fried.
“Isn’t this magic enough?” I asked myself. “What is it that I am hoping to
learn?” As Alan Watts once said, “When you get the message, hang up the
phone.”
1 Now that I had actually felt the presence of G/d and really believed in
it, did I need to keep going back there again and again? Or did I need to keep
returning to keep on believing? Maybe I was becoming addicted to this feeling
of getting my ass kicked? I felt closer to being terrified than I felt to being
addicted, and in my heart I knew it would be many months before I got the
courage to smoke the 5-MeO-DMT again. Nevertheless, I continued to question
my motivation and compulsion to access those terrifying realms.
The strange thing is that if you start smoking tryptamines, then the whole
world seems to become a tryptamine experience: you cannot tell when the
changes began—identify the time before gnosis—nor can you draw a line
around what changes were made. Perhaps it is the same as it is for the characters
in the Peruvian novelist César Calvo’s translucent novel The Three Halves of Ino
Moxo—heading up the river to find a famous shaman, the world is an ayahuasca
vision.
2 This is the revelation: life is a dream—an experience from which we
will one day wake up, into another dream, another experience. Putting down a
tryptamine pipe on the other side of the universe and trying to explain where it is
we have been.
After the turmoil of this experience, I resolved to abstain from smoking any
more 5-MeO-DMT until the world told me it was time to start again. I
contemplated the possibility that perhaps my moment in the sun was over;
maybe now I just had to hold on to the lessons I had learned. But it would not be
long before it would be made dramatically obvious to me that the knowledge I
had gained from visiting the Tryptamine Palace was responsible for guiding me
in ways that I would never consciously know. It was having such a profound
influence upon my path, my life, and perhaps even my destiny that I could
hardly deny it. And over a period of time, many of my experiences in India—
including this tumultuous 5-MeO-DMT experience—began to make more sense
to me.
At that time, however, I prepared to leave India more confused than I had
been when I arrived. After twenty years of travel experience, I can honestly say
that I had never been so glad to be leaving a country behind. But as the Chinese
say, “You cannot polish a diamond without roughness,” and India definitely
managed to polish my consciousness into some kind of a shine. And because of
that—as hard as it can be—I hope that I will one day return there, to keep
working on that shine.
As the paragliding season in the Himalayas drew to a close with the advent of
the monsoons, I attempted to complete a Vipassana meditation course outside of
Jaipur. But I found that my still-injured back couldn’t endure the long hours of
sitting (the silence was no problem), so I headed south to the holy town of
Pushkar in the Rajasthan Desert to attend its annual Camel Fair, which is a
photographer’s wet dream. It was while walking the streets of Pushkar one night
that I first conceived the idea of writing this book. I had been in India more than
three months by then, and the culture had finally beaten me down to its pace.
The next weeks slid by, broken only by my daily yoga classes, but since I
didn’t have long left in India, I felt like I should go and see some other sights
before I had to depart. I took a disastrous bus trip to Jaisalmer on the Pakistani
border. The heavily overcrowded bus ran out of diesel in the middle of the desert
at night and took an extra day to get there. I then spent a couple of dissolute days
kicking around inside Jaisalmer’s timeworn pink stone walls, before I booked
myself a first-class train ticket back to Delhi. Then, on that train ride, something
remarkable happened: for a handful of hours, my brain really began to work.
Maybe it was the virtually empty first-class carriage, or the maximum 30
mph of the train’s speed. Or maybe it was the endless flat gray vista outside the
window (Rajasthan is the most boring desert I have ever seen), the long hours of
the journey, or the months I had already endured in India, which, when
combined, finally slowed me down enough so that I could really think. Or
maybe I had simply had the ego and the intellect beaten out of me. Whatever it
was, something opened up in my mind on that train ride like a flower in bloom.
And long before I had ever heard of the zero-point field or a quantum basis for
consciousness, a steady stream of ideas about the true nature of reality as various
forms of light flowed seamlessly through my mind. Ideas that seemed solid
enough that I made the effort to find a pen and paper and write them down.
Now, several years later—with a great deal of reading on current ideas of
quantum physics under my belt—I have come to realize those ideas correspond
to the cutting-edge of modern science to an uncanny degree. I find this rather
startling, since I did not know about any of the latest discoveries of quantum
physics at the time. Whatever happened on that train ride, I know one thing for
sure: my mind received a solid dose of in-formation, a fundamental factor in
nature that has the capacity to “inform” the recipient. When I read how Rupert
Sheldrake’s revelatory intuitions about “morphic resonance” fields had occurred
while he was staying at an ashram in India, I found it easy to understand. There
are few places left in the world where a person can calm the hubris of modern
life enough to fish through the waters of the still pond for divine answers. In the
age of rapid-fire digital sensibilities, countries like India may be our last link to a
past age of contemplation and revelation. For this reason alone, India will
continue to attract foreign interlopers like myself, to crash and burn upon its
fabled shores. India is where you discover that it’s what you make of the
shipwreck that ultimately teaches you the most. Some days, I think this is the
most important lesson I have ever learned.
M
TEN
The High Priest
Timothy Leary and the Legacies of the Psychedelic Age
A botanist I know (who does not take recreational drugs) believes that
30 million Americans took drugs between the 1960s and the 1990s, and
that the visions the drug users had while in that altered state account
for the utterly new sea-change of attitude that we find today at the end
of the century: a deep and reverent regard for our planet and for those
others out in space, for our environment, for the rain forest and both
wild and domestic animals, for the idea that the Earth itself—Gaia—is
breathing, has consciousness, and that all living beings, all rocks and
plants and sentient beings are inextricably entangled; that we humans
are now evolving to a higher plane of divine consciousness.
SOPHY BURNHAM, THE ECSTATIC JOURNEY:
THE TRANSFORMING POWEROF
MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE,1997
y time in India impressed upon me the timeless nature of many of Hindu
philosophical concepts, whose parallels within the emerging paradigm of
the quantum sciences were becoming increasingly obvious to me. The fact that
these metaphysical beliefs that originated in the Indus Valley thousands of years
ago could still circulate and seem relevant to our modern age seemed incredible
to me, and I could only marvel at their staying power. However, the fact that all
real knowledge of the preparation of Soma—the Hindu entheogen of the Vedas
—has apparently been lost in the mists of time, while the philosophies it birthed
and encouraged have remained, caused me to question if the ideas themselves
are not more powerful than the entheogens that create them. A paradox that also
exists in Western Philosophy, since the Eleusinian Mysteries and the use and
preparation of kykeon lasted 2,000 years, only to disappear as well, while the
ideas of the Greek Philosophers who participated in these Mysteries still
continue to influence us.
Clearly there was a shift in perspective in our more “modern” human
societies that caused us to abandon the use of sacred entheogens. Words,
prayers, and ultimately scripture replaced the first-hand experience of the Divine
that Soma and kykeon had provided, as we turned the pursuit of spirituality over
to the priests and their “holy books.” It has only been in the last hundred years
that our (Western) society has begun to turn back to entheogens in an attempt to
experience the sacred first-hand again, perhaps as a polar reaction to our
science’s bold assertion that any belief in spirituality is nothing more than
superstition.
A Psychedelic Movement?
After Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception reintroduced to popular
culture the possibilities inherent in the spiritual use of entheogens, the “acid
generation” of the sixties and early seventies was the most obvious large-scale
rediscovery of the ritualized use of such compounds, while the current, much
smaller-scale interest in ayahuasca and shamanism is the latest attempt at
reasserting the sacred role of entheogens within our own society.
However, as Huston Smith points out in his book Cleansing the Doors of
Perception, modern “psychedelic theophanies” have lacked substantial staying
power. The fleeting nature of the experience itself, as mystical as it may be, is
not enough to create “a movement,” since a moment of spiritual understanding is
not necessarily enough to ignite “a religious life.”
Due in part to the repressed urges of the American youth of the midtwentieth century, contemporary “psychedelic movements” have been portrayed
as more hedonistic or utopian than spiritual or philosophical. But in the
midsixties, when mescaline and LSD were still legal and readily available, the
modern Western consciousness threw open the doors to the unknown—to the
infinite—and we jumped in. Deep inside that experience, we realized that we
were now swimming in a dimension we had somehow forgotten—one with
tremendous new possibility for the future of humanity. But these were far deeper
waters than the “modern” Western mind had ever swum in before, perhaps
deeper than we could handle. And I believe we flinched.
We flinched in the face of that psychedelic vision of the infinite unknown
because the minds of that generation—who were born before television, who
were children when the atomic bomb was dropped, and whose lives had mostly
been lived in terms of black and white—were ill-prepared for exploring those
realms of vivid realization. They had been deprived of a mystical history for too
many generations. The psychedelic experience was a brutal shock to the
generation born after World War I, less than a century after the horse and cart. In
William S. Burroughs’ letters to Allen Ginsberg, for example, which describe his
yagé experiences in 1953—perhaps the real beginning of the “psychedelic
age”—much of what you read is terror: sheer terror and bafflement at the
extreme and vivid nature of his seething ayahuasca visions.
By the time Dr. Timothy Leary’s “Harvard experiment” and his provocative
brand of pedagogy came around, we were clearly on the cusp of a new era of
technology that promised to have a profound impact on the future exploration of
the capacities of human consciousness. Aldous Huxley realized that mescaline
and LSD had a unique potential to be important tools in reshaping the way we
understand our psyche and that if we used them correctly, we could explore
higher forms of consciousness. Timothy Leary, unfortunately, popularized the
belief that LSD would reshape the psyche itself, and save us the job of worrying
about it.
To further clarify, Huxley felt that if you took LSD, you were more likely
to understand the metaphysical content of, for example, The Tibetan Book of the
Dead. Through the many paths of knowledge, meditation, and “psychodelics”
(the more etymologically correct term that Huxley commonly used), you could
progress toward the higher realms of consciousness and understanding. Leary,
on the other hand, promoted that LSD and the Tibetan Book of the Dead were
basically the same thing. You didn’t have to really think, you just had to drop
acid, and society would change itself overnight. This cultural “enlightenment”
clearly does not appear to have occurred, despite the pockets of sixties idealism
that remain. (Although with over forty years of hindsight, psychedelics clearly
have had an important impact on society.)
In Zen terminology, Leary made the mistake of “forgetting that the finger
that points at the moon is not the moon.”
1
In a position to lead the advance of
our knowledge of inner space like no man in history before him, Leary instead—
like every religious conman—promised enlightenment in a bottle, and then
latched his own social and political aspirations onto the most ancient of ideas. Of
all the principal characters that in one way or another created the so-called
psychedelic revolution of the last fifty years, I find Dr. Timothy Francis Leary
(1920–1996) to be by far the most paradoxical and confounding.
The High Priest
As a scientist and a psychologist, Leary has a most impressive resume. In his
early work in psychology he published a complex and respected interpersonal
circumplex model that is still used in psychology today. The timing that led him
to Mexico to ingest magic mushrooms in 1960 before he began his research
assignment at Harvard could not have been more propitious to the nascent
psychedelic movement. Leary’s subsequent oft-quoted statement that he learned
more about psychology in the five hours on those mushrooms than he did in
fifteen years of research and studying, drew the battle lines for the future
emergence of what I will now dub the “mystical sciences” paradigm.
The early work that he and Richard Alpert did at Harvard largely produced
solid scientific results, and studies like their Concord Prison experiment had the
opportunity to produce real change from within the American system. In the
prison study Leary gave psilocybin to prisoners in an attempt to reduce prison
recidivism: 20 percent of the study’s test group returned to prison after release, a
reverse of the normal 80 percent. (These reported results have since been
characterized as inaccurate.) Walter Pahnke’s “Good Friday experiment,”
however, investigating the entheogenic effect of psilocybin on religiously
predisposed subjects (with Leary as his principal academic advisor), remains one
of the most intriguing experiments in the scientific study of religion ever
performed in an American university (and its findings were supported by a 2006
study at Johns Hopkins University). Walter Huston Clark, a prominent
psychologist wrote, “There are no experiments known to me in the history of the
scientific study of religion better designed or clearer in their conclusions than
this one.”
2
Leary was a Harvard professor; he had climbed the walls of the Ivy Tower
and he was in a unique position to guide the use of psychedelics in research and
psychology to hitherto unexplored regions of the human psyche. But before
long, the temptations of glory as “the High Priest” of the exploding youth
movement of the sixties proved too much for him. He was fired from Harvard
for (allegedly) not turning up to lecture. While Leary has been deified as a
counterculture icon, I can’t help but feel that ultimately his own personal desire
for fame damaged the counterculture movement as much as he did it any good.
By losing his status at Harvard, and then preaching to the youth of America the
mindless psychedelic propaganda that they only needed to “Turn On, Tune In,
[and] Drop Out,” he more than anyone was responsible for ensuring that
psychedelics could not become instruments of mainstream interest—by being
one of the high-profile vehicles for their eventual criminalization; instead of
protecting them like the scientist and high priest he proclaimed himself to be.
LSD and the Beheading of the New Left
What we have to contemplate nevertheless is the possibility that the
great American acid trip, no matter how distinctive of the rebellion of
the 1960s it came to appear, was in fact the result of a despicable
government conspiracy . . . if U.S. intelligence bodies collaborated in
an effort to drug an entire generation of Americans, then the reason
they did so was to disorient it, sedate it, and de-politicize it.
CARL OGLESBY, FORMER HEAD OF THE
STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY
Leary’s paradoxical transformation from a Harvard scientist to a counterculture
caricature raises some interesting and unsettling questions about the introduction
and subsequent widespread use of psychedelics (and LSD in particular) in the
sixties and about the ensuing effect that this enthusiastic LSD usage had both on
various individuals and on the nascent politics of the New Left itself.
Among today’s counterculture (and much of the popular culture) LSD is
regarded as being one of the main (if not the main) agents of social change in the
sixties. It is seen as fuel for the fire of change that America’s youth embraced
during that period and the source of much of that generation’s creativity. The
continued popularity of the Grateful Dead and the sixties acid culture into the
twenty-first century could be considered nostalgia for those “days of the good
acid.” Acid’s effect on the counterculture of the sixties is universally considered
to have been a good thing—despite the occasional burnout along the way.
People tend to forget that members of the socialist student movement (such
as the SDS—Students for a Democratic Society) in the United States were
integrally involved in the victories of the Civil Rights movement in the late
fifties and early sixties in the south and emerged from those years as a highly
organized, politically mature, and battle-tested organization that would become
known as the New Left. By 1965, thanks to the Vietnam War, they had a new
front on which to fight. Social change had already become a priority among a
significant portion of the youth at American universities, even before
psychedelics were introduced.
We know that LSD was introduced to the colleges in the United States by
the CIA—this is established fact.
3
The common counterculture view of this historically provable fact is that
this was a mistake and that the CIA unwittingly let the genie out of the bottle by
introducing LSD to the already disgruntled youth culture. Personally, I don’t buy
into that view. The OSS had been experimenting with “mind-control” drugs
since at least 1942. When it later became the CIA, it created a program in 1953
called MK-ULTRA, which studied the effects of various mind-altering
compounds on different groups of the population. The CIA initially tried to buy
a staggering ten kilograms of LSD from Sandoz, the Swiss pharmaceutical
company that was Dr. Albert Hofmann’s employer and the original supplier of
LSD. While this staggering amount would have been enough to manufacture
some 100 million doses, it turned out that Sandoz had only manufactured some
40 grams of the compound to this point. Sandoz agreed to manufacture 100
grams a week for the CIA, and although it will probably never be known exactly
how much LSD the CIA purchased from Sandoz, it is generally believed that
Sandoz was unable to fulfill this commitment due to the difficulties of
manufacturing LSD by their method. So in 1953, apparently wanting a larger
supply of the compound and not trusting the Swiss company, the CIA convinced
the American pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly (now the manufacturers of
Prozac) to break the patent held by Sandoz. Significantly, Eli Lilly did so by
coming up with a complicated twelve- to fifteen-step method that created the
precursor for LSD (lysergic acid monohydrate) from chemicals available on the
open market, as opposed to Sandoz’s original method, which started with
cultivated ergot-fungus to create ergotamine tartrate, a time-consuming process
that produced only small batches of LSD at a time. Eli Lilly’s new method
effectively opened up the possibility of the mass-production of LSD. (They
reputedly informed the CIA that they could manufacture “tons” of this
compound if required.)
During the period that Sandoz was supplying the CIA directly, and then
later the FDA, the CIA were aware of—and approved all—LSD sales by
Sandoz. Therefore it is not inaccurate to say that virtually all the LSD consumed
between the early 1950s and 1965 (when Sandoz stopped manufacturing LSD)—
whether it was by Al Hubbard, Tim Leary, Wavy Gravy, Ken Kesey, or anyone
else who gained access to the drug—was in fact “CIAapproved acid.”
Considering the fact that the OSS-CIA had been studying the effects of “mindcontrol” compounds like LSD since the days of World War II, I believe that they
had a pretty good idea of what would happen if they released several million hits
of LSD into the country over eight years: that the political center of the student
movement would fall apart. The CIA couldn’t have predicted the “acid-tests,”
the Summer of Love, or Woodstock, but they certainly could have “modeled”
the subsequent political collapse of the U.S. student anti-war movement.
*33
The effect of LSD on the ego has been likened to the effect of hard exercise
on muscle. LSD shreds the ego, but—just as a muscle rebuilds larger and
stronger after being “torn down” by hard exercise—so too can the ego actually
strengthen after years of repetitive high-dosage LSD use. This would explain a
lot about the egomaniacal blowouts of the apparent leadership of the
“psychedelic movement”—Leary immediately leaps to mind, while Tom Wolfe
also portrays the other great LSD advocate of the day, Ken Kesey, as something
of a control freak in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Similar fallout was also
documented among the leadership of the SDS, which by 1968 was splintering
from a cohesive whole into numerous competing factions. This foreshadowed
the total disintegration of the so-called youth movement, which by the start of
the seventies was almost completely headless. In the wake of its subsequent
collapse after the end of the Vietnam War, the major universities and their
student bodies have been virtually apolitical ever since.
Leary and the CIA
Leary and the CIA
This brings me back to the paradox of Dr. Timothy Leary, who was undoubtedly
responsible for helping to significantly change American culture with his snappy
acid propaganda, and who, ironically, may have been a pawn of the CIA and
their own plans, whether he knew it or not. We will probably never know the
extent of Tim Leary’s knowledge of the CIA’s involvement in the introduction
of LSD into American society, but Leary’s numerous relationships with
individuals involved in the CIA raises a number of unsettling questions and
possibilities.
In 1947, while acting as the California state delegation leader at the national
convention of the American Veterans Committee (AVC), Leary met Cord
Meyer, a man that Leary would later credit for “helping me understand my
political-cultural role more clearly.” By late 1950, Meyer was a full-blown
member of the CIA and was soon put in charge of its International Relations
Division, whose expressed purpose was to covertly finance, infiltrate, and
encourage noncommunist liberal movements and institutions such as labor
unions, creative-academic societies, and student groups (including the SDS).
Over a decade later, Leary would continue to be involved with Meyer’s ex-wife,
Mary Meyer, who was having an affair with President John F. Kennedy at the
time and whom Leary (and numerous others) believe introduced Kennedy to
LSD.
*34
In 1964 she would be shot to death, execution style, in a murder that
was never solved. Cord Meyer himself, when asked six weeks before he died of
cancer who had killed his ex-wife, hissed “the same bastards who killed
Kennedy.”
From the fifties onward, the CIA gave over $25 million dollars (through a
front organization called The Society for Human Ecology) to Harvard and other
universities to study the effects of psychedelic drugs.
4
In an interview about the
chemist Nick Sand, Leary also makes mention of the fact that the OSS-CIA was
distributing LSD to hospitals in the late fifties and early sixties.
5 So Leary
clearly did know, at least in part, of the CIA’s involvement in these psychedelic
research programs—the question is when did he realize that.
Numerous other strange connections between Leary and the murky world of
the CIA also exist. In the late sixties Leary would live for two years in the
headquarters of an LSD-smuggling cartel called “the Brotherhood of Eternal
Love” who distributed the notorious Orange Sunshine acid. This group was
controlled by a mysterious character called Ronald Stark, who reputedly turned
up at the Brotherhood of Eternal Love compound with a kilogram of pure LSD .
. . an amount far in excess to what had been known to be produced in the world
at that time. (The famous underground chemist Owsley Stanley, for example, is
thought to have produced only a half-kilo of LSD in his entire career.) While the
Brotherhood of Love chemists Nick Sand and Tim Scully would be responsible
for the production of an estimated 3.9 million doses of LSD between 1965 and
1969, Stark was reputedly responsible for the importation of 80 to 200 million
doses of acid from his labs in Europe!
6 Stark, who had numerous connections
with paramilitary groups around the world, including Italy’s Red Brigade and the
Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), would later be arrested in Italy and
then released by the Italian High Court judge on the grounds that he had been a
CIA agent since 1960. Leary himself says he never met Stark, who disappeared
without a trace, but interestingly the Brotherhood of Eternal Love funds were
channeled through Castle Bank in the Bahamas, which was a known CIA
“proprietary.” It also seems highly unlikely that any of the LSD chemists of this
period—including Owsley, Nick Sand, Tim Scully, or Ronald Stark—would
have been able to obtain the large amounts of lysergic acid monohydrate that
was required for such large-scale operations without the CIA knowing about it,
considering their historical interest in the production and supply of these
chemicals.
In 1970, Leary would be imprisoned for marijuana, stemming from an
earlier arrest in 1968. His initial sentencing was for thirty years (for a total of
half an ounce between the two offences—his second “bust” was for two joints),
and the publicity of his original trial in 1966 would lead to a widespread media
campaign about the dangers of the out-of-control use of LSD among the youth of
America. Leary was liberated from the minimum-security prison he was
incarcerated in by members of the Weather Underground, the most radical of the
groups of the American New Left, who had been paid to spring Leary by the
Brotherhood of Eternal Love (with funds drawn from the same Castle Bank in
the Bahamas). Leary would pledge solidarity to the group and release a
provocative “POW statement” that declared (among other things) that “to shoot
a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act. . . . Total war is
upon us”—further turning American opinion against the New Left (and the
menace of LSD). Leary escaped to Algeria where he and his wife Rosemary
would be held virtual hostages for the next three years by Eldridge Cleaver and
the Black Panthers, who apparently did not trust him.
They escaped to Switzerland, where Leary would then spend two years
living the life of a jet setter before being kidnapped in Afghanistan by U.S.
agents. He was returned to the United States, where he was convicted on
weapons charges and incarcerated in Folsom Prison. President Nixon had
described Leary as “the world’s most dangerous man,” and bail was set at five
million dollars—at that time the highest sum ever. Leary would then turn State’s
evidence against the Weathermen Underground, the very organization that had
liberated him. After spending three years in jail, he would later be pardoned in
1976 by then California governor Jerry Brown.
Although Leary claims that he never provided the government with any
significant information—a claim that members of the Weathermen themselves
agree with—the fact that the FBI revealed him as a government informant, codenamed Charlie Thrush, caused him to be publically condemned by the likes of
Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, and Jerry Rubin. (Rubin called Leary’s press
conference after his release “the death of the sixties.”) Others such as William S.
Burroughs, Ken Kesey, and John Sinclair, the leader of the White Panther Party,
would conclude that Leary had been involved in a CIA plot to discredit the New
Left through the distribution of LSD all along. Upon his release he faced
numerous death threats and then found himself ironically placed under police
protection through the Witness Protection Program for a number of years.
By the end of the seventies, with the movement fading into memory, Leary
would distance himself from the government and his old associates, his
counterculture reputation now in tatters. A reputation that only suffered when
early in the Reagan years he “debated” G. Gordon Liddy, the Watergate burglar
who had once busted him at Millbrook, on a highly publicized nation-wide
tour.
*35 By the end of the eighties, with cocaine the main drug of choice among
the “Greed Generation” and LSD now regarded (along with marijuana) as a
hippie-throwback for burn-outs and losers, Leary seemed like a desperate
publicity seeker and political lightweight whose star had long since faded.
To this day Leary’s ties with the CIA continue to be vigorously debated, with
numerous sites in the Internet dedicated to the possibilities. Leary’s friends and
supporters claim that he deliberately misled interviewers for his own amusement
(such as in the notorious 1978 High Times interview) and that such accusations
are absurd, while others point to the numerous close connections and say where
there is smoke, there must be fire. Leary himself issued various contradictory
statements, from saying that the CIA “never gave him a dime”
7
to claiming that
“the liberal CIA are the best mafia you can deal with in the twentieth century.”
8
There can be no doubt however that Leary was undoubtedly an elitist, and his
infatuation with the intelligentsia within the fifties and sixties intelligence
community is obvious, and no more so than in the following statement from a
speech that Leary gave at a meeting of the American Psychological Association
in Los Angeles, August 15, 1994, at a symposium titled “Interpersonal Theory
and the Interpersonal Circumplex: Tim Leary’s Legacy.”
9
In this commentary, Leary begins by noting some of the people who
influenced him and says, “And now let us toast Harry Murray, a founding father
of the OSS-CIA, by the way,” and then, “Another delightful thing about many of
these Harvard people, particularly Harry Murray, was their cultural scholarship
and aesthetic sensitivity—their interest in the psychology of art and literature.
No question about it, Harry Murray was much more interested in Herman
Melville than in the Wechsler-Bellevue. Over his office-house on Divinity
Avenue he mounted the figure of a white whale.”
Considering the high regard Leary clearly held for Harvard men like Harry
Murray—and considering the fact that in the fifties and sixties both the CIA and
the British Secret Service conducted most of their recruiting from the top
universities—it certainly would not seem to be an outlandish stretch of the
imagination to believe that Leary at least came to the attention of these same
“spook” recruiters in those tumultuous days. And there is no doubt that in
becoming the ego-maniacal Captain Ahab of his generation, Leary turned LSD
into the twentieth century’s own version of the legendary white whale.
Tim Leary’s Redemption: The High Scientist Returns
Leary was always a futurist of note. In the sixties he attempted to create a new
“typewriter” tool that could be used in real-time to describe the DMT
experience,
10 while in the eighties he was on the vanguard of trying to recreate
the psychedelic experience through sound-and-light shows, using the latest in
electronic gear. He was a huge advocate of computer technology and a disciple
of the idea that the human race was destined to go into outer space—so much so,
he actually ridiculed the ecology movement that LSD itself undoubtedly helped
to create. With the advent of the Internet, which Leary called the LSD of the
nineties, Tim Leary was presented with an opportunity for redemption, an
opportunity that he characteristically, and very publically, grabbed with both
hands. He had one of the first websites on the World Wide Web and was an
early proponent of virtual reality; a generation that read WIRED instead of
Rolling Stone would come to know him as one of the pioneers of a new
technological age.
As the era of Reagan/Bush was put to rest, and a former sixties draft-dodger
who admitted he had tried to smoke weed but didn’t inhale became the next
president, nostalgia for the hippie era became fashionable. With the publication
of his memoirs titled Flashbacks, the always media-savvy Leary found himself
back in the public eye. As his stock rose with the tide of nostalgia, and he once
again became something of an icon, Leary rubbed shoulders with much younger
movie stars in his home in the Hollywood Hills and surrounded himself with
computer-savvy Gen X’ers who had barely been born when he had advocated
that their parents “Turn On, Tune In,” and “Drop Out.” Only now his message
and philosophy was taken from William Gibson rather than Aldous Huxley, and
the Internet was the New Revolution.
It is said that time mellows nearly everyone, and while some luminaries like
Hunter S. Thompson and Owsley continued to disparage Leary’s contribution to
the psychedelic era, most of his contemporaries forgot and forgave,
remembering only the best of what he had done. When Leary announced a few
months after the death of legendary Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia in 1995
that he had been diagnosed with cancer, he received a worldwide show of
support and attention; and when he died the following year, it was regarded as
the end of an era, the likes of which will probably never be seen again. Ever the
showman, Leary had long claimed that he wished to be stored cryogenically
when he died; but he changed his mind about this in his last days, and later seven
grams of his ashes were shot into outer space in a rocket (along with Star Trek
creator Gene Roddenberry). With that final act, Timothy Leary’s reputation and
his place in history were effectively deified in a manner that he would have
undoubtedly found immensely satisfying.
Leary and the Tibetan Book of the Dead
Apart from his immortal acid-propaganda, Timothy Leary’s enduring
contribution to the entheogenic world will undoubtedly be his book (with
Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner) The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual
Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is the most notable attempt at
establishing a “psychedelic religious philosophy” from that period. I personally
find it somewhat paradoxical that a futurist like Leary looked to the past and the
Tibetans—metaphysically passing the buck, so to speak—rather than seizing on
the unique technological opportunity that LSD represented and carefully
developing an effective way of exploring its transformative potential from within
our own sciences.
However, I must note that I agree with Dr. Leary’s assessment that The
Tibetan Book of the Dead can be an effective metaphor for understanding the
psychedelic experience. What I find strange is that a man as brilliant and
innovative as Dr. Leary effectively turned his back on seeking parallels to the
emerging psychedelic experience in the newly emerging sciences of the day
(especially consciousness research and the new physics). As an innovative and
well-published psychologist, Leary more than anyone was heir to the respect and
interest that Aldous Huxley’s reputation had (at that point) generated for
psychedelics among the academic world; and by being in the employ of Harvard,
he should have been introducing the psychedelic experience to the curiosity of
these same new sciences and thus transforming the scientific community from
within. But by opening the door to a mimicry of established mystical practices,
he turned psychedelics into the first of the New Age cults. Thanks to the flaws of
his own personality and the power of his own egomania, he was largely
responsible for ensuring that LSD has not been studied in a scientific manner
since he was fired from the very institution that was capable of integrating LSD
into the core of our spirituality, science, and society.
That first modern entheogenic generation was thus encouraged by its selfproclaimed “High Priest” to go looking for answers in the past and in other
cultures instead of confronting the future head on; soon Allen Ginsberg, the
Beatles, and countless others were following Leary’s lead, unleashing a plethora
of fake gurus and false hopes upon the Western world. This fascination with
ancient Eastern philosophies would cause a significant percentage of the
Western youth to question the flaws of the Judeo-Christian society and
ultimately would change the nature of American culture in ways that could never
have been imagined only a decade before. But a thoroughly modern opportunity
for the integration of entheogens into our society slipped away. Psychedelics
were made illegal and banished from further study, forcibly sent underground
and criminalized. By the time Leary was imprisoned, escaped the country, was
extradited, reimprisoned, and ultimately pardoned and disgraced, LSD’s day in
the sun was over. For the wealth-obsessed generation that followed, its use was
derided as nothing more than a hippy throw-back, while its epiphanies were
reduced to the status of merely “tripping,” nothing more than a brief escape from
reality. In the brutal years that followed the demise of the hopes and dreams of
the sixties, the counterculture would turn toward the destructive allure of
amphetamines, cocaine, opiates, and benzodiazepines—any “feel good” or “feel
nothing” drug, which was preferred over an opening of the mind.
Nevertheless, the shockwave of that entheogenic injection reverberated
through the human consciousness, and it would affect the emerging technologies
of mass-produced sound and visuals in a manner that could have never been
predicted. Some folks believe that this shockwave can ultimately be credited
with the seeds of inspiration that grew into the creation of the Internet, which
many now believe will end up being the most revolutionarily transformative
technology in human history.
11
The roots of every multicolored psychedelic image you see printed or
broadcast each day and each weird electronic sound you hear are embedded in
the use of LSD (or something similar), even if the person who created that image
or sound has never touched a visionary drug. Psychedelic lingo has even
penetrated contemporary vernacular, with the descriptive word “trippy” now in
common use by people who have never touched an illegal drug of any kind;
while today’s youth generation attempt to describe the visual effects of smoking
DMT by making reference to acid-inspired video games and computer
animation.
Entheogens (or psychedelics, to be more historically correct) have now
been recognized as the mother of our Western ecology and conservation
movements, as well as the entire field of transpersonal psychology and our
apparent desire to return to some firsthand spiritual and/or mystical
understanding of G/d (rather than blindly accepting traditional religious dogma
without an experiential basis). As a modern agent of societal transformation, the
obvious effectiveness of LSD can no longer be denied. Yet now, more than forty
years after the Summer of Love and even though Leary himself abandoned much
of what he preached in the sixties for the “new acid” of the Internet, still we are
overrun with antique gurus and New Age philosophies. And what remains of the
so-called counterculture seems obsessed with them. Everyone knows all about
astrology, tantra, crystals, and the tarot, but far fewer people seem interested in
quantum physics, DNA, or particle-accelerators, which were born out of the
same Western sciences that invented LSD. How many hours have you spent
speculating about the Mayan calendar’s “end of time?” And when was the last
time you and your friends discussed the latest findings of the Hubble Space
Telescope over a joint? You get the point.
Science versus Speculation
Thanks to the construction of incredible instruments like spacebased telescopes and particle accelerators over the past two
decades, cutting-edge science is providing a plethora of factual
discoveries that are as fascinating and potentially mind-blowing as
the wildest speculations of any mystic or madman. These
inventions have provided us with proven and exhaustively verified
discoveries that should be at the center of our conversations about
the nature of our universe and our reality. But thanks to the schism
between the universities and the “New-Age” counterculture that
occurred during the social fall-out of the sixties, it frequently seems
that scientific achievements are viewed either with a certain
skepticism or with total disinterest by the New Age movement;
whereas often ridiculous speculation gets bandied around like
hard evidence throughout our popular culture. I find this situation
extremely perplexing and can only assume that it has something
to do with the way the two types of information—science and
speculation—are presented. it seems to me that a lot of people
took Tim Leary’s advice—Turn on, Tune in, Drop Out—as some
kind of reasoning to turn their backs on the findings of all modern
science, which is highly ironic if you consider the fact that science
has now entered the most fascinating and mystical paradigm that
it has ever encountered.
Take, as an example, the current search for the presence of
pressure waves in the cosmic vacuum (the zero-point field).
Astronomers in NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory recently found
such a wave generated by the supermassive black hole in the
Perseus cluster of galaxies, some 250 million light years from
earth. what is incredible to me is that this vacuum-pressure wave
translates into the musical note B-flat.
12 This is a very real note
that has been traveling through space for the past 2.5 billion years.
our ears cannot perceive it, since its frequency is 57 octaves
below middle c—more than a million billion (!) times deeper than
the limits of human hearing—but it is a proven fact that this wave
exists, and i cannot help but wonder if those scientists have not
accidentally found Aum, the original note of creation.
Personally I find speculation about this very real discovery a
lot more interesting than, let’s say, the counterculture’s current
fascination with December 21, 2012—but how many of you out
there have even heard about this modern scientific discovery?
how many of you are willing to read enough to try and understand
it, instead of speculating, without any proof or shred of evidence,
on the Mayan calendar, or psychic transmissions from Pleiades,
the lost tribes of Atlantis, or some other popular science-fiction
fantasy? it seems to me that these days our attention spans are so
short that we fear anything that requires intellectual complexity or
the necessity of verifying the accuracy of our information.
speculation has its place—and there is plenty of it in this book—
but it should be understood to be just that—speculation—and not
confused with hard facts that have earned the right to represent
the truth. This is a lesson that can be applied not only to science,
but many other arenas (i.e., politics) in our lives as well, since we
only have to look at the mess that the Bush administration made of
the world by preferring speculation rather than the facts when
making its decisions. As George Clinton so succinctly put it, “You
can’t afford free speech, so you might as well pay attention.”
I believe that this is the enduring legacy of Dr. Timothy Leary. This so-called
High Priest was also supposed to be our High Scientist; he more than anyone
was in a unique position to integrate entheogens into our society as an
instrument of change and discovery, but he fumbled that responsibility. His folly
resulted in the relegation of these sacraments to the status of cult-ish intoxicants
and unleashed a culture of pseudo-science and pseudo-religion as people search
for the same chance at meaning that entheogens briefly provided them in the
sixties. Now, in this burgeoning New Age—this age of deliberately enticing misinformation—any ridiculous conspiracy or theory is happily circulated.
If we are ever going to come up with a modern philosophy of life that is
practical, makes sense, and embraces the uses of entheogens, it has to have its
basis in the solid discoveries of our time. We can look at other cultures, other
mythologies, and we can learn, but we also have to incorporate the incredible
knowledge that contemporary culture is generating at an astonishing rate about
the nature of the universe and this mystery we call “reality.”
A modern entheogenic philosophy needs to be a syncretic one. It can use
the lessons in ancient texts and the timeless truths that they reveal, but it must
build on that inherited knowledge with new perspectives and new discoveries.
We cannot do this by burying ourselves in the past, or by solely following
another culture’s traditional practices—or even worse, the watered down “New
Age” interpretations of those practices. The parallels between modern scientific
views and ancient wisdoms are well documented, but no single scientist,
shaman, or rock ’n’ roll Rinpoche is going to save us. If there is a new doctrine
to be written, then we must write it, based on current experiences.
That which has been lost to Western civilization—the mysteries of kykeon,
Soma, and other sacraments that disappeared into the mists of time and the
inspiration they offered their cultures and philosophies—must be rebuilt. But
they must be rebuilt in an image reflective of today’s times and used as a tool in
our search for a spirituality fused with our science and cosmology. As a result of
my own explorations, I now believe that the quantum viewpoint of the world is
as important to our hopes for a better, more peaceful existence as the Buddhist
viewpoint. Particle-accelerators and quantum computers can prove to be just as
revelatory of the mystical experience as entheogens are, and our future
spirituality must embrace all knowledge that leads us toward a greater
understanding of reality. For while our society’s infatuation with science has
undoubtedly gotten us into much of the mess that humanity now finds itself in,
the way out does not lie by solely looking back to the past. There are no gurus
anymore, and those who claimed to be gurus failed us. We would be wise to
recognize this, since we are the ones who will have to save ourselves.
ELEVEN
The Zero-Point Field and the 5MDE
A Quantum Explanation
The evidence that surfaces, surprising as it may be, indicates that our
brain is not limited to the neural processes that go on . . . within our
cranium—it is a wide-band receiver and high-powered processor of
information. This information it receives originates not only in our own
body, but comes from all over the world. The brain’s ten billion
neurons, with 10,000 connections each, constitute the most complex
system of electronic organization in the known universe. This system,
which operates at the edge of chaos, receives and transforms
information from our own body, as well as the electromagnetic,
acoustic, and other wave fields in our environment. It also receives and
decodes information from more subtle fields, including the vacuum’s
zero-point holofield. Potentially, our brain connects us with the wide
reaches of the cosmos.
As mystics, prophets, and people of insight and sensitivity intuited
through the ages, our brain is an integral part of the universe, and our
mind is a potentially open window on it. It is up to us to throw open that
window, to the full extent of our remarkable, but hitherto largely
unexploited, physical and mental capacities.
ERVIN LASZLO, 3RD MILLENNIUM: THE CHALLENGE
AND THE VISION—THE CLUB OF BUDAPEST REPORT
ON CREATIVE PATHS OF HUMAN EVOLUTION, 1997
I
t is within the the theories regarding this “inexhaustible energy sea,” which
scientists now call the zero-point field, that I have been able to find some
potential answers to the puzzling questions I posed at the beginning of chapter
five. I will now examine each of these questions individually and attempt a
“quantum explanation” for each particular aspect of the 5-MeO-DMT
experience.
1. What Is the Source of the Brilliant Laser-like Light
That I Encounter?
“Instead of an absolute space and time filled with an ether that sustains
the epiphenomenon of light, light becomes the fundamental thing whose
propagation determines the flow of time and the measure of distance.
We can almost say that light creates space-time. I suggest here that
light, in the form of a universal electromagnetic zero-point field, also
creates and sustains the world of matter that fills space-time. Thus the
words, “Let there be light,” may express more than a poetic mythology
after all.
BERNARD HAISCH, THE GOD THEORY, 2006
“With all your science can you tell how it is, and whence it is, that light
comes into the soul?”
HENRY DAVID THOREAU, JOURNAL, JULY 16, 1851
Numerous modern writers, such as Thom Hartmann in The Last Hours of
Ancient Sunlight: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It’s Too
Late, have pointed out that we are in fact made up of light: every atom in our
body (and our world) originated in the last gasp of a dying star, which threw the
remains of its energy out into the galaxy in a cloud of rare elements. Our own
sun creates and sustains life on this planet through its daily bombardment of
solar energy. The energy from the food we eat is essentially stored sunlight,
while the fossil fuels that we’ve tapped to create the Industrial Revolution and
our consumer society are the culmination of millions of years of sunlight stored
in the Earth (a vast sea of irreplaceable stored energy, which soon we will have
managed to exhaust—taking only a little over two hundred years to do so).
We are beings of light, created and sustained by a star. Every culture has
intuitively recognized this and credited that light as the source of our own divine
nature. Creation mythology, common through much of humankind’s history,
credits the birth of material reality out of a void or darkness, from which a divine
spark of light leapt forth. The ancient Egyptians (c. 3000 BCE) believed that a
person possessed a body of flesh and a body of light. Each body needed the other
in order to function as a human, with the body of light animating and
“correcting” the physical body. The Tibetans assert that in the bardos—the
intermediary states between dying and rebirth—we possess a body of light with
which we can cross time and space as fast as a thought.
Mystics since the beginning of time have attributed an understanding of the
Divine to knowledge of that light, and the two have become inexorably
entwined. References to the divine nature of light are especially prevalent in the
esoteric Eastern philosophies of Hindu and Buddhist teachings, but there are also
numerous examples to be found within the Jewish Kabbalah, Greek
Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Islamic Sufism, and in the New Testament. The
following teachings attributed to Jesus himself clearly express that this was his
belief: “. . . God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of
lords, who alone is immortal and who lives in unapproachable light, whom no
one has seen or can see” (Timothy 6). The gospel of John states Christ’s
philosophy irrevocably, “This is the message we have heard from him and
declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5).
My experiences with 5-MeO-DMT have led me to believe that when our
consciousness is freed of the constraints of matter and mass, it spontaneously
returns to the universal ground state of light, where it ultimately recognizes the
true nature of reality as union with that light: union with G/d. According to
Stanislav Grof, the premier researcher of transpersonal states, this experience of
recognition of the divine nature of light is not unusual among entheogen users.
He asserts that in his experience (now of over fifty years) of administering LSD
or holotropic breathing sessions:
Time after time, people compared the Absolute to a radiant source of light
of unimaginable intensity, though they emphasized that it also differed in
some significant aspects from any forms of light that we know in the
material world. To describe the Absolute as light entirely misses some of
its essential characteristics, particularly the fact that it also is an immense
and unfathomable field of consciousness endowed with infinite
intelligence and creative power.
1
Interestingly enough, this idea is consistent with some of the discoveries
being made about the zero-point field in relation to one of the great mysteries of
biology—the level of communication that must exist almost simultaneously
between individual genes and cells to allow them to operate in unison, along
with the process by which the DNA instructs the construction of a living entity.
According to Lynne McTaggart, “Each cell undergoes, on average, some
100,000 chemical reactions per second—a process that repeats itself
simultaneously across every cell in the body. At any given second, billions of
chemical reactions of one sort or another occur. Timing must be exquisite, for if
any one of the individual chemical processes in all the millions of cells in the
body is off by a fraction, humans would blow themselves up in a matter of
seconds.”
2 But we don’t.
In the seventies, German physicist Fritz-Albert Popp discovered an
extraordinary thing: all life-forms emit a weak light. There is some evidence that
the source of this light, which Popp called biophoton emission, may be generated
from the DNA in all living cells. Popp believes that this light exhibits the highest
level of order, quantum coherence, which allows subatomic particles to
cooperate and communicate with each other. By resonating in harmony through
their shared electromagnetic waves, they begin acting like a single larger wave
and a single larger subatomic particle. The greater the coherence, the greater the
communication between the individual particles, which virtually cease to be
individual particles at all, since they are now all in synch with each other.
Popp proposed that this organization occurs at the quantum level by means
of the biophotons resonating in coherence with the zero-point field. According to
him, “each molecule in the universe [has] a unique frequency and the language it
[uses] to speak to the world [is] a resonating wave.”
3 This means that it isn’t the
physical matter of the body (i.e., the chemicals) that causes a reaction; rather, it
is the unique low frequency electromagnetic waves of subatomic particles
resonating with the zero-point field that causes a reaction. This is the medium
that allows all the molecules in the body (and the universe) to communicate
nonlocally with each other, virtually instantaneously.
The mechanism within the body by which this is theorized to be possible is
called “superradiance.” This theory about the nature of human consciousness
postulates that biophoton light “pulses” through the body via microtubules (the
scaffolding of the cells), which resonate in coherence with each other, thus
allowing the cells in the body to communicate instantaneously. These
microtubules represent
the Internet of the body. Every neuron of the brain [can] log on at the
same time and speak to every other neuron simultaneously via the
quantum processes within. . . . [Superradiance] would provide an
explanation for the instantaneous operation of our brains, which occurs at
between one ten-thousandth and one-thousandth of a second, requiring
that information be transmitted at 100–1000 metres per second . . .
4
Popp believes that, at the quantum level, the subatomic particles in our
bodies (particularly the particles in our DNA) are acting with such singular unity
that we actually emit a weak coherent light. Jeremy Narby has suggested that the
images seen while under the influence of ayahuasca are the result of this
biophotonic light emission from our DNA, which makes it possible for shamans
to access a vast library of common planetary knowledge being shared between
all living things in this Gaian web of biophoton emissions. As Narby points out,
a laser uses this same sort of coherence to achieve its brilliance of light and color
—the strength of the source itself is not important. Biophoton emission within
our own bodies is thus a logical possibility as the source of the laser-like light I
regularly encounter. But it wouldn’t necessarily help to explain the similarities
between the 5MDE and the near-death experience, with their common “tunnel of
light” and the feeling of crossing through a gate into a new locality. However,
further examination of quantum biophotonic coherence with consideration of the
zero-point field opens the door to some deeper possibilities.
From the amount that I have read about the current emerging scientific views, I
think it is safe to say that we are entering a new paradigm in which the isolated
mechanical universe of Newton, Descartes, and Darwin is about to be replaced
by the interconnected “enchanted” cosmos hinted at by Nicola Tesla and Albert
Einstein, predicted by David Bohm, and now being realized by Hal Puthoff,
Bernard Haisch, Ervin Laszlo and others. At the center of this shift is the
experiential evidence amassing for the phenomena of coherence, which is
evident throughout the universe at every level, from the very great to the very
small. In the following passage Ervin Laszlo explains the special properties of
this new form of coherence:
The findings of coherence at various scales of size and complexity in
nature, from quanta, the smallest identifiable units of the physical world,
to galactic macrostructures, the largest units, is not the finding of the
standard form of coherence. The standard form is observed in optical
interference experiments. Ordinary light sources are coherent—show an
interference pattern—over a distance of a few meters, since the phase
coherence of radiation from the same source lasts only 10 nanoseconds.
Lasers, microwaves, and other technological light sources remain coherent
for considerably longer and hence over greater distances. But the kind of
coherence now coming to light is more complex and remarkable than the
standard form, even if in this form, too, phase relationships remain
constant and processes and rhythms are harmonized. The pertinent kind of
coherence shows a quasi-instant correlation of the parts or elements of a
system in space as well as time. All parts of a system of this coherence are
correlated in such a way that what happens in and to one of the system’s
parts also happens in and to all its other parts, and hence it happens in and
to the system as a whole. In consequence the parts respond to the “rest of
the world” as a whole, maintain themselves as a whole, and change and
evolve as a whole. This kind of coherence also obtains in the sphere of the
mind. It is recognized in quantum physics but has no realistic explanation,
and it is mainly anomalous at the macroscopic level: the current paradigm
of local action and interaction cannot account for it.
5
According to Laszlo, more than anything it is the surprising discovery of
this new form of coherence that is challenging the existing scientific paradigm:
For the pertinent findings speak of a hitherto unsuspected form and level
of coherence in nature. . . . Such connections seem to obtain over all finite
distances and finite times, and they suggest that the “nonlocality”
discovered in the microscopic domain of the quantum may extend into the
macroscopic domains of life, mind, and cosmos. Nature, it appears, is
made up as a nested hierarchy of nonlocally connected coherent systems.
6
The most interesting thing to me, in relation to the 5MDE, is the fact that
the light present in biophoton emission and superradiance is assumed to
originate from within the zero-point field. Coherence with the zero-point field
posits an explanation for the amazing coherence of the body, where trillions of
cells (far more than the number of stars in the Milky Way) and millions of
antibodies, “coexist at [any] given time [to] produce thousands of biochemical
reactions in the body each and every second, and they are all precisely and
almost instantly coordinated so that they maintain the dynamic order of the
whole organism.”
7
It could explain the amazing coherence of the universe,
where even its basic parameters, “[the] mass of elementary particles, the number
of particles, and the forces that exist between them are all adjusted to favor
specific harmonic ratios (such as the ration 10
40
) that recur over and over
again.”
8 Most importantly for my search, coherence with the zero-point field
may explain the amazing coherence of the mind, with consciousness itself being
a result of the highest possible form of coherence—a “Bose–Einstein
condensate”—present in the neural matter of our brain.
A Bose–Einstein condensate is a singular quantum state first predicted by
physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, with Albert Einstein, in which bosons (identical
particles that share quantum states) confined in an external potential and cooled
to temperatures very near to absolute zero collapse (or “condense”) into the
lowest accessible quantum state, resulting in a new form of matter. (The best
way of understanding this is to imagine these bosons as millions upon millions
of compass needles circling individually around and around, each with an
independent magnetic north. A Bose–Einstein condensate forms when all the
compass needles suddenly find the same position, and all point in the same
direction. When this happens, each compass [boson] essentially no longer retains
its own identity or individuality, and all the compass needles [bosons] can
effectively be regarded as being one.)
In her pioneering work, The Quantum Self: Human Nature and
Consciousness Defined by the New Physics, Danah Zohar (with the collaboration
of her husband, I. N. Marshall) develops the hypothesis that consciousness is the
result of a quantum-level coherence between the neural matter of the brain and
the zero-point field (which she refers to by the early term “quantum vacuum”).
In searching for a way to explain the mystery of the “unbroken wholeness” of
human consciousness (i.e., the way we can perceive dozens of different thoughts
and inputs, yet integrate them seemingly instantaneously into a singular “I”
experience), Zohar identifies the unique capabilities of materials that are in
“condensed phase.” Being in “condensed phase” means that all the fields and
atoms in the material “line-up” and act as one, which could be a possible
mechanism for the brain’s ability to achieve a similar coherence of thought.
Materials in a condensed phase include such things as super-conductors, superfluids, laser light, electric current in metals, and sound waves in crystals.
One problem with this idea is that super-fluids and super-conductors only
work at temperatures around absolute zero. So how could such a system exist in
the substantially warmer environment of a living biological system? According
to Zohar, there is one system known to exist in biological systems, “the pumped
system” first described by Professor Herbert Fröhlich in the seventies, which
seems to satisfy the necessary criteria. Zohar writes:
Fröhlich’s pumped system is simply a system of vibrating, electrically
charged molecules (dipoles—positive at one end and negative at the other)
into which energy is pumped. As they jiggle, the vibrating dipoles
(molecules in the cell walls of living tissue) emit electromagnetic
vibrations [virtual photons], just like so many miniature radio transmitters.
Fröhlich demonstrated that beyond a certain threshold, any additional
energy pumped into the system causes its molecules to vibrate in unison.
They do so increasingly until they pull themselves into the most ordered
form of condensed phase possible—a Bose– Einstein condensate.
The crucial distinguishing feature of Bose–Einstein condensates is
that the many parts that go to make up an ordered system not only behave
as a whole, they become whole; their identities merge or overlap in such a
way that they lose their individuality entirely.
9
Zohar points out that Fröhlich-type systems are found only in biological
tissue, although no one has the slightest clue why. According to Ervin Laszlo:
“Living tissue is a ‘Bose–Einstein condensate’: a form of matter in which
quantum-type processes, hitherto believed to be limited to the microscopic
domain, occur at macroscopic scales. That they do has been verified in 1995, in
experiments for which the physicists Eric A. Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle, and
Carl E. Wieman received the 2001 Nobel Prize. The experiments show that
under certain conditions, seemingly separate particles and atoms interpenetrate
as waves.”
10
Zohar tells us that it has been hypothesized “that one of the fields within the
[zero-point field] is thought to be a coherent Bose–Einstein condensate, that is, a
condensate with the same physics as the ground state of human
consciousness.”
11 Another way of saying this is to say that the coherence of the
waves of the zero-point field is thought to operate under the same principles as
human consciousness: “Further, excitations (fluctuations) of this coherent
vacuum condensate appear to have the same mathematics as the excitations of
our own Fröhlich-style Bose–Einstein condensate.”
12 So our atoms are
resonating with the vibration of the quantum vacuum.
Thus the quantum mechanism of consciousness is hypothesized to operate
something like this: quantum particles present in the neural cell walls of the
brain “fire” in coherence with the zero-point field. There are over 100 billion
neurons in the human brain, now all firing in coherence as one. This is how we
are fed information from the zero-point field (in the form of electromagnetic
waves), and this is how we organize it. This mechanism—called a Fröhlich-style
Bose–Einstein condensate in the brain—is what Fritz-Albert Popp believes is
present in biophoton emissions.
The implications of this are mind-blowing! The atoms of our “reality” are
thought to be held together and given form by their interaction with the zeropoint field, such that all matter is essentially a construct of this field. All
biological and biochemical systems regulating the “program of life” appear to be
modulated at the quantum level by the zero-point field (which occurs at such a
level of organization that they can exhibit negative entropy, in defiance of the
second law of thermodynamics). And now it is proposed that our very
consciousness itself is the result of an interaction of extreme coherence between
the subatomic particles (fermions) in the neural tissue of our brains and the
waves (bosons) of this same zero-point field.
This model for consciousness, and the concept of resonant coherence, opens
up an interesting possibility: that smoking 5-MeO-DMT (or DMT) briefly
increases the coherence in the brain’s Bose–Einstein condensate, causing all the
neurons in the brain to fire simultaneously, which in turn “lifts the veil” from
this reality by increasing the brain’s resonant coherence with the Bose–Einstein
condensate of the zero-point field. Then it is possible to experience the ground
state of the zero-point field as a conscious entity of pure light; if consciousness is
truly a bosonic phenomenon, then it is essentially light and it would resonate
with the zero-point field as light.
We are like a radio tuned in to the zero-point field, resonating with the
vacuum energy. Every atom in our body is quivering with that energy and
literally bringing that energy across, as light, into material existence, very much
like the ancient Egyptians postulated. This is the light I believe I encounter
during a 5-MeO-DMT experience: a highly coherent light emitted via the
neurons in my brain and my DNA, which originates from the other side, from
the quantum vacuum, the void. It is the light of both creation and consciousness
—a pure stream of coherent photons in resonant harmony with the emptiness of
the “vacuum energy” of the zero-point field.
I believe this is the Tibetan light of Rigpa, “the true nature of mind that
manifests spontaneously and blazes out as energy and light,”
13 and the same
tunnel of light that people report from near-death experiences. This is the
ultimate light, the light of creation, of mysticism, of religion, of information. As
my consciousness leaves the confines of the physical world during a 5MDE and
resonates in reunion with its original source, I briefly cease to exist except as
that light. In that moment—in the classical mystical sense—the light and I are
one.
2. How Can I Feel as If I Am Occupying a Reality
Outside of Time?
Since light travels at the speed of light, let’s imagine a disembodied
observer (pure mind with no mass) traveling at the speed of light.
Einstein’s equations would predict that, from light’s own point of view,
it travels no distance and takes zero time to do so. This points toward
something very strange indeed about the light. Whatever light is, it
seems to exist in a realm where there is no before and no after. There is
only now.
PETER RUSSELL, FROM SCIENCE TO GOD:
A PHYSICIST’S JOURNEY INTO THE
MYSTERY OF CONSCIOUSNESS, 2005
The trigger for the flood of ideas that presented themselves to me about the
nature of mind and light when I was riding on the train at the end of my time in
India came from a passage in an Indian newspaper (attributed to Krishna) in
which he states, “Nothing in the universe is faster than mind.” For the first time,
I found myself considering whether this might be a real possibility, instead of
how Western civilization had taught me to view it, as a metaphor. What if
consciousness actually is capable of moving at speeds faster than light?
The commonly accepted special theory of relativity assumes that nothing
can travel faster than light (186,000 miles per second), but this assumption lies
in the belief that all “things” in our universe are comprised of matter and thus
must have mass. Yet we intuitively know that the universe possesses real
“quantities” that cannot be measured and which have no mass, entities that we
label with names like consciousness, thoughts, soul, pain, joy, fear, courage,
love, hate, dreams, mythology, poetry, language, knowledge, art, memory—even
the varieties of tryptamine experience. They undeniably exist and have had a
direct and profound effect upon our human society, which in turn has affected
the life on this planet in all its various physical forms.
While Newtonian science and material reductionism have no place for
quantities that cannot be divided or measured, quantum mechanics assumes the
existence of anti-particles and virtual particles—all which cannot be measured.
(Only their effect on other particles can be measured.) And at the quantum level,
time is assumed not to exist within the unidirectional constraints of our reality: it
can move forward or backward with equal ease. Einstein’s theory that nothing
can travel faster than light is now called into question by our realization of the
existence of an underlying field that is the basis for reality and the medium
through which information can travel at speeds greater than light. Lynne
McTaggart explains:
Pure energy as it exists at the quantum level does not have time or space,
but exists as a vast continuum of fluctuating charge. We, in a sense, are
time and space. When we bring energy to conscious awareness through
the act of perception, we create separate objects that exist in space through
a measured continuum. By creating time and space, we create our own
separateness.
This suggests a model not unlike the implicate order of [the
American-born] British physicist David Bohm, who theorized that
everything in the world is enfolded in this “implicate” state, until made
explicit—a configuration, he imagined, of zero-point fluctuations.
14
As we have seen, consciousness may well be an effect created by the
interaction of the zero-point energy with the matter of our physical body, in
which a miniature replica of the infinite Bose–Einstein condensate of the zeropoint field is formed within our own physical body/brain. (Bringing to mind the
perennial Heremetic intuition attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, “As above, so
below.”) Time and space as we experience them would thus be phenomena
created by this essential interaction. The perverse dependence of our brain’s
Bose–Einstein condensate upon the finite nature of our body’s physical lifetime
causes our consciousness to recognize the physical nature of what we know of as
time, and hence our own peculiar mortality. (This is, however, a condition to
which the Bose–Einstein condensate of the zero-point field is presumably
immune.)
My theory is that during a 5-MeO-DMT experience, my consciousness is
freed of the linear three-dimensional limitations of its physical matter—this
mortal knot in space-time we call life—and it is able to resonate in coherence
with the zero-point field as a form of light, because it effectively “returns” to this
“sea of potential.” It is based on seeing light and omniscient Mind as linked
entities. By “linked entities” I mean that light provides the energy and substance
for all physical existence, while the “enfoldment” of Mind (out of the
quantitatively immeasurable dimension of the zero-point field) provides
organization (sub-molecular, molecular, biological, DNA, and so on). I propose
that the purpose of matter (which is light moving at slower than light speed) is to
slow Mind (in the form of light) down—by giving it mass or inertia—and in
doing so, creating time, the physical universe, and (in the more organized forms
in this evolution of matter) the apparatus of consciousness (mind with a small
“m”) to realize this creation. This mind with a small “m” is actually only a finite
and restricted form of Mind—a filter of sorts, for what Haisch described as the
“creation by subtraction” of our reality from the white light of infinite potential.
Thus: matter + Mind = consciousness (m)
While Space (S) and Time (T) = light (c) moving slower than the speed (V)
of (c)
ST = c < Vc
In its purest, unhindered form, light and Mind are one and the same—the
potential for everything. The “slowing of light” due to the creation of the mass
of matter also creates both time and space, with human consciousness (m)
having evolved as the filter mechanism for the perception of both of those
“quantifiable” entities (time and space/matter). Conversely, when Mind is free of
its interface with matter, it has the capacity to move faster than the physical
speed of light. According to the special theory of relativity, if something could
move at the speed of light and had no mass, then time and space (as we
experience them) would no longer exist. Esoterically, this idea has been
expressed in the belief expounded upon in the Tibetan Book of the Dead that in
the bardos one possesses a body of light that is capable of crossing into universes
existing in far-away dimensions at the speed of thought. 5-MeO-DMT is a
powerful chemical “vehicle” that I feel is capable of temporarily erasing this
interface between Mind and matter. When our consciousness (m) is momentarily
freed of all mass, it “returns” to Mind as light. Smoking 5-MeO-DMT allows an
evolved “finite” consciousness (m) to briefly recognize itself as the infinite Mind
(M) from which it “enfolds.” This allows us to experience a greater reality,
where time does not exist. It is these glimpses of this greater reality that we bring
back as fragments from an experience that is—in its entirety—a reunification
with wholeness.
3. How Can This Dimension Outside of Time Seem to
Contain All Possible Permutations and Information?
The quantum vacuum is a kind of neo-ether through which all matter
and energy evolves in continuous nonhertzian communication. The neoether model posits that the vacuum state has the same properties as a
dynamic holography crystal: it infinitely stores the diffraction patterns
of matter-energy in a nontemporal and nonlocal fashion analogous to
holographic information storage throughout the recording material.
Due to quasi-infinite superposition possibilities, the quantum vacuum is
the source of all possible matter-energy states and parallel universes.
Individual states can be selected using a fundamental form of a
holographic, self-referencing, phase-conjugate mirror-like process.
This process accounts for the nonlocality observed in biological
organisms as well as in consciousness.
MICHAEL J. COYLE, FROM ERVIN LASZLO,
THE CONNECTIVITY HYPOTHESES:
FOUNDATIONS OF AN INTEGRAL SCIENCE OF
QUANTUM, COSMOS, LIFE, AND CONSCIOUSNESS, 2003
“A growing storehouse of evidence indicates that when the brain functions
coherently, consciousness is not limited to the signals conveyed by the senses.”
15
So writes Ervin Laszlo, whose descriptions of the interactions between quantum
coherence, brain functioning, and consciousness are impressive. Since the ideas
that he presents are central to my speculations about the 5MDE, I have quoted
extensively from him below.
A series of experiments carried out by Italian physician and brain
researcher Nitamo Montecucco provides impressive testimony to the kind
and level of coherence that can obtain between the minds of different
individuals. The experiments show that as people enter an altered state of
consciousness—in deep meditation or prayer—the electrical activity of
the left and right frontal hemispheres of their brain becomes synchronized.
Still more remarkably, the electroencephalograph (EEG) patterns of the
left and right brain hemispheres of an entire group of persons can become
synchronized with one another. . . .
Dr. Montecucco summed up the results of his research by
distinguishing four states of brain coherence. The lowest state is the “state
of disgregation” where coherence is absent. This is a state of noconsciousness, typical of severe bodily degeneration, cerebral death, or
deep coma. The next state is the “state of fragmentation,” hallmarked by
some coherence, but of a low level. This is typical of low awareness,
depression, disease, and psychic crisis. The third state is the “state of
integration” characterized by a significant level of coherence. It is
correlated with high awareness, integrated knowing and experiencing, and
psychophysical well-being. The fourth state is the “state of unity.” Here
the EEG patterns produced by the brain exhibit harmonic relations: frontal
hemispheres of the brain are fully synchronized and move in unison.
According to Montecucco this state of the brain and of the consciousness
that accompanies it is the state in which great evolutionary leaps occur, in
the cognitive, social, as well as spiritual domains.
16
It is this fourth state of coherence that I believe applies to the 5-MeO-DMT
experience; this evidence of transpersonal coherence best explains how the
5MDE can incorporate dimensions of existence far beyond anything you have
ever experienced. Laszlo notes the link between this kind of coherence and the
explanation sought by Carl Jung, “in terms of what he called the unus mundi, a
higher or deeper reality that would lie behind both psyche and physical and
connect human minds with each other as well as with nature.” Laszlo continues:
[Jung] compared unconscious processes in individuals with the myths,
legends, and folktales of a variety of cultures at various periods of history
and found that the individual’s recollections and the collective material
had common elements. According to Jung, these elements make up
humankind’s “collective unconscious.”
The collective unconscious has both a historical aspect and an
archetypal aspect. The historical aspect consists of experiences
accumulated by human beings throughout history: these experiences have
entered, and are conserved in, the collective unconscious of humankind.
Archetypes are the dynamic principles that organize their manifold
elements. They are irrepresentable in themselves, but have effects that
make visualizations possible. Archetypal ideas do not merely repose in the
historical dimension of the collective unconscious, but can become part of
the waking consciousness of individuals.
The collective unconscious, the same as other transpersonal
phenomena, is evidence that our mind is not an isolated entity but is
constantly in touch with other minds as well as with the world around us.
We are never entirely detached from the outside world; never entirely
enclosed within our skin. Our mind and our body resonate with our
environment, including other people in our environment. Our mind is
coherent with the world, and when we do not repress the intuitions that
link us with other people and with nature, we can become aware of our
oneness with the universe.
17
A “mechanism” by which transpersonal coherence of this nature might be
possible is suggested within Hal Puthoff’s theories regarding the constant
interaction of all subatomic matter with the zero-point field. He posits that the
subatomic waves of the ZPF are constantly imprinting a record of the shape of
everything through wave interference. As Lynne McTaggart explains it, when
two waves collide, “each wave contains information, in the form of energy
coding, about the other, including all the other information it contains.
Interference patterns amount to a constant accumulation of information, and
waves have a virtually infinite capacity for storage. . . . As the harbinger and
imprinter of all wave-lengths and all frequencies, the Zero Point Field is a kind
of shadow of the universe for all time, a mirror image and record of everything
that ever was.”
18
If we consider the underlying structure of the universe to be “disturbances”
caused by electromagnetic waves emitted by fluctuations in the zero-point field,
then all possible permutations and information would be contained within the
zero-point field (since it contains all possible waves). The amount of information
that the zero-point field is calculated to be able to contain through the
mechanism of wave-interference is virtually infinite, effectively making it the
repository of all knowledge and the greatest “supercomputer” imaginable.
Every biological entity that has ever lived and created a Bose–Einstein
condensate of its own (by the coherent firing of neurons born of the DNA and
biological tissue of its existence) “feeds” the Bose–Einstein condensate of the
zero-point field with the information of its own temporary experience. Such
information exchanges may not be limited to biological systems, since other,
nonorganic Bose–Einstein condensates are presumed to exist within the zeropoint field. All of this information is then “captured” and contained within the
zero-point field itself. This information (and all its permutations) would
theoretically be instantaneously and simultaneously available. If the 5MDE does
allow me to experience the zero-point field as a base-reality, then the
overwhelming impression would be of a totality of knowledge and information.
4. How Can I Exist as Consciousness without Ego or
4. How Can I Exist as Consciousness without Ego or
Identity, and Yet Clearly Still Be Me?
Whoever has been parted from his source Yearns always for the
moment of reunion.
JALAL AD-DIN RUMI, THE SONG OF THE REED
Once again, the concept of the Bose–Einstein condensate is essential to
understanding how smoking 5-MeO-DMT might affect consciousness. Zohar
notes that “one physicist suggests that the purpose of the microwave-producing
vibrations in living cells might be related to the way living systems, as opposed
to nonliving ones, create order out of Nature’s chaos and confusion.” She
continues: “When cell membranes vibrate sufficiently to pull themselves into a
Bose–Einstein condensate, they are creating the most coherent form of order
possible in Nature, the order of unbroken wholeness. . . . I think that the same
Bose–Einstein condensation among neuron constituents is what distinguishes the
conscious from the nonconscious. I think it is the physical basis of
consciousness.”
19
(Emphasis in original.)
According to her, this quantum coherence of neurons in the brain gives us
“the unity of consciousness.” She asserts that
without the ordered, Bose–Einstein orchestration of photons (or other
bosons), there would be no sense of self and world; but equally, without
the material components of the neural tissue, there would be no Bose–
Einstein condensate. The two, quantum coherence (the ground state of
consciousness), and neural tissue (matter), in relationship to each other,
give the brain its conscious functioning capacity. This capacity is linked to
all the neural networks that process data from the environment.
So at the level of consciousness found in ourselves and higher
animals, the creative dialogue between matter and consciousness is
obvious and crucial—neither is reducible to the other, and yet neither
could function without the other.
Equally, and at a more basic level, this same ordered quantum
coherence is thought to be present in all biological tissue, right down to
the level of DNA itself.
20
Her explanation of the concept of quantum consciousness, and how the
mechanism of the Bose–Einstein condensate can resolve any number of longunanswered questions about the nature of consciousness (and indeed, the nature
of humanity), is well considered and persuasive. By identifying mind with the
wave aspect of reality and body (or matter) as the particle aspect, Zohar asserts
that there is no duality at all—the two combine to create the “unbroken
wholeness” of our consciousness. She eloquently states:
Thus by understanding the quantum mechanical nature of human
consciousness—seeing consciousness as a quantum wave phenomena—
we are able to trace the origin of . . . our mental life right back to its roots
in particle physics, just as has always been possible when seeking the
origin of our physical being. The mind/body (mind/brain) duality in man
is a reflection of the wave/particle duality, which underlies all that is. In
this way, human being is a microcosm of cosmic being.
We are, in our essential makeup, composed of the same stuff and
held together by the same dynamics as those which account for everything
else in the universe. And equally—which brings out the enormity of this
realization—the universe is made of the same stuff and held together by
the same dynamics as those which account for us.
21
In a 5MDE my consciousness may be realizing the quantum reality of the
zero-point field by achieving coherence with its standing Bose–Einstein
condensate. There would then be no difference, in a quantum sense, between the
two Bose–Einstein condensates (“mine” and that of the ZPF), and there would
be no sense in saying that I exist any longer at all, as I would no longer be able
to experience ego or identity other than as an infinite wholeness. In a very real
sense, my consciousness and the zero-point field would then have become One.
Q
TWELVE
A Quantum God
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are
spiritual beings having a human experience.
TEILHARD DE CHARDIN, THE PHENOMENA OF MAN, 1959
God is the unexcelled seed of all knowledge.
PATANJALI, THE YOGA SUTRAS
uestion Five: Why do I so firmly believe that this experience is a
recognition and subsequent realization of both the true nature of G/d, and
of myself?
Because this question is the real reason that this book was ever written or
that I ever needed to begin this quest for answers in the first place, it now
warrants a chapter entirely of its own. To begin to answer this “Question of
Questions,” we must start again with the tangled web of possibilities that the
Heisenberg uncertainty principle unleashed upon the world.
As I pointed out in my introduction to the quantum world, the implications
inherent in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and this new quantum view of the
universe, have ironically put humanity back in the center of existence, since it
appears that some form of consciousness needs to be here for reality to exist at a
fundamental level. For as the cosmologist Sir James Jeans wrote in The
Mysterious Universe in 1930, “the universe begins to look more like a great
thought than a great machine.”
1
The intuition that smoking 5-MeO-DMT gives me—that consciousness can
exist free of any physical realm and that matter, the stuff of our reality, is
effectively an illusion—could one day be proven by quantum physics to be
fundamentally correct. Matter could simply be an illusion created by our
consciousness in response to the blizzard of information the zero-point field of
the universe bombards us with each day: a collective hallucination that we must
decipher in order to progress toward realms of higher understanding. Or as
Lynne McTaggart explains it: “At the lowest level of mind and matter, each of
us creates the world.” According to the quantum physicists, “We are the world.”
Their findings suggest that the material world may be a mechanism of
consciousness. Danah Zohar’s investigation of the wave/ particle duality (as
fermions and bosons) in the nature of life led her to the conclusion that
[b]osons are, essentially, “particles of relationship.” They are the
fundamental building blocks of all Nature’s forces—the strong and weak
nuclear, the electromagnetic, and the gravitational. They are the most
primary antecedents of consciousness, but they also bind together the
material world.
The fundamental building blocks of the material world itself are
fermions (for instance, electrons and protons), those “antisocial” particles
that prefer to keep to themselves. Without bosons, fermions would seldom
get together and build anything; without fermions, bosons would have
nothing to draw into relationship and thus nothing with which to order and
structure their own more complex coherence. From the very beginning,
then, from the most primary level of what later becomes the material
world and the world of consciousness, the building blocks of matter
(fermions) and the building blocks of consciousness (bosons) are
necessarily involved in a mutually creative dialogue.
That which, in a far more complex form, later becomes us, is part and
parcel of the basic dynamic through which the universe unfolds. With this
understanding of the origins of consciousness—that it begins wherever
two bosons meet—it may not be too wild to speculate that a gradual
evolution of consciousness is the driving force behind that unfolding. This
is not quite as strong as saying that Mind created the world, but it is
suggesting that the elementary building blocks of Mind (bosons) were
there from the beginning, and were necessary partners in that creation. In
creating themselves (fulfilling their nature as “relationship”), they evoke
the world.
2
Then, near the conclusion of The Quantum Self, she states:
Understanding this might well lead us to conclude that the physics which
gives us human consciousness is one of the basic potentialities within the
quantum vacuum, the fundament of all reality. It might even give us some
grounds to speculate that the vacuum itself (and hence the universe) is
“conscious”—that is, that it is poised towards a basic sense of direction,
towards a further and greater ordered coherence. If we were looking for
something that we could conceive of as God within the universe of the new
physics, this ground-state coherent quantum vacuum might be a good
place to start. [Italics mine.]
3
This quantum view of consciousness, coupled with my own revelations
from smoking 5-MeO-DMT, has allowed my view of the world to expand
considerably. As the Jains and Buddhists have espoused, as well as the Gnostics
in more modern times, I now believe that we are all unrealized gods, trapped in
the illusion of mortality.
In one of my first solo 5-MeO-DMT experiences, I had a vision of the
world as a fractal, with each moment in time branching off into millions of
possible permutations—worlds upon worlds upon worlds, like those commonly
depicted in Tibetan thangka paintings. Parallels to this vision—which I consider
to be a visualization of the Hindu concept of emanation—appear throughout the
quantum model, such as the “Many Worlds” hypothesis of theoretical physicist
Hugh Everett. At every given instant, through our subconscious intent and
interaction with the zero-point field, we create our world from the fractal web of
future possibilities.
Visualize a dark road and you will walk down it; visualize the light and it
will take you up. I have always somehow believed this, and I have joked with
my friends about how “life is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” but now I believe I
understand the implications of that viewpoint more correctly. We can make the
world as we want it to be. It is only the mechanistic folly of Newtonian science
that has left so much of humanity without hope or direction; a lifeless universe
has left no room for G/d. We have bulldozed our way down a blind alley “where
the dead men lost their bones,”
4 and now—relegated to being mere powerless
creatures of chance—we listlessly await our inevitable oblivion.
But after being lost on a short, sharp road that has led humanity to the brink
of destruction, science is now ironically beginning to bring us back on course.
The quantum physicists are listening, and they cannot believe the universe’s
song. This same song is singing everywhere, with the strongest voice right inside
of us, in every cell, through every strand of our DNA. Our consciousness is not
the mystery. Our consciousness is the answer. “You knew it all along! We knew
it all along!”
The world of matter, of birth and rebirth, of wars, genocides, and
starvations—every one of us is creating that. We are reality. And we are,
ultimately, part of G/d. Our identities are merely the clothes that our
consciousnesses wear during this burst of “reality,” this projection into the video
game of matter caused by fluctuations of possibility in the zero-point field.
When you smoke 5-MeO-DMT, you are stripped of your body and its ego as you
approach the world of the boson, the realm of the entelechy, and become a being
of pure light. That’s how you can exist as consciousness without knowledge of
self, because that’s what you really are.
Ervin Laszlo and the Akashic Field
Akasha ( • • sha) is a Sanskrit word meaning “ether”: all-pervasive
space. Originally signifying “radiation” or “brilliance,” in Indian
philosophy akasha was considered the first and most fundamental of the
five elements—the others being vata (air), agni (fire), ap (water), and
prithivi (earth). Akasha embraces the properties of all five elements: it
is the womb from which everything we perceive with our senses has
emerged and into which everything will ultimately re-descend. The
Akashic Record (also called The Akashic Chronicle) is the enduring
record of all that happens, and has ever happened, in space and time.
ERVIN LASZLO, SCIENCE AND THE AKASHIC FIELD: AN INTEGRAL THEORY OF
EVERYTHING, 2004
While virtually all of the information that I have presented on the zero-point
field is less than thirty years old, the actual realization of the ZPF’s existence has
only really begun as we enter the twenty-first century, and most of its
implications certainly aren’t being taught at universities today. The worldview it
implies is too staggering, too incredible, and our schools and our society are not
moving anywhere near as quickly as our technology. This is a very important
fact: everything I was taught at university less than twenty years ago could now
be considered obsolete. The amount of technological knowledge being generated
in the world today is so staggering that if a student is doing a four-year technical
degree at the moment, the information they learn in their first two years is
obsolete by their fourth year. Even worse, kids today are still being fed ideas
from an obsolete paradigm that cutting-edge science no longer believes to be
true. As cosmologist Ervin Laszlo puts it, “A field that transports light (that is,
waves of photons) and density-pressure waves, and replenishes the energy lost
by atoms and solar systems, is not an abstract theoretical entity. No wonder that
more and more physicists speak of the quantum vacuum as a physically real
cosmic plenum.”
5
The physicists have become true mystics, and they are on the verge of
lifting the veil covering reality once and for all. But they, themselves, are mostly
still products of the Newtonian paradigm: they were born in it, trained in it, and
they represent the pinnacle of its methods; they are the high priests of the
specific and the singular—they are specialists. There are very few Renaissance
men anymore, thinkers who straddle numerous fields. But Ervin Laszlo is a
prominent exception, having worked at universities as a professor of philosophy,
music, futures studies, systems science, peace studies, and evolutionary studies.
Laszlo deserves further mention at this point for two reasons: first, his
background has allowed him to be uniquely qualified to address this area of
study; and second, it is in his continuing work that the idea of the Bose–Einstein
condensate in the zero-point field (or the Akashic Field, as he calls it) being the
literal “mind of God” has found its most mystical and eloquent expression.
Hungarian–born, Laszlo was a successful concert pianist until he was
thirty-eight, when an epiphany around the birth of his son caused him to
seriously question the root of human existence, and he found himself enraptured
with the sheer mystery of it all. He went back to university to study physics in
search of a “universal theory” that would connect the mysteries of the quantum,
the cosmos, life, and consciousness—his quest in the second forty years of his
life. With an ability to cross disciplines that is rarely seen, Laszlo has written
around seventy-five books (his words have been translated into at least
seventeen different languages), and he has contributed to over four hundred
papers. He is widely considered the father of systems philosophy and general
evolution theory, and because of his systems knowledge he has worked as an
advisor to the Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific,
and Cultural Organization. Oh, and he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize
in both 2004 and 2005. The list of his accomplishments goes on and on, but you
get the point.
Laszlo is considered one of the foremost thinkers and scientists of our age,
maybe the greatest mind since Einstein. And he’s all about the zero-point field
for basically the same reason that I am*36—because it can explain so many
difficult things. In the end, it relates to everything, since it is the fundamental
underlying basis for reality. When discussing what importance further
investigations into the zero-point field will hold for the twenty-first century,
Laszlo writes: “The sustained investigation of the cosmic plenum as the basis for
the entire realm of manifest phenomena, including mass, energy, and
information, will highlight the role of fields not only in physics and cosmology,
but throughout the range of observed phenomena, including the phenomena of
mind.”
6
Naming Hal Puthoff, Roger Penrose, Fritz-Albert Popp, and a handful of
others as “front-line investigators,” Laszlo quotes Puthoff who says of the new
scientific paradigm:
[What] would emerge would be an increased understanding that all of us
are immersed, both as living and physical beings, in an overall
interpenetrating and interdependent field in ecological balance with the
cosmos as a whole, and that even the boundary lines between the physical
and “metaphysical” would dissolve into a unitary viewpoint of the
universe as a fluid, changing, energetic/informational cosmological unity.
7
This is very similar to how I might describe the view of reality invoked by a
“full-release” 5MDE. Then, in discussing the metaphysical implications of the
identification of the zero-point field, Laszlo specifically notes the fact that it can
contain an infinite number of “waves” of information:
This conception corresponds to a perennial intuition also articulated in
Hindu cosmology. There the almost infinitely varied things and forms of
the manifest world are united in an essential oneness at a deeper level. At
the fundamental level of reality the forms of existing things dissolve into
formlessness, living organisms exist in a state of pure potentiality, and
dynamic functions condense into static stillness. All attributes of the
manifest world merge into a state beyond attributes. Time, space, and
causality are transcended in a state of pure being: the state of Brahman.
Absolute reality is the reality of Brahman; the manifest world enjoys but a
derived, secondary reality—mistaking it for the real is the illusion of
maya.
8
Laszlo’s view of the history of the universe is of a series of universes that
rise and fall, but are each “in-formed” by the existence of the previous one. In
Laszlo’s mind, the universe is becoming more and more in-formed, and within
the physical universe, matter (which is the crystallization of intersecting pressure
waves moving through the zero-point field) is becoming increasingly in-formed
and evolving toward higher forms of consciousness and realization.
A comparatively evolved system, such as the human, has a comparatively
evolved brain and thus a correspondingly articulated mental potential.
This endows the human brain with a highly evolved capacity for receiving
sensory signals from the manifest domain, and nonsensory in-formation
from the virtual domain [i.e., the zero-point field]. In regard to the latter,
the brain is generally in-formed by the wave function of the universe and
specifically in-formed by the wave function of the social and ecological
systems in which the individual participates. Sensory information
constitutes the familiar contents of everyday experience, whereas
nonsensory information, in modern societies generally repressed, comes to
light mainly in the form of intuitions, images, archetypes, and the
seemingly anomalous contents of altered-state experience. [Italics mine.]
9
And so it appears that Ervin Laszlo (one of the greatest thinkers of our time,
a man who has dedicated half of his life to the search for a theory that can unite
the mysteries of the physical universe and consciousness) and my humble self (a
seeker who has spent the last few years searching for some insight into the
5MDE) share at least one thing in common: Laszlo has (in this last passage)
identified (as have I) the zero-point field as being the very source of the “alteredstate experience.” I find this extraordinary. When I began my search, I did not
really think I would find any answers. But in this case—unlike dozens of
investigators who have come before me—it would appear that I have found
some relatively concrete scientific ground to stand on. And it turns out that
“altered-state” or “transpersonal” experiences are something that Ervin Laszlo
has focused considerable attention on as well. He states that
[t]he altered-state interconnection of human consciousness with the world
at large is of crucial importance for our times. It exhibits a fact that both
mainstream science and mainstream public opinion has long disregarded:
that our mind is spontaneously linked with other minds, and even with the
cosmos as a whole.
10
In both The Connectivity Hypothesis and Science and the Akashic Field,
Laszlo points to the work of Stanislav Grof and states that when subjects are
having the “experience of dual unity” (whether due to mind-altering substances
or due to holotropic breathwork) that some people experience “a loosening and
melting of the boundaries of the body ego and a sense of merging with another
person in unity and oneness,” while others achieve a sense of “complete
identification to the point of losing the awareness of his or her own identity. In
still deeper altered states, some individuals can expand their consciousness to an
extent where it encompasses the totality of life on the planet, then seems to
extend outward into the cosmos.”
11
So, in a series of books about an emerging field of new physics, I find
descriptions of my own mystical experiences, with the apparent explanation
being that my consciousness is somehow able to “identify with” the “nonsensory
in-formation” of the zero-point field, the underlying reality of the universe.
Pretty heavy stuff indeed. But this still does not answer my final question:
why do I subsequently identify the source of that “in-formation” as being G/d (or
at least G/d as much as I am capable of knowing G/d), especially given that I
didn’t believe in any form of God prior to smoking 5-MeO-DMT?
I suspect that Ervin Laszlo would find that question simple to explain to
me, for as scientific and encyclopedic as his works are, his conclusions are
ultimately mystical. In his expanded concept of the zero-point field as the
Akashic field, a modern quantum equivalent of the Hindu “Akashic Record,”
Laszlo ultimately appears to realize his own G/d in his evolved vision of the
field. To Laszlo, the Akashic field began as a “primordial cosmic plenum,” a
blank sheet of virtual energy possibility, but no form. “Excitations” within the
plenum (much like thoughts arising in our mind) caused the universe to emerge
from the field as a fireball that created all the matter that occupies space-time in
the first milliseconds of its existence. This universe is in-formed by the
primordial (and less-coherent) universes that have preceded it that also in-form
the cosmic plenum (the zero-point field), which replicates the information in the
form of waves (inscribing the Akashic record). Each subsequent universe is
therefore in-formed with the total knowledge of all the preceding universes,
which is the process that guides evolution. Laszlo writes:
Evolution, we should note, realizes a twofold potential in the cosmos: a
physical potential for the progressive, although intermittent and nonlinear,
complexification of manifest entities; and a mental potential for the
intermittent yet progressive evolution of consciousness. These potentials
were encoded in the primordial virtual-energy domain. In the maximum
concept that domain constitutes the primordial nature of God.
Upon the termination of the evolutionary process—following the
“evaporation” of the last remnants of supergalactic structures in the space
and time of the last universe—the potentials encoded in the primordial
virtual domain achieve final realization. For the maximum concept the
completely in-formed virtual-energy domain constitutes the consequent
nature of God.
12
Which is to say that everything—the countless number of possible
universes, the existence of every cosmological, chemical, quantum, and
biological system, even consciousness itself—is G/d in-forming itself in an
evolution toward G/d’s own ultimate realization. Every single Bose–Einstein
condensate that has ever been formed through the interaction between wave and
particle systems has imprinted itself on the “blank” plenum of the zero-point
field, in the same way that the “blank” ground state of our own quantum
consciousness is imprinted by our life’s thoughts and experiences. The millions
and billions and incalculable trillions of Bose–Einstein condensates of
experience of this universe, and all the universes that have preceded it and all
that will come after it, all act in coherence within the quantum, wave-like nature
of the Akashic Field, so that they become One. Until finally, as Laszlo
mystically envisages it:
In the course of innumerable universes, the pulsating Metaverse realizes
all that the primeval plenum held in potential. The plenum is no longer
formless: its surface is of unimaginable complexity and coherence; its
depth is fully informed. The cosmic proto-consciousness that endowed the
primeval plenum with its universe-creative potentials becomes a fully
articulated cosmic consciousness—it becomes, and thenceforth eternally
is, the self-realized mind of God.
13
Resonating with the Mind of G/d
Direct experience is the highest of all ways of gaining knowledge. All
other means are only fragments. In the path of self-realization, purity,
one-pointedness, and control of the mind are essentials. An impure
mind hallucinates and creates obstructions but an orderly mind is an
instrument for direct experiences.
SWAMI RAMA, LIVING WITH THE HIMALAYAN MASTERS, 1980
Back in chapter 1, I described the basic progression of the 5MDE as moving
from a dissolution into fractals upon exhalation to a rapid acceleration into pure
white light, followed by the recognition of the unity of all and that love is the
organizing principle behind the universe. Then, finally, I reach complete
dissolution—from my ego, my identity, and any concept of time—into resonant
consciousness with the Mind of G/d—Absolute Consciousness.
This is what the 5MDE is all about: total dissolution into the light radiation
of the zero-point field, with the accompanying realization of the true nature of
Mind and reality. That allows for an understanding that I am only capable of
deifying. It’s an expression of the atman-Brahman—a dissolution back into the
coherent cogent standing wave that is the universe: the realm of pure potential
from which this actuality has arisen. It is a world of non-locality and coherence,
a vacuum of quantum energy and information beyond human description that
forms the basis for both ancient mystical experiences and the modern 5-MeODMT experience.
Bernard Haish and The God Theory
Earlier I mentioned Bernard Haisch’s ideas on “creation by subtraction” and the
creation of mass by light. Haisch is an astrophysicist whose professional
positions have included Staff Scientist at the Lockheed Martin Solar and
Astrophysics Laboratory, Deputy Director of the Center for Extreme Ultraviolet
Astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Visiting Fellow at
the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany. His
work has led to a close involvement with NASA; he is the author over 130
scientific papers; and was the scientific editor of the Astrophysical Journal for
nine years, as well as the editor in chief of the Journal of Scientific Exploration.
With solid qualifications like these and a lifetime of studying suns and stars, we
can assume he knows a thing or two about the nature of light. And apparently he
has given a great deal of thought to the nature of G/d as well, which he presents
in his recent and remarkable book, The God Theory.
If you think of white light as a metaphor of infinite, formless potential, the
colors on a slide or frame of film become a structured reality grounded in
the polarity that comes about through intelligent subtraction from that
absolute formless potential. It results from the limitation of the unlimited.
I contend that this metaphor provides a comprehensible theory for the
creation of a manifest reality (our universe) from the selective limitation
of infinite potential (God). . . .
If there exists an absolute realm that consists of infinite potential out
of which a created realm of polarity emerges, is there any sensible reason
not to call this “God”? Or to put it frankly, if the Absolute is not God,
what is it? For our purposes here, I will identify the Absolute with God.
More precisely, I will call the Absolute the Godhead. Applying this new
terminology to the optics analogy, we can conclude that our physical
universe comes about when the Godhead selectively limits itself, taking
on the role of Creator and manifesting a realm of space and time and,
within that realm, filtering out some of its own infinite potential. . . .
Viewed this way, the process of creation is the exact opposite of
making something out of nothing. It is, on the contrary, a filtering process
that makes something out of everything. Creation is not capricious or
random addition; it is intelligent and selective subtraction. The
implications of this are profound. If the Absolute is the Godhead, and if
creation is the process by which the Godhead filters out parts of its own
infinite potential to manifest a physical reality that supports experience,
then the stuff that is left over, the residue of this process, is our physical
universe, and ourselves included. We are nothing less than a part of that
Godhead—quite literally.
14
In his summation of The God Theory he offers an answer to the question
posed by the physicist Paul Davies in The Mind of God: “Why should human
beings have the ability to discover and understand the principles on which the
universe runs?” According to Haisch the answer is simple: “We understand the
rules because we made them up—not in the state we currently find ourselves as
human beings, of course, but back when we were literally one with God, before
God decided to temporarily become us.”
15
G/d is in everything. G/d is everything. You just have to have the veil lifted
from your eyes to see G/d, to realize that you are a part of G/d also. Somehow, to
my amazement, smoking 5-MeO-DMT has cleared my view, and just as William
Blake famously stated,
*37 everything does indeed look infinite.
The mind produces a powerful illusion, that of existing in this body
which we consider to be our own.
KALU RINPOCHE
Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science,
but men and women need both.
FRITJOF CAPRA, THE TAO OF PHYSICS:
AN EXPLORATION OF THE PARALLELS
BETWEEN MODERN PHYSICS AND
EASTERN MYSTICISM, 1975
Six years of study, experimentation, and contemplation have led me to realize
that it is easy to be seduced by powerful and exotic ideas, and much harder to
discern the truth distilled within ourselves. But considering how much more I
now know about a dozen fields of human research and philosophy, and
considering how hard I have grappled with complex concepts generated from
deep within my own “soul,” I consider myself fortunate to have been able to
undertake this intellectual adventure. The following are some of the conclusions
and speculations I have come to in forming the foundation of my new expanded
worldview.
Human consciousness is a bosonic coherence phenomenon: a complex
interaction between the matter (fermions) in our brains and the waves (bosons)
of the zero-point field, caused by an extreme form of neuron coherence called a
“Bose–Einstein condensate.” Time and space as we experience them are
phenomena created by this essential wave/particle interaction.
Another (less scientific) name for the Bose–Einstein condensate within
living beings could be the soul.
Mass and matter—the quantities by which we claim to define our physical
reality—are caused by the “slowing down” of light, caused by inertia as it is
“pushed” through the super dense medium of the zero-point field, and the
stability of our physical universe is maintained and informed by the constant
interaction of virtual particles (photons of light) from this same zero-point field.
The zero-point field, this “quantum vacuum that is a plenum” that has been
identified by mystics throughout the ages, and is now being rediscovered by our
physicists and cosmologists, is the true underlying reality of our universe. The
Akashic Record and the aether field, concepts that were intuited centuries ago
and then dispelled by a wave of scientific determinism, are now being
rediscovered.
The zero-point field is capable of containing all knowledge and information
provided by the Bose–Einstein condensates of every entity and every particle
throughout eternity; thus the function of our individual existences (in this
universe) is to add to the collective in-formation of the zero-point field by way
of our own temporal experience. Within the zero-point field there is a Bose–
Einstein condensate that is identical (in its physics) to the Bose– Einstein
condensate in our brain. This mirrors both the Hindu realization of atman–
Brahman and the classical Hermetic intuition “As above, so below.”
Another (less scientific) name for the Bose–Einstein condensate of the zeropoint field could be the Mind of G/d. Smoking the correct dose of 5-MeO-DMT
affects the coherence of the neurons in the brain, thus increasing the coherence
of the Bose–Einstein condensate of our brain (our soul or consciousness) so that
it achieves greater coherence with the Bose– Einstein condensate of the zeropoint field (the mind of G/d). This allows a temporary “escape” from the
dimension of matter, into a transpersonal, ego-less mode of quantum
consciousness that is a resonant glimpse of the coherent conscious existence of
the Akashic Field itself. As consciousness of pure light, the smoker exists in a
dimension of pure in-formation, where time and space no longer apply.
Interpreted in a linear Newtonian manner, the 5MDE makes no sense, but it
makes perfect sense as a quantum event. Coherent nonlocal resonance with the
standing ground-wave of all reality—the zero-point field—would give access to
all knowledge in the universe, at once. And from this comes the recognition of
self as a microcosm and reflection of the ultimate coherent state of the zero-point
field—the Akashic Field—the conscious wave that we all came out of, and the
wave to which we will all return. The 5MDE can be seen therefore as both a
mystical experience and a quantum experience. And it can be recognized that the
zero-point field is, in fact, the origin of the entheogenic experience.
All knowledge implicit in this coherent resonance is inherently
untranslatable. It can only be experienced, but not explained. Once the
tryptamine has been metabolized, our “normal,” matter-bound Bose–Einstein
condensate (our ego) begins to reestablish itself. This is the point where we
wonder who we are and how it was possible for us to have just experienced the
full omniscient power of Absolute Consciousness. We are left with the
mysterium tremendum et fascinans of touching the mind of G/d.
Experientially, the state induced from smoking 5-MeO-DMT closely
resembles the near-death experience. The 5MDE is also phenomenologicaly
similar to aspects of the Tibetan Buddhist concept of Rigpa—the realization of
the true nature of mind. The most recent major expressions of the realms that
smoking 5-MeO-DMT can allow access to are alluded to by Carl Jung’s
concepts of archetypes, the anima mundi, and the collective unconscious. The
5MDE is also similar to certain mystical states common to virtually all creeds
and religions since the beginning of time. The discovery of the 5-MeO-DMT
experience is a modern continuation of the tradition of mystical experience,
humanity’s experiential connection to the numinous.
The greatest “proof ” of the 5MDE being a genuine mystical experience is
that it passes the basic test for all true religious conversions: it can result in
intense self-examination and produce a tremendous sense of responsibility in the
person who has had the experience. Ultimate knowledge causes ultimate
gratitude-of-being; the sheer beauty of G/d revealed brings out the spontaneous
joy of compassion. You move closer and closer to harmony and coherence with
the world, a constant process that never ends and only grows more mysterious
and beautiful as life deepens in content and purpose. If there is any true meaning
in life, it is in our ability to wonder about, seek, and ultimately even know, the
unknowable.
The path itself is the key to knowledge; we call that flowing river life. The
mystical experience reveals the knowledge that more than just life as we know it
exists. In a physical universe, replete with wonder, I believe that this mystery is
the greatest gift of G/d to all creation.
If my identification of the Bose–Einstein condensate of the zero-point field
as the Mind of G/d (or my belief that you can realize the Mind of G/d during a
5MDE) seems like a stretch, consider this astonishing passage from Ervin
Laszlo’s Science and the Akashic Field. Laszlo is discussing the fact that the
zero-point field is essentially immeasurable by modern science:
To begin with, even if we cannot directly observe consciousness in the
vacuum, we could attempt an experiment. We could enter an altered state
of consciousness and identify ourselves with the vacuum, the deepest and
most fundamental level of reality. Assuming that we succeed (and
psychotherapists tell us that in altered states people can identify with
almost any part or aspects of the universe), would we experience a
physical field of fluctuating energies? Or would we experience something
like a cosmic field of consciousness? The latter is much more likely. We
have already noted that when we experience anybody else’s brain “from
the outside,” we do not experience his or her consciousness—at the most
we experience gray matter consisting of complex sets of neurons firing in
complex sequences. But we know that when we experience our brain
“from the inside,” we experience not neurons, but the qualitative features
that make up our stream of consciousness: thoughts, images, volitions,
colors, shapes, and sounds. Would not the same hold true when we project
ourselves into a mystical union with the vacuum?
16
Maybe Ervin Laszlo, universally regarded as one of the greatest scientists
and philosophers of our time, knows something about smoking 5-MeO-DMT
after all!
All phenomena I encounter on 5-MeO-DMT—in this white light of unlimited
potential—are manifestations of the Universal Mind. Upon returning to this
light, freed of mass, a suitably prepared consciousness is inexorably guided to
the supreme realization of wholeness and Oneness that is at the center of
existence, which I can only deify as G/d. This experience of Oneness is
ineffable, since it occurs in a dimension that is devoid of time or mass, and is
experientially infinite. When the fragment of that Oneness returns to this reality
as our limited consciousness, it has no language to describe existing as Mind in a
world without physical or temporal boundaries. It only has a series of fleeting
glimpses of a greater reality that it struggles to understand and hold on to.
Although I continue to feel that ultimately this state of being is
indescribable, in my humble opinion the closest our species has managed to
approach describing a coherent resonance with this Wholeness is via the Sanskrit
word/concept of Aum (or Om). The following explanation of the roots of the
word comes from Joseph Campbell: “Aum is God. Aum is God as sound. We
usually think of the divine as a form, as an image that we can visualize, but this
is the sound aspect of the form that we are going to find when we meet God. It is
the sound of God, the sound of the Lord of the World, out of whose thoughts,
out of whose being, out of whose energy substance the world is a
precipitation.”
17
After explaining how each letter in the word Aum is a syllable—associated
with waking consciousness, dreaming consciousness, and deep, non-dreaming
sleep—Campbell then asks: “What is the fourth syllable in the three-syllable
word aum? It is the silence that is before and after aum is pronounced. That is
the totality of the word and of the world now: you have the silence—that is to
say non-being—and aum, which is being. Neither exists without the other. They
are mutually interrelated. So this word when thought about contains in itself all
the mysteries of the world.”
18
I
THIRTEEN
The Role of Light in Eastern Philosophy
Do not make the mistake of imagining that the nature of mind is
exclusive to our mind only. It is in fact the nature of everything. It can
never be said too often that to realize the nature of mind is to realize the
nature of all things.
SOGYAL RINPOCHE, THE TIBETAN BOOK OF
LIVING AND DYING, 2002
You do not really exist.
KALU RINPOCHE,WHEN ASKED TO EXPLAIN
THE ESSENCE OF BUDDHISMIN AS FEW WORDS AS POSSIBLE,
AS QUOTED IN THE COSMIC GAME BY STANISLAV GROF, 1998
t will undoubtedly seem contradictory for me to spend a chapter examining the
role of light in Buddhist and Hindu philosophy after espousing the view that a
modern mystic must firmly root his or her knowledge in the language and
technology of the day. However, I have always espoused a Renaissance view
toward life and believe that one must look for answers everywhere. We can find
inspiration for our own personal mystical path in the esoteric Eastern
philosophies that have mostly been lost to contemporary Western civilization (as
Aldous Huxley, Baba Ram Das, Timothy Leary, and numerous nameless seekers
have realized); we can also find fascinating parallels to our own speculative
sciences.
I must confess that I have always been drawn to these fabulous Indian
philosophies—and especially to the historical figure of Siddhartha Gautama, the
Buddha. I am sure that if I had been incarnated as an English scholar a century
ago, I would have been labeled an “Orientalist,” since I have always loved the
art, philosophy, and mythology of India, Tibet, China, and South-East Asia. It
was this curiosity about Eastern philosophy (and especially Buddhism) that led
me to briefly enroll in a university to study the phenomenology of religion. But
while I was there my Eastern philosophy professor—a balding hippy philosopher
who for twenty years had spent half the year teaching and the other half of the
year in India “studying”—also told me that school was a waste of time for
someone like me and that I should be “getting out in the world.”
These were sage words of advice, which I obviously heeded. Yet, while I
eschewed my formal education from this point, I never stopped reading. Over
the course of many years, I read hundreds of books on Eastern philosophy,
mythology, comparative religion, and shamanism. But—until I encountered 5-
MeO-DMT—I just didn’t get it. I read, and read, and read, and I came to know
many things, but I did not understand.
This is one of the mysteries about smoking 5-MeO-DMT that is frustrating
to try to convey: How the experience can change your life and your way of
thinking so profoundly that you can look back on a lifetime of knowledge with a
totally new understanding. How smoking a “drug” can change the foundation of
your flesh-and-blood world so resoundingly that you can scarcely remember the
human being you used to be, a person you can now only view as a child, full of
facts, but devoid of any real knowledge.
When I returned to the great Eastern writings I had explored in my youth
after smoking 5-MeO-DMT, I experienced a revelation about the world’s
religions that had never occurred to me before. As I re-read numerous passages
from the esoteric traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism, which described
specific states of altered consciousness in terms of light, I found that I could now
easily relate to these descriptions from my own experience. After considering
again Alfred North Whitehead’s remark that the Hindu Vedanta is the most
impressive metaphysics the human mind has conceived, I came to the startling
conclusion that we have been getting it all wrong since the first day an
Englishman learned to read Sanskrit. The occidental mind has insisted on
reading these reports of light as a metaphor, while they are actually precise
descriptions of accessible regions of the human mind, written by experienced
travelers.
Before I examine this idea more closely, there is a tremendous irony here that I
feel the need to briefly mention. How is it possible that occidental scholars have
only been able to see Eastern philosophy (which may be experientially based) in
metaphorical terms, while in our own forms of religion—Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam—we have failed to separate obvious metaphor from historical fact, a
failure that has resulted in the fanatical dogmatism of today’s fundamentalist
groups and the general intolerance that Christianity and Islam seem to breed?
According to the great contemporary mythologist Joseph Campbell, if you
draw a line through ancient Persia at “sixty degrees east of Greenwich,”
1
this is
the line between the Occident and the Orient, and this is where the split in
human consciousness and our view of the Divine occurred. Campbell remarked:
The fundamental thought in the Oriental philosophical world is that the
mysterious, ultimate truth, that which you seek to know, is absolutely
beyond all definition. All categories of thought, all modes of imaging fall
short of it. When we ask, “Is God merciful, just, loving? Does he love me,
does he love my people more than those? Are these not chosen, are those
not rejected?” this from the Oriental standpoint is sheer kindergarten stuff.
This is the projection of anthropomorphic forms of thought and feelings
upon a mystery that transcends even the categories of being and nonbeing.
The categories of logic, the forms of sensibilities of time and space—all of
these are functions of human thought, and the mystery that you’re seeking
lies beyond it. This is taken seriously; the absolute is absolutely
transcendent of all thought.
In Occidental theology, the word transcendent is used to mean
outside of the world. In the East, it means outside of thought. To imagine
that your definitions of your God have anything to do with that ultimate
mystery is a form of sheer idolatry from this standpoint. Your God is good
enough for you and mine’s good enough for me. A God, from this point of
view, is merely a reflex of one’s ability to conceive of God. Since people
have various abilities of this sort, they have various powers of
apprehending God.
2
This fundamental difference in the way the oriental and the occidental view
the essential nature of their gods—that one can be known, and that one cannot—
is the reason why Eastern philosophy, in both its terminology and its construct,
offers a much more copasetic understanding of the reality revealed by 5-MeODMT. In the East, where all forms of G/d are considered both possible and
inadequate, everything that 5-MeO-DMT has taught me is known and assumed,
while in the West, thanks to our rigid interpretation of dogma, we deny it and
classify the experience as a “hallucination,” or, even more frighteningly,
“psychotic.”
Campbell continues with an explanation so apt that, reading it, I felt that I
could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I had just carried it around with me to
explain my 5-MeO-DMT experiences. With all due respect to Aldous Huxley,
Terence McKenna, and Alexander Shulgin, I can’t think of a better description
of the peak intensity of a true entheogenic experience, even though Campbell
was not talking about entheogens, but instead expounding on the philosophical
bedrock of the Eastern mind.
In the East, however, this relationship is viewed slightly differently: that
which is absolutely transcendent of all knowledge is the basis of your own
being. It is you; it is immanent within you. This fundamental Oriental
statement appears in the Chh ndogya Upanisad as early .as the eighth
century B.C.: Tat tvam asi, “thou art that.” “You yourself are that which
you would know.” However, this “you” is not the you that you identify
with, not this phenomenon in time and space that can be named, that can
be identified, that can be described. That is not it, and so we have also
come to the Sanskrit phrase, Neti, neti—“not this, not this!” Anything that
you can name about yourself is not it. Therefore, when you have erased all
that you can name and have broken through, then you have come to it.
This is a very different sort of calculus. In this equation a is you and x is
the mystery and a = x—you are that mystery, but not the “you” that you
think you are. The you that you think you are is not it and the you that you
can’t even think about is it. This paradox, this absurdity, is the essential
mystery of the East.
3
In the introduction
4
to Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal (a
collection posthumously compiled from lecture transcripts archived by the
Joseph Campbell Foundation), the great scholar has this to say about the state of
religion in the West:
Myths do not belong, properly, to the rational mind. Rather, they bubble
up from deep in the wells of what Carl Jung called the collective
unconscious.
I think what happens in our mythology here in the West is that the
mythological archetypal symbols have come to be interpreted as facts.
Jesus was born of a virgin. Jesus was resurrected from the dead. Jesus
went to heaven by ascension. Unfortunately, in our age of scientific
skepticism we know that these things did not actually happen, and so the
mythic forms are called falsehoods. The word myth now means falsehood,
and so we have lost the symbols and that mysterious world of which they
speak. . . .
At present, our culture has rejected this world of symbology. It has
gone into an economic and political phase, where spiritual principles are
completely disregarded. You may have practical ethics and that kind of
thing, but there is no spirituality in any aspect of our contemporary
Western civilization. Our religious life is ethical, not mystical. The
mystery has gone and society is disintegrating as a result.
The question is whether or not there can ever be a recovery of the
mythological, mystical realization of the miracle of life of which human
beings are a manifestation.
5
So spoke the greatest interpreter of mythos of our time—a man with his
finger on the pulse of Western spirituality. The professor has declared us dead.
But I don’t believe that this has to be true. I believe that—here at the beginning
of the twenty-first century—we can still create a meaningful spiritual experience
that is structured around the wisdom of the great historical sages, supported by
the scale of our current science and cosmology, and that includes the
sacramental use of entheogens as a tool of realization. This experiential spiritual
philosophy would be based on the recognition that the supreme realization is in
our ability to transcend knowledge entirely, to find our own G/d. And it would
presume that a transcendent experience was both valid and possible.
This amounts to a new mystical “tradition” that recognizes a variety of
methods of exploring and mapping the human consciousness, based on the
experientially recognizable but hard-to-grasp “fact” that the true state of reality
is differentiated states of consciousness—one of which we currently occupy.
This approach (which is the antithesis of the reigning Western viewpoint of
material realism) is based on a philosophy called monistic idealism. In the words
of Indian-born scientist Amit Goswami:
In this philosophy, consciousness, not matter is fundamental. Both the
world of matter and the world of mental phenomena, such as thought, are
determined by consciousness. In addition to the material and mental
spheres (which together form the immanent reality, or world of
manifestation), idealism posits a transcendent, archetypal realm of ideas as
the source of material and mental phenomena. It is important to recognize
that monistic idealism is, as its name implies, a unitary philosophy; any
subdivisions, such as the immanent and the transcendent, are within
consciousness. Thus consciousness is the only ultimate reality.
6
This philosophy of monistic idealism has been expressed in one form or
another in virtually all the great religions and philosophical traditions, including
the Judeo-Christian tradition. However, the most famous expression of the
philosophy of monistic idealism in the West comes from The Republic and
Plato’s allegory of the cave:
As hundreds of generations of philosophy students have learned, this
allegory clearly illustrates the fundamental concepts of idealism. Plato
imagines human beings sitting in a cave in a fixed position so they always
face the wall. The great universe outside is a shadow show projected on
the wall of the cave, and we humans are shadow watchers. We watch
shadow-illusions that we mistake for reality. The real reality is behind us,
in the light and archetypal forms that cast the shadows on the wall. In this
allegory, the shadow shows are the unreal immanent manifestations in
human experience of archetypal realities that belong to a transcendent
world. In truth, light is the only reality, for light is all we see. In monistic
idealism, consciousness is like the light in Plato’s cave.
7
The highest expression of monistic idealism cans be found among the
assorted philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism, as this has been a central
tenet of these philosophies since their origins in the Indus Valley in pre-Aryan
times, in an ancient yogic tradition (and philosophy) that appears to date back at
least 3,000 years and remains at the heart of all Indian spiritual practices. It
provided the philosophical bedrock for Hinduism after the invasion of the
Aryans from where we now believe was Anatolia (now Turkey), who brought
with them their colorful pantheon of Vedic gods. The ideas and practices of this
yogic tradition were also later reinterpreted and enlarged in different forms by
Mahavira, the founder of the Jain religion, and slightly later again in the
teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, to subsequently develop into the various
schools of Buddhism. Indian monistic idealism was succinctly expressed by the
eighth century philosopher Shankara in this way: “This entire universe of which
we speak and think is nothing but Brahman. Brahman dwells beyond the range
of Maya [illusion]. There is nothing else.”
8
In light of the antiquity and sophistication of Indian philosophical thought
and mystical expression, I looked more closely into Buddhist and Hindu
concepts, finding that they provided great clarity in my quest to develop a model
for the realms of consciousness experienced on tryptamines. What I found
convinced me that a syncretic melding of the Western scientific viewpoint with
certain ideas from Eastern philosophies can provide a possible basis for a
modern form of experiential transcendental mysticism.
The outline of my 5-MeO-DMT experiences presented in chapter 1 provides a
helpful framework in which to consider various descriptions of the realms and
processes involving light, as detailed by Sogyal Rinpoche in The Tibetan Book
of Living and Dying. These descriptions, taken from commentaries on the Bardo
Thodol, are intended to guide a person through the actual process of dying.
There is considerable debate among Buddhist scholars as to whether or not neardeath experiences—let alone entheogenic experiences—can be considered
relevant to the descriptions of the bardos, because, according to some, being near
death doesn’t actually mean that you have experienced death. Most Buddhist
communities frown upon entheogen use. Dr. Rick Strassman, for example,
received harsh criticism and was expelled from the Buddhist community that he
was a member of because of his experiments with DMT on volunteer subjects.
It is my sincere hope that my comparison of some of Sogyal Rinpoche’s
beautiful descriptions of the bardo states to the 5-MeO-DMT experience does
not offend serious practitioners of these ancient wisdoms. I do not wish to infer
that smoking 5-MeO-DMT is in any way a “short-cut” substitute for years of
meditation and practice. Yet I do believe that the ancient commentaries that the
Bardo Thodol itself provides, which by tradition are accredited to
Padmasambhava who was a Tibetan sage born in India, and which were
originally written down by his primary student Yeshe Tsogyal in Sanskrit, are
relevant to the 5-MeO-DMT experience. As well, the modern commentaries on
the Bardo Thodol by Sogyal Rinpoche resonate so eerily with my own 5-MeODMT experiences that I find the comparisons remarkable. I also believe that the
Sanskrit language itself is more etymologically open to the possibilities in the
5MDE, since its philosophic scaffolding was built around a monistic idealistic
understanding of reality (consciousness is everything), as opposed to the West’s
narrow and mystically bigoted languages, which since the Greeks have been
mostly built upon the foundations of material realism.
Although I feel that Timothy Leary missed a rare opportunity by
overemphasizing Eastern traditions at the expense of incorporating Western
science into the entheogenic model, he was nevertheless correct in his
identification of the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a valuable resource for helping
to understand the psychedelic experience. I also believe this is especially true
when one is considering the phenomenology of the 5-MeO-DMT experience in
particular.
Dissolution into Fractals upon Exhalation of the 5-MeO-DMT
This is the instantaneous eruption of Rigpa, the nature of mind. It is perhaps too
subtle a state of consciousness to be really understood without years of dedicated
meditation. The great Tibetan masters say that Rigpa can pass “in the snap of
one’s fingers” for some people, and last “the length of a meal” (about twenty
minutes) for others.
Sogyal Rinpoche tells us, “As the Ground Luminosity dawns at death, an
experienced practitioner will maintain full awareness and merge with it, thereby
attaining liberation. But if we fail to recognize the Ground Luminosity, then we
encounter the next bardo, the luminous bardo of dharmata.”
9
Every 5-MeO-DMT trip I have witnessed has been characterized by the
complete immersion of the subject into the experience for the first few minutes.
No one ever speaks; everyone lies down after exhaling, with his or her body
often shaking from the incredible velocity that he or she seems to be
encountering.
If the Tibetan philosophy is correct in its rigid adherence to the necessity of
a lifetime of arduous study and training in order to have any chance of liberation
at the moment of death, then none of the 5-MeO-DMT smokers I know
(including myself) would have much of a chance of recognizing liberation
anyway. So down we go . . .
Transportation via Rapid Acceleration into the White Light . . .
. . . into the luminous bardo of dharmata. This could also be the tunnel of light
that people report from near-death experiences and the realm in which angels
and protector-spirits may appear. Here is Sogyal Rinpoche again, this time with
one of my favorite passages:
In the bardo of dharmata, you take on a body of light. The first phase of
this bardo is when “space dissolves into luminosity”: Suddenly you
become aware of a flowing vibrant world of sound, light, and color. All
the ordinary features of our familiar environment have melted into an allpervasive landscape of light. This is brilliantly clear and radiant,
transparent and multicolored, unlimited by any kind of dimension or
direction, shimmering and constantly in motion. The Tibetan Book of the
Dead calls it “like a mirage on a plain in the heat of the summer.” Its
colors are the natural expression of the intrinsic elemental qualities of
mind: space is perceived as blue light, water as white, earth as yellow, fire
as red, and wind as green.
10
The following description mirrors the paradoxical appearance of the white
light of my 5-MeO-DMT experiences: “This white light—which blazes with the
focused intensity of a laser and which is both whiter-than-white, yet also
sparkling with brilliant color.”
11 But then, as Sogyal Rinpoche explains:
How stable these dazzling appearances of light are in the bardo of
dharmata depends entirely upon what stability you have managed to attain
in Tögal practice [a secret Tibetan meditation practice]. Only a real
mastery of this practice will enable you to stabilize the experience and so
use it to gain liberation. Otherwise the bardo of dharmata will simply flash
by like a bolt of lightning; you will not even know that it has occurred. Let
me stress again that only a practitioner of Tögal will be able to make the
all-important recognition: that these radiant manifestations of light have
no existence separate from the nature of mind.
12
Which certainly leaves me out of liberation once again. Yet out of the light,
the multitudes surround me and I begin the next stage.
The Recognition of the Unity of All, and That Love Is the Principle that
Organizes the Universe
In the Tibetan bardo model, this is described as the second phase of dharmata
known as “luminosity dissolving into union,” which seems like a very precise
description of stage three of a 5MDE to me. Since this is the phase of the bardos
where you can see the various Buddhas or deities, this is probably about the
point where I apparently get to my feet declaring, “It exist! It exists! I am there!”
(Wherever there is.) And that I occasionally even utter the word “God.”
Here is Sogyal Rinpoche’s explanation of the concept of dharmata:
The Sanskrit word dharmata . . . means the intrinsic nature of everything,
the essence of things as they are. Dharmata is the naked, unconditional
truth, the nature of reality, or the true nature of phenomenal existence.
What we are discussing here is something fundamental to the whole
understanding of the nature of mind and the nature of everything.
The end of the dissolution process and the dawning of the Ground
Luminosity has opened up an entirely new dimension, which now begins
to unfold. One helpful way I have found to explain it is to compare it with
the way night turns into day. . . . Now gradually the sun of dharmata
begins to rise in all its splendor, illuminating the contours of the land in all
directions. The natural radiance of Rigpa manifests spontaneously and
blazes out as energy and light.
13
Sogyal Rinpoche states that he finds it “extremely suggestive that modern
physics has shown that when matter is investigated, it is revealed as an ocean of
energy and light.” He then quotes David Bohm, whose theory of wholeness and
the implicate order has clearly resonated among the modern Tibetan scholars: “[
. . . Matter], as it were, is condensed or frozen light . . . all matter is a
condensation of light into patterns moving back and forth at average speeds
which are less than the speed of light. . . . It’s energy and it’s also information—
content, form and structure. It’s the potential of everything.”
14
Complete Dissolution from Ego-identity and Any Concept of Time, As I
Dissolve into Resonant Coherence with the Mind of G/d
Somehow, by recognizing the oneness of all creation and the true nature of the
energy that manifests that creation, and by letting myself willingly dissolve into
the conscious field of energy (that I call G/d), I can now resonate with that same
omniscient field of energy as One. This state is an experience that is virtually
beyond description—but historically some poets, artists, and mystics have tried.
My personal favorite description of the experience comes from a Sanskrit
word for an ancient Indian concept, Saccid nanda, which roughly translates into
three root words: existence, awareness, bliss. For me, that’s the 5-MeO-DMT
experience right there in a nutshell.
According to Stanislav Grof, “All we can say about this experience is that
we are identified with a radiant, boundless, and dimensionless principle, or state
of being, that seems to be endowed with infinite existence, has infinite
awareness or wisdom, and experiences infinite bliss. It also possesses an infinite
capacity to create forms and experiential worlds out of itself.”
15
Consider also this exquisite description of difference between the Sixth and
Seventh chakras by Joseph Campbell, and how transcendence occurs when the
kundalini ascends.
Nonetheless, at this level of the ascent of the kundalin [at the sixth
chakra], ..the soul and its beloved, the Lord, are still two. They are
distinct.
At the sixth [chakra] everything is relationship—relationship of I to
thee, of the soul to the beloved. Here we behold the divine aim of life, but
it is as though there were a cellophane wall between the soul and the
object, and perfect love requires that there should be no wall.
The ultimate goal is to transcend duality . . . and that is achieved only
[when . . .] the dividing membrane is withdrawn from between the soul
and its beloved, and both are gone. For there to be an object, there must be
a subject of knowledge and a relationship between them. So, with the
membrane withdrawn, both the soul and God are extinguished, joined
beyond duality, beyond pairs of opposites.
There one finds what we, in our language, can only call identity. And
yet it can’t be called identity because it is beyond categories altogether . . .
something impossible to think of takes place; namely, all phenomenology
is transcended, and with that all subjectivity as well. Schopenhauer speaks
of this in The World as Will and Representation. He says, “If we could
only understand how it is that that which is one becomes many, how that
which is no thing, becomes things.” He calls this paradox the “world
knot.” If we could understand that, we would understand all, but it cannot
be understood.
16
Fear from Disorientation Caused by Transitioning Back into a Restricted
Consciousness and the Return of My Ego
My exit from this state of resonant bliss seems to be precipitated by a sudden
fear regarding how much knowledge I have achieved, and how omniscient I
appear to have become. It is at this point that I begin to search wildly for
identity, for a beginning, for something linear to grasp onto.
The last two phases of the bardo of dharmata are called “union dissolving
into wisdom” and “wisdom dissolving into spontaneous presence.” In the
following passage, Sogyal Rinpoche elucidates on the final phase:
Now the whole of reality presents itself in one tremendous display. . . .
The limitlessness of this vision is utterly beyond our ordinary imagination.
Every possibility is presented: from wisdom and liberation to confusion
and rebirth. At this point you will find yourself endowed with powers of
clairvoyant perception and recollection. For example, with total
clairvoyance and your senses unobstructed, you will know your past and
future lives, see into others’ minds, and have knowledge of all six realms
of existence. In an instant you will vividly recall whatever teachings you
have heard, and even teachings you have never heard will awaken in your
mind.
The entire vision then dissolves back into its original essence, like a
tent collapsing once its ropes are cut.
17
As the Last of the 5-MeO-DMT Effects Fade Away, I Abruptly Repossess My
Physical Body
This is analogous to “the bardo of becoming,” or the sipa bardo. Sogyal
Rinpoche explains that
[w]ith our failure to recognize the Ground Luminosity and our failure to
recognize the bardo of dharmata, the seeds of all our habitual tendencies
are activated and reawakened.
. . . The outstanding feature of the bardo of becoming is that mind
takes on the predominant role, whereas the bardo of dharmata unfolded
within the realm of Rigpa. So, in the bardo of dharmata we have a body of
light, and in the bardo of becoming we have a mental body.
18
A Period of Fading Resonance between Physical Consciousness and G/d
Consciousness, as I Return Completely to My Normal “Baseline” State
This is the lingering resonance with the mystical union. And the beginning of the
age-old struggle for words to try and explain the inexplicable experience.
These parallels between the ancient philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism
and the 5-MeO-DMT experience seem especially obvious if you read the
accounts from the Eastern texts as literal events rather than as metaphor. Sogyal
Rinpoche’s detailed descriptions of the bardo realms surely could not be
considered to be metaphorical. They contain descriptions of particular
emanations of consciousness that are even more detailed than the ones I have
quoted, including manifestations called tiklé, which are described as “simple
rays and colors [that] begin to integrate and coalesce into points or balls of light
of different sizes.”
19 That sounds pretty specific to me, and is an accurate
description of phenomena experienced while in an altered state of consciousness
(or in this case, the ultimate state of altered consciousness: mind on its exit from
material reality).
The same can be said for The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (which detailed very
specific realms of consciousness possibly as far back as three thousand years
ago), and Sri Ramakrishna’s descriptions of the ascent of the kundalini
(corporeal energy). I am sure that countless other examples from Eastern
philosophy, as well as many from our own mystical canon, can also be found. If
these ancient mystics and philosophers were able to chart out the various regions
of human consciousness so lucidly, then we should be able to do so also.
A New Model of Consciousness
The establishment of a foundation for a new understanding of human
consciousness by a limited number of consciousness explorers has
unquestionably already begun. Stanislav Grof has made extraordinary progress
in mapping the frontiers of the modern psyche for more than fifty years now, and
his contribution toward understanding the human subconscious mind may
someday rank as great as Carl Jung’s or Sigmund Freud’s. From thousands of
case studies, Grof describes vast realms of the mind that emerge in obvious
patterns—and in far too great a detail for me to go into here.
Dr. Grof’s focus these days is on accessing altered states of consciousness
via the holotropic breathwork technique that he and his wife Christina invented.
However, he first became aware of transpersonal states of consciousness through
his clinical exposure to LSD, and there is no reason to think that he would have
stopped working with entheogens if they hadn’t been made illegal.
Interestingly enough, I found the following extraordinary description of
consciousness expressed in terms of both the void and of light, not in a book on
the effects of entheogens or in a book on Eastern philosophy, but in yet another
book on quantum physics: Ervin Laszlo’s popular 2006 offering, Science and the
Reenchantment of the Cosmos: The Rise of the Integral Vision of Reality. In a
letter to Laszlo from Chris Bache, a professor of philosophy whom Laszlo
mysteriously remarks has “carried out one of the most sustained and courageous
explorations of deeply altered states ever attempted,” Bache writes about
Laszlo’s ideas regarding the holographic retention of all things in the Akashic
Field:
I am receptive to your proposal both from theory and from my own
transpersonal experience. As one “drops” into the vacuum layer by layer,
structures that had appeared “real” from the perspective of space-time
become transparent to the underlying ground. Not only ego but soul too,
traditionally conceived, becomes permeable and fleeting, simply another
intermediate organization of experience in an open, unbounded system of
energy and information. All patterns of life including collective,
archetypal, even cosmic structures can become transparent, sunyata,
empty of self-existence.
20
Bache, who states that, “from twenty years of exploring nonordinary states
of consciousness, I have taken away a small number of fundamental
convictions,” later concludes his letter with this remarkable description:
The universe relentlessly generates, collects, and integrates experience. In
time, self-emergence yields systems strong enough to begin to form
continuities across multiple incarnations. At first fragmented and
disjointed, these lives eventually come together to form more integrated
wholes. This process of accumulation and integration reaches a
bifurcation point where something comes into being that had not
previously existed. I experienced this birth as an explosion of brilliant,
luminous, extremely dense, exquisitely clear, crystalline diamond light . . .
21
While I have no clue how Chris Bache accesses his “transpersonal
explorations,” I think it is safe to assume after reading such an extraordinary
passage that those realms of light and consciousness that mystics have been
describing since the beginning of time have not closed their doors on the modern
mind just yet. Science and spirituality are both languages of attempted
understanding, since they both seek to find meaning out of the mystery of life.
But words themselves are only symbols and metaphors; they are not the thing
that they describe. I suspect that this is the dialogue that mystics and scientists
have been having since the death of Pythagoras. And although the current
parameters of mainstream science may have no need or desire to explain the
5MDE (or any other experiences outside of “provable” parameters), in my
search to understand my own personal 5-MeO-DMT experiences, I found that
science can be a powerful tool. Equally potent and revealing are the collective
works of the great prophets and mystics. This is one of the reasons why I believe
that the point where the tryptamine experience touches on both the great truths
inherent in quantum physics and in all the philosophies that have come before it
—is the place where G/d resides.
FOURTEEN
A Transcendent Future for Humanity?
Ought it to be assumed that in all men the mixture of religion with other
elements should be identical? Ought it, indeed, to be assumed that the
lives of all men should show identical religious elements? In other
words, is the existence of so many religious types and sects and creeds
regrettable?
To these questions I answer “No” emphatically. And my reason is
that I do not see how it is possible that creatures in such different
positions and with such different powers as human individuals are,
should have exactly the same functions and the same duties. No two of
us have identical difficulties, nor should we be expected to work out
identical solutions. Each, from his peculiar angle of observation, takes
in a certain sphere of fact and trouble, which each must deal with in a
unique manner.
WILLIAM JAMES, THE VARIETIES OF
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, 1902
Experience is not what happens to a man: it is what a man does with
what happens to him.
ALDOUS HUXLEY, TEXTS AND PRETEXTS:
AN ANTHOLOGY WITH COMMENTARIES, 1932
Experience Is the Only Path to Understanding
Ironically, I have discovered that the greatest dilemma that my investigation has
revealed is how to live with my conclusions. For I have come to believe that I
am writing about one of the most difficult and controversial topics in the history
of humankind: the existence of God and our own mortal ability to know, or
directly experience, God’s power. This newfound spirituality has clearly
changed my own life, but as I have enthusiastically expounded my ideas over the
last few years to those close to me, I have come to realize that the whole concept
makes a lot of people uncomfortable, even hostile. The word God itself creates
such immediate emotions, often negative in this modern age, and I can
remember still how skeptical and derisive I would have been if I had been
presented with the bulk of these ideas in my pre5MDE days. “Direct experience
is the highest of all ways of gaining knowledge,” said Swami Rama, and I have
to agree with him. Experience is the only path to understanding. Explanations
just won’t do.
Of course what I am presenting here are my views, and they relate to my 5-
MeO-DMT experiences. Many people have bizarre and amazing experiences
when they smoke 5-MeO-DMT, but don’t necessarily realize G/d. In fact, none
of the many people I have watched undergo a 5MDE has clearly identified his or
her experience as definitively being a mystical “union with God,” although
Nathan’s experience in Panama and some voyages I witnessed at Burning Man
seemed to tread in the same territory. Smoking 5-MeO-DMT in the upper ranges
is a powerful thing—it will blast any human being off into some very interesting
realms—but apparently only a small percentage of those who do so feel that they
have recognized the existence of an absolute consciousness that they know is
God. You either believe you have made contact with G/d or you don’t—there is
no real in-between. Among my immediate circle of friends and enthusiasts, I am
the only one who has come to such a definite conclusion, which was indelibly
imprinted upon me from my first undeniable experience. To date, as far as I have
witnessed, this has been my experience, and mine alone. Yet somehow the same
experience happens virtually every time I smoke 5-MeO-DMT, with varying
degrees of cosmic love and sheer power, while paradoxically I never get used to
it.
References in the scant literature I have found definitely indicate that
similar experiences have happened to other people on 5-MeO-DMT. And, after I
gifted Tryptamine Palace on the playa in 2006 and 2007, I have now either met,
or been contacted by, a handful of people who have had 5-MeO-DMT
experiences that are virtually identical to mine. 5-MeO-DMT is universally
regarded as one of the most powerful psychoactive compounds available, and as
far as I am concerned, it is virtually in a class all of its own. However, I have
also come to realize from my research—especially through the works of
Alexander Shulgin and Stanislav Grof—that this same identification and “union
with God” has happened to other people, and on other compounds, fairly
regularly. Shulgin even has a category for the experience within his “rating
system” that he explains in the introduction to PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story:
(++++) or Plus-four. This is a separate and very special category, in a
class by itself. The four pluses do not imply in any way that it is more
than, or comparable to, a plus-three. It is a serene and magical state which
is largely independent of what drug is used—if any drug at all—and might
be called a “peak experience,” in the terminology of the psychiatrist, Abe
Maslow. It cannot be repeated at will with a repetition of the experiment.
Plus-four is that one-of-a-kind, mystical or even religious experience
which will never be forgotten. It tends to bring about deep change of
perspective or life-direction in the person who is graced with it.
1
Thus 5-MeO-DMT is neither unique in its ability to cause a “genuine
mystical experience” or “union with God,” nor is it guaranteed to be able to do
so. The mystical experience has been available to the human mind for centuries
upon centuries, through a wide variety of means. 5-MeO-DMT just happens to
be the one that arrived in a yellow envelope and unexpectedly worked for me.
A Healthy Dose of Skepticism?
Some of my friends (and undoubtedly some of my readers) say that I was
looking for God all along and that the 5-MeO-DMT filled some deep inner need
for me. They point at my brief university study of the phenomenology of
religion, my continued interest in shamanism and mysticism, even my attraction
to magic mushrooms and LSD, and say that unconsciously this is what I have
been wanting all along. Though they don’t come right out and say it, there is the
definite implication that I am over-rationalizing while at the same time deluding
myself. From that perspective, this book could be seen as the ultimate expression
of that delusion. And they could be right. There is no way of proving any of this
one way or the other. These are just my ideas and my experiences, and the
“hypothesis that best fits the given evidence” for me. But the fact remains that
before I smoked 5-MeO-DMT, I was a hard-core scientific-rationalist atheist
who thought religion was an antiquated superstition for people with weak minds.
I was personally happy, professionally content, and had no interest in the
existence of God, until I came to believe that in the midst of the 5MDE I was
granted classical mystical union with what historically has been called “a Higher
Power.”
In an effort to present a balanced view on the subject, I decided to seek out
some books on skepticism. I tried reading Richard Dawkins’ popular book The
God Delusion, thinking that along with some interesting facts about genetics and
Darwin, I would find some grounded scientific rationalism that might make me
reconsider at least a few of my newly found views. An author of a number of
books on genetics and evolution, Dawkins held the position of Charles Simonyi
Professor in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University in Great
Britain until September of 2008. He is described on his book’s cover as being a
“preeminent scientist and outspoken atheist,” and the book contains a host of
glowing recommendations from prominent scientists and authors, who describe
how revolutionary Dawkins’ view of God is. Surely I was in the right territory, I
figured; this book must be some kind of an atheist’s Holy Grail. (No pun
intended!)
Alas, The God Delusion sorely disappointed me. From the beginning,
Dawkins makes it clear that what he is debunking is the idea of God we have
inherited from the Judeo-Christian religion. I have been disheartened to find that
this is the approach that several other authors have also taken. I have yet to read
a book that “debunks” the existence of any form of G/d other than this
monotheistic and jealous “tribal god” we have inherited from the peoples of
what we now call “the Middle East.” Dawkins takes great offense at the use of
the word God in the writings of scientists like Albert Einstein and Stephen
Hawking. He argues that they don’t really mean God, since they are talking
about their own concept of God, not the Old Testament God with a white beard
sitting up in heaven on a throne. He then pointedly describes the disastrous
effects of religion, without ever really examining the concept of God in any
detail.
Since Dawkins is a celebrated Darwinian, he sets about proving that natural
selection can account for everything and that it is simply the illogical and
unscientific mindset of the “great unwashed masses” that doesn’t allow us to
realize that God doesn’t exist. He has an annoying habit of repeating the idea
that understanding the concept of natural selection has given him “a raised
consciousness,” allowing him to see the truth in nature, while most of the rest of
us remain superstitious and deluded.
Dawkins avoids examining the variety of concepts of God in any detail.
There is virtually no mention of spiritual ideas from Eastern religions, excepting
at the point where he dismisses them from the discussion: “. . . I shall not be
concerned at all with other religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism. Indeed,
there is something to be said for treating these not as religions at all but as
ethical systems or philosophies of life.”
2 With an off-handed rejection of more
than half the world’s religions just like that, it’s not surprising that mysticism
doesn’t warrant any mention, and there’s only a scant dismissal of the ideas from
new physics, when Dawkins decrees that, “Our imaginations are not yet tooledup to penetrate the neighbourhood of the quantum.”
3 Adhering to a rigid
dogmatism as bad as any of a religious nature (only with Darwin as the new
God), Dawkins feels that the theory of evolution by natural selection is the
ultimate scientific consciousness raiser, stating: “It is impossible to exaggerate
the magnitude of the problem that Darwin and Wallace solved.”
4 So strong is his
faith in Darwin that the rather pompous Dawkins seems entirely unable to
consider anybody else’s viewpoint at all.
Take, for example, the following from chapter three, “Arguments for God’s
Existence,” under the heading “The Argument from ‘Personal Experience’”:
One of the cleverer and more mature of my undergraduate
contemporaries, who was deeply religious, went camping in the Scottish
isles. In the middle of the night he and his girlfriend were woken in their
tent by the voice of the devil—Satan himself; there could be no possible
doubt: the voice was in every sense diabolical. My friend would never
forget that horrifying experience, and it was one of the factors that later
drove him to be ordained. My youthful self was impressed by his story,
and I recounted it to a gathering of zoologists relaxing in the Rose and
Crown Inn, Oxford. Two of them happened to be experienced
ornithologists, and they roared with laughter. “Manx Shearwater!” they
shouted in delighted chorus. One of them added that the diabolical shrieks
and cackles of this species have earned it, in various parts of the world and
various languages, the local nickname “Devil Bird.”
5
This is the best ammunition against being able to personally experience G/d
that the world’s most prominent atheist has to offer? A friend of his, who was
already “deeply religious,” is scared by a noisy bird into becoming a priest. In
the rest of the chapter, Dawkins alludes to the brain’s ability to trick itself into
believing in things that don’t exist, and he claims that the “formidable power of
the brain’s simulation software . . . is well capable of constructing ‘visions’ and
‘visitations’ of the utmost veridical power.” Dawkins insists that, “Constructing
models is something the human brain is very good at. When we are asleep it is
called dreaming; when we are awake we call it imagination or, when it is
exceptionally vivid, hallucination.”
6
Dawkins takes a few stabs at the gullibility of mass Catholic visions, and
falls back on the old idea that anything that doesn’t have some kind of tangible
physical reality is either imaginary or a form of psychosis—material
reductionism at its finest. But this “paradigm” is crumbling with the discovery of
biological quantum interactions with the zero-point field. Dawkin’s book is
filled with blind faith in the veracity of the “laws” of random mutation and
natural selection, yet according to Ervin Laszlo, these ideas will have to be
radically amended if it turns out that the structure of the genome is affected by
the energy and/or information it receives from the zero-point field.
The Immutable Genome
The central pillar of modern Darwinism is that—with regard to the genome
(your DNA) and phenome (the physical construction of that DNA, that is, you)
—only the phenome is adaptable, while the genome is immutable. According to
the current “synthetic theory” of modern Darwinism, the information contained
in the genetic code is presumed to be immune to outside conditions, and is
therefore always passed on unchanged between generations. The genome is said
to mutate randomly, unaffected by the conditions that affect the phenome.
However, statistical evidence is increasingly pointing to the conclusion that pure
blind “random mutation” would lead to too many evolutionary “dead ends,” and
that the “search space” of possible genetic rearrangements within the genome is
so enormous that random processes are unlikely to produce viable species. The
laws of natural selection also cannot explain the relatively short (in geological
terms) periods of intense diversity (that represent radical “jumps” in evolution)
that are contained within the fossil record.
Stephen Jay Gould (then of Harvard) and Niles Eldredge postulated that
new species do not arise through a stepwise modification of existing species—
they appear almost at once. In this “macro-revolutionary theory,” new species
arise in a time span of no more than five to ten thousand years, which translates
in geological time as an instant. This explains the mystery of the “missing links”
in the fossil record that have puzzled biologists for years—there are no missing
links, since they don’t exist. Ongoing laboratory experiments appear to indicate
the probability of coherence between the phenome and the genome, in the form
of mechanical, chemical, biochemical, and field-transmitted connections.
7 This
is perhaps one of the most exciting developments in biology today. If this turns
out to be true, then it is Darwinists like Richard Dawkins who may have to
evolve to realize that nothing can really ever be said to have been “proven”—it
can only be said to have provided us with the best “minimum hypothesis” for the
time being.
Dawkins is so clearly dogmatic in his faith in Darwin’s ideas that he comes
off just as bigoted and narrow-minded as any religious fanatic. But for me, the
most immediately obvious thing wrong with Richard Dawkins’ attempts to prove
that God does not exist is that he is setting out to disprove the God of the Old
Testament, which is clearly a God manifested out of the antiquated regional
mythology of the Middle East, although Dawkins could just as easily be raging
against Zeus, Ganesha, or Odin or any other tribal metaphor of the
transcendental Godhead. The very use of the word God seems to incense
Dawkins, who can only see a white-bearded heavenly “father” and won’t even
consider the possibility of the transcendental. He has no interest in examining a
God greater than the most antiquated one that he has inherited from his society;
nor, apparently, does he have any interest in redefining the existence of God
with metaphors sufficient for the modern age. For Dawkins, the supernatural
cannot exist—he simply won’t allow it, like Niels Bohr “forbidding” the
collapse of the electron in an atom. When Dawkins talks about Einstein’s
“regrettable” use of the word God, he goes as far as to say:
I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their
special metaphorical sense. The metaphorical or pantheistic God of the
physicists is light years away from the interventionist, miracle-wrecking,
thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of
priests, mullahs, and rabbis, and of ordinary language. Deliberately to
confuse the two is, in my opinion, an act of intellectual high treason.
8
Albert Einstein doesn’t have the right to redefine humanity’s understanding
of the word God? It’s all right to radically redefine our reality through
mathematics and physics, but don’t you dare mess with spirituality? I find such a
narrow-minded viewpoint bizarre. Perhaps Dawkins had some rough days as a
choirboy. He certainly comes across as a rabid God-hater, and when he states
that the wonder of nature is enough for him (but that this should in no way be
considered religious), I cannot help but laugh and remember Joseph Campbell’s
assertion: “The term nature religions has become the object of rejection and
abuse. But what else are you going to worship? Some figment of your
imagination that you have put up in the clouds? A strange thing has happened. It
is so extreme that if you don’t believe in a figure, you don’t have any worship.
Now everything is lost!”
9
This is where our modern civilization has gone so radically wrong over the
last three hundred years—we have mostly stopped developing our vision of God.
We have become so allergic to the very word that its use immediately creates
suspicion, linked, as it is, to archaic dogmas forcing rigid adherence to concepts
of God that are hundreds, if not thousands, of years old. Richard Dawkins’ book
is really about (Western) monotheistic religion and the historic and political grip
that this institution has held on the terminology of God in our culture—and it has
precious little to do with whether or not God can exist. While Western thinkers
as recent as Einstein, Heisenberg, and Sir Arthur Eddington had a decidedly
mystical bent, it seems that since World War II (and the advent of the atomic
bomb) our modern scientific culture has clearly stopped developing this idea—
an idea that may be older than our branch of humanity itself, as it is increasingly
accepted that the Neanderthals practiced a form of religion. Without such a
development of our vision of God, we are left with only the tottering and archaic
systems of our Euro-Christianity, or the countless schools of New Age and/or
Eastern synthesis that have arrived on our shores since a generation momentarily
blasted its third eye open with an ocean of LSD.
New Visions of God
I belong to a group of scientists who do not subscribe to a conventional
religion but nevertheless deny that the universe is a purposeless
accident. Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and
more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an
ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact.
There must, it seems to me, be a deeper explanation. Furthermore, I
have come to the point of view that mind—i.e., conscious awareness of
the world—is not a meaningless and incidental quirk of nature, but an
absolutely fundamental facet of reality.
PAUL DAVIES, THE MIND OF GOD: THE SCIENTIFIC
BASIS FOR A RATIONAL WORLD, 1992
10
This situation in our society does however appear to be changing, with new
visions of the nature of God emerging from some intelligent and prominent
thinkers. I find it very telling that in the same year (2006) that Dawkins released
The God Delusion to considerable success and acclaim, the astrophysicist
Bernard Haisch quietly released his book The God Theory into the collective
consciousness of the world. Here is Haisch’s take on the current dilemma of the
opposing views of science and spirituality, which he lays out in his introduction:
If we are nothing but physical beings originating by chance in a random
universe, then there really can be no ultimate purpose in our lives. This is
not only bad news for us individually, it undermines the ethical and moral
underpinnings of society and civilization.
I propose a theory in this book that does provide a purpose for our
lives while at the same time being completely consistent with everything
we have discovered about the universe and about life on earth, in
particular the Big Bang, a 4.6 billion-year-old earth, and, of course,
evolution. The single difference between the theory I propose and the
ideas current in modern astrophysics is that I assume that an infinite
conscious intelligence preexists. You cannot get away from the
preexistence of something, and whether that is an ensemble of physical
laws generating infinite random universes or an infinite conscious
intelligence is something present-day science cannot resolve, and indeed
one view is no more rational than the other.
One might argue that one view is supported by evidence and the
other is not. I would agree one hundred percent. The evidence for the
existence of an infinite conscious intelligence is abundant in the accounts
of the mystics and the meditative, prayerful, and sometimes spontaneous
exceptional experiences of human beings throughout history. The
evidence for random universes is precisely zero. Most scientists reject the
former type of evidence as merely subjective, but that simply reduces the
contest of views to a draw: zero on both sides.
11
With that last statement, I believe that Haisch identifies the problem
exactly: since current science can’t prove the existence of G/d, it feels compelled
to deny it. But history is full of accounts of people who claim to have
experienced G/d, with plenty of scientists and scholars included among them.
The problem these days is that as soon as you mention the word God, you get
dragged into a theological discussion about which dogma-attached version of
God you are talking about—even if you profess to be attached to no particular
religion or philosophy. Discussing the existence of God often degenerates into a
historical–political debate rather than a spiritual–philosophical one.
Fading Metaphors and a Transcendental Remedy
Toward the end of his remarkable life, Joseph Campbell delivered a series of
lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, based on the theme that
humankind’s future mythology would have to incorporate the new scale of the
universe that it was discovering. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space was the
name of a symposium he gave (with astronaut Rusty Schweickart) and is the
name of a book based on these lectures, reissued by the Joseph Campbell
Foundation in 2002.
In this series of lectures, Joseph Campbell argues that our society has
totally lost the ability to understand metaphor in myth or religion, and that
Western religions’ dogged insistence on regarding spiritual metaphors (such as
the Virgin Birth, that Jesus physically ascended to heaven, and so on) as actual
facts that are clearly now in opposition to the established science of the day only
reduces their argument’s credibility. You can accept them as “miracles” or
“articles of faith,” but something like Ezekiel ascending to heaven in a chariot
ends up being pretty hard to swallow. Metaphors that were inspirational and
mystical 2,000 years ago now appear either dated or inconsequential when
compared to our modern cosmology, or clearly impossible when examined by
our current sciences. It is the loss of power in these metaphors, along with the
dogged insistence of the clerical authorities that they actually occurred, in
addition to the abuses that these same authorities have committed in the names
of their various Gods, that has resulted in a complete split from spirituality for
large chunks of our population. Now having lost the power to inspire many of
us, when we are forced to try and rationalize these “scientific” impossibilities,
the result is a form of societal split-psychosis, with either atheism or
fundamentalism as the most tenable positions available.
According to Campbell, universal metaphors should be timeless and
transcendental vehicles to greater truths.
“Have you not heard,” asked Nietzsche, already in the introduction to his
Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–84): “Have you not heard that God is
dead?”—the god in point, of course, being the named and defined creatorgod of the historically limited Bible. For the conditions, not only of life,
but of thought also, have considerably changed since the centuries of the
composition of that guide to truth and virtue, which by its deliberately
restricted and restricting ethnocentric horizon and tribal “jealous God”
(Exodus 20:5) is culture specific . . .
The first step to mystical realization is the leaving of such a defined
god for an experience of transcendence, disengaging the ethnic from the
elementary idea,
*38
for any god who is not transparent to transcendence is
an idol, and its worship is idolatry. Also, the first step to participation in
the destiny of humanity today, which is neither of this folk or of that, but
of the whole population of this globe, is to recognize every such local
image of a god as but one of many thousands, millions, even perhaps
billions, of locally useful symbolizations of that same mystery beyond
sight or thought which our teachers have taught us to seek in their god
alone. Black Elk’s phrase, “The center is everywhere” is matched by a
statement from a hermetic, early medieval text, The Book of Twenty-four
Philosophers (Liber XXIV philosophorum): “God is an infinite sphere,
whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”
12
5-MeO-DMT and the Potential for Transcendental
Realization
My desire to see our societal vision of God recreated to a stature fitting of our
current cosmology leaves me with the unenviable task of proposing a remedy
that is quasi-illegal and that many will consider scientifically illogical. But I was
once just as terminally unaffected by the presence of the sacred as most of the
Western world is. I had accepted without question the same hopeless inherited
worldview that much of my generation has accepted—a worldview where we are
told to lose ourselves in the pursuit of sex, money, possessions, and
entertainment. And I know that I have now experienced a radical transformation
of my own spirituality.
If 5-MeO-DMT has allowed me the classic experience of mystical
realization, then there is no reason why it can’t work for others too. I have no
qualifications for tasting enlightenment, other than a disdain for the
contemporary model of society. If I can turn my tribe on, and you can turn yours
on, and they can turn theirs on . . . then we just might start to inject some
experiential mystical spirituality back into the fading memory of the Western
soul.
Those who have never experienced 5-MeO-DMT may be skeptical. Be
reassured that I would have been too. The effect that smoking 5-MeO-DMT has
had on my life has been without parallel. I was a hardheaded motherfucker—
they didn’t call me “Rock” for nothing. But smoking 5-MeO-DMT dissolved a
lot of that hardheadedness away in just over a half-an-hour, more effectively
than a lifetime of reading and enough psychedelics to imprison a small nation. 5-
MeO-DMT hit me like Zen lightning. I was totally ignorant and unprepared. And
if the reason 5-MeO-DMT succeeded with me was because it caught me offguard, with all my belief systems and defenses down, then my apologies:
because if you have read this far, I have probably ruined the impact of surprise
for you.
Various friends who have read my manuscript have suggested jokingly (and
maybe not so jokingly) that I am interested in starting some kind of a cult. But
they miss the point entirely. I am only interested in personally experiencing G/d.
I believe that this experience is open to all of us and through a variety of means,
not just by smoking 5-MeO-DMT. Transcendence, as Joseph Campbell points
out, is a distinctly human phenomenon. And we have all experienced it in one
form or another, even if we have never experienced the totality of G/d.
Music has always been an integral part of religion and has been considered
sacred by virtually every human society because of its capacity to evoke
transcendence. And it is the most common vehicle of transcendence in our
current society. Most of us have “lost ourselves” in music at one time or another,
while the popularity of the current dance (rave) culture is a clear example of how
music and dance can enable us to transcend our normal consciousness.
This is not surprising, since music is based on scales and harmony that are
in themselves a product of our natural world, despite what instruments we may
invent to recreate them. Those same notes, scales, and harmonic values appear
throughout both the inanimate universe (as shown by the B-flat vacuum-pressure
wave discovered traveling through the zero-point field) and the world of biology.
For example, the coherent whole-system behavior of the cells, organs, and organ
systems of an organism has been compared to “a good jazz band” by
experimental biophysicist Mae-Wan Ho. The “music” of a higher organism
ranges over more than seventy octaves.
13 These scales and harmonies
undoubtedly have a cosmic origin. One interpretation of the zero-point field is
the idea that all matter has a signal, so it’s the signal (or note) that causes reality,
not the actual particles and atoms themselves.
Matter as the concretization of sound is also an idea that appears in many
spiritual philosophies. In a fascinating lecture about the Sanskrit language
presented at the World Psychedelic Conference (Basel, 2008) by Baba Rampuri
—an American who became the first non-Indian to be initiated as a Naga baba
saddhu (a “holy-man” from a Shiva sect known for its extreme austerities) after
living in India for more than twenty-five years—remarked repeatedly that we
paid too much attention to the written form of the word, or the meaning of the
word, while it is the actual sound of the word that is the road to a deeper
understanding.
Other forms of transcendence also clearly exist. Parents often talk of a type
of transcendence when they experience the birth of a child, or watch with
wonder the faculties of their children develop over time: the wonder of the first
step, the first word. Meditation, prayer, art, sport, and even sex can also be
transcendent; and countless other forms of transcendence clearly exist. Yet
thanks to our society’s rigid fascination with “material-reductionism,” we tend to
discount these very accessible realms of transcendence as being of little
“practical” value. Advanced technologies for inducing transcendence have
existed throughout the ages. Most notably kundalini yoga from India, which
Joseph Campbell tells us “is not a game of ‘as if’ and make-believe, but an
actual experience of psychological absorption in a metaphysical ground of some
kind, a morphogenetic field that has not yet, as far as I know, been scientifically
recognized in the West except by C. G. Jung and lately, by the [biologist] Rupert
Sheldrake, whose works, according to one concerned scientific reviewer, ought
to be burned.”
14
In the West, the last great school of transcendence appears to
have been the Greek mysteries of Eleusis, whose adepts used the entheogenic
preparation called kykeon to carry them beyond the realms of their immediate
consciousness, a methodology that was so successful it lasted 2,000 years.
The modern use of entheogens, and particularly the widespread use of LSD
in the sixties, would seem to indicate a deep-rooted desire within our own
society to reacquire knowledge of these transcendental realms. The subsequent
prohibition of these same entheogens—and the apparent willingness of our
governments to traffic decidedly non-transcendental inebriants like alcohol,
heroin, and cocaine upon the peoples of the world—makes it apparent that the
individual pursuit of transcendence is considered dangerous and undesirable to
those institutions of mass societal control that currently run our world. Aldous
Huxley had great foresight when, writing in 1954, he said:
Systematic reasoning is something we could not, as a species or as
individuals, possibly do without. But neither, if we are to remain sane, can
we possibly do without direct perception, the more unsystematic the
better, of the inner and outer worlds into which we have been born. This
given reality is an infinite which passes all understanding and yet admits
of being directly and in some sort totally apprehended. It is a
transcendence belonging to another order than the human, and yet it may
be present to us as a felt immanence, an experienced participation. To be
enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent
otherness—to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as
an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever
expedient to systematic reasoning. Our goal is to discover that we have
always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task
exceedingly difficult for ourselves. Meanwhile, however, there are
gratuitous graces in the form of partial and fleeting realizations. Under a
more realistic, a less exclusively verbal system of education than ours,
every Angel (in Blake’s sense of that word) would be permitted as a
sabbatical treat, would be urged and even, if necessary, compelled to take
an occasional trip through some chemical Door in the Wall into the world
of transcendental experience. If it terrified him, it would be unfortunate
but probably salutary. If it brought him a brief but timeless illumination,
so much the better.
In either case . . . the man who comes back through the Door in the
Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be
wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in
acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the
relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the
unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.
15
Myself, having now experienced this transcendental gnosis at its sublime
fullest, I have little interest in anything else. I still survive in the world the same
as anyone else does. I still need air, and water, and food. I still love my wife,
listen to music, travel, and enjoy the many other pleasures of my life—perhaps
even more than I did previously. But I now consider my moments of knowing
G/d within the 5-MeO-DMT experience to be the most important and fulfilling
experiences that I have managed to achieve as a human being. These
transcendental moments outside of space and time have both created a certain
agitation and allowed a certain peace of mind.
I suspect that the rest of my life, with or without 5-MeO-DMT, will be
spent developing my own personal viewpoint of and relationship with my G/d. I
have recently realized how much time I now spend thinking about G/d and the
meaning of our human existence, and I try to remember what I used to spend all
that time thinking about! My interest in extreme sports, which dominated more
than a quarter of my life, has clearly dropped, as has my interest in making
money. When I look around, I realize that most other people are not spending
their time thinking about the kind of things that I’m thinking about! If The God
Delusion is the best argument against my experiences that the world’s most
prominent atheist has to offer me, then I’m going back to reading the likes of
Joseph Campbell and Aldous Huxley for inspiration instead.
Even though Huxley’s grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, coined the term
agnostic, and Aldous Huxley’s most famous book, Brave New World, reflected
his youthful radical agnosticism, Huxley renounced his agnostic viewpoint after
having his own first-hand experiences. He continued to develop his personal
spirituality all the way until his dying breath (his wife gave him two 100 μg
injections of LSD during his last hours).
16 He realized that there can be no
denying the history of mystical experiences, and the words of the great mystics
ring strikingly similar to Huxley’s “perennial philosophy,” no matter what their
cult or creed.
Synthetic 5-MeO-DMT is a recent vehicle of mystical realization
discovered by the ingenuity and curiosity of the human imagination, just as
mescaline and LSD were for Huxley’s generation. Throughout this book, I have
presented my surprising discovery that under certain conditions you can
experience union with G/d, while making a clumsy attempt at distancing my
personal G/d from the gods of all known religions. But ultimately, as Huxley
expounds with his “perennial philosophy,” I know that all these gods are one and
the same. They are atman-Brahman. The ineffable, indescribable, but
paradoxically not un-knowable, nature of God, of which we are all but drops
from the same infinite cosmic ocean.
My adventures and immersions—in other authors’ psychedelic writings, in
Buddhism, Hinduism, alchemy, mysticism, quantum physics, and in the startling
implications of the zero-point field—these are all brush strokes on a masterpiece
that had already been painted. I needed them to regain my balance in this world
after I first smoked 5-MeO-DMT, because I needed to understand how I could
have experienced what I now believe to be the undeniable existence of G/d, a
God I did not believe in, in any form, prior to my first 5MDE, a God that I saw
no need in believing in, since I was as staunch an atheist as Richard Dawkins.
I believed in the natural good and beauty in the world. I embraced the
concept of karma as a good way to live, if not actually being a supernatural
force. I believed in myself, and that was about it. The cynical, educated, overintellectualized twentieth-century product that I was, I firmly believed that while
material reality might not be all that there was to existence, it was all that we
could know, and the belief in anything that was consciously more than that was
merely “ignorant” superstition.
While I had been enthusiastic about various entheogenic drugs over the
years, I had viewed them as doors into my own consciousness, and had gradually
lost faith in them. I had eventually come to see “psychedelics” as being
something fun to do (in low doses) for outdoor sporting activity, or when going
out to dance and listen to music. I drink little alcohol and eschew powders.
MDMA makes me cranky the next day, so I don’t bother. My ayahuasca
experiences in Ecuador and Peru had been weak, producing little more than
vomiting and a few colors. Since all the good LSD had been drying up anyway, I
generally just liked to puff chronic herb. But then along came the entirely
different 5-MeO-DMT experience, and I realized that everything I had done up
until that point was simply training-wheels.
In the days prior to my discovery of 5-MeO-DMT, I was more interested in
self-knowledge through paths like yoga and meditation than I was in trying any
new drug, since I no longer believed that any drug could teach me much more
about myself than what I had already learned through my past history of
psychedelic experiences. Hence my tremendous surprise at the experiential
discovery (through the use of an entheogen) of that transcendent Other; my inner
G/d revealed.
Early in a 5-MeO-DMT experience there comes a moment when you feel
that everything in your life—everything that you have learned or have
instinctively known—everything is about that single moment in time: “This is
it.” And then in you go. All the study, all the thinking, all the flying, and
climbing, and acid, and mushrooms, all the good times, all the hard times, being
washed in a bath as a child by my mother, bathing in the Ganges with millions of
others at the Kumba Mela—all of those moments led to this One moment. Now,
on the other side of that “black hole that is a white hole,” nothing can ever quite
be the same.
The Power of Absolute Consciousness
My discovery of G/d, and the peace this discovery has brought me, is
undoubtedly the greatest spiritual and intellectual change in my inner being and
is perhaps the greatest spiritual and intellectual revelation that any human can
undergo. But the factor that has changed my life the most externally is the
immense sense of responsibility that has accompanied this inner transformation:
a sense of responsibility to myself, to my people, and to my planet. Other
dedicated tryptamine smokers have expressed this same feeling of responsibility
to me, just as many shamans and mystics have expressed it throughout history.
So where does this twin sense of purpose and responsibility come from?
Reports of its existence are well documented in transpersonal experiences, and
they are a significant aspect of the experience, which can inspire a genuine
change in personality. Once again, this depends on what you believe the 5-MeODMT experience really is and how powerfully that belief takes hold of you. If
you believe, as I do, that this experience can allow you to connect in coherent
resonance with Absolute Consciousness, then it is pretty easy to understand
where this sense of responsibility and purpose originates.
The source of mystical insight is considered at length in Ervin Laszlo’s
recent book, Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos:
[The] most remarkable of altered-state experiences surfaces in individuals
who are committed to the quest of apprehending the ultimate grounds of
existence. When the seekers come close to attaining their goal, their
descriptions of what they regard as supreme principle of existence are
strikingly similar. They describe what they experience as an immense and
unfathomable field of consciousness endowed with infinite intelligence
and creative power. The field of cosmic consciousness they experience is
a cosmic emptiness—a void. Yet, paradoxically, it is also an essential
fullness. Although it does not feature anything in a concretely manifest
form, it contains all of existence in potential. The void they experience is a
fullness; the vacuum is a plenum. It is the ultimate source of existence, the
cradle of all being. It is pregnant with the possibility of everything there
is. The phenomenal world is its creation: the realization and concretization
of its inherent potential.
People who practice yoga and other forms of deep meditation report
the same kind of experience. This was the basis in the Indian Vedic
tradition for the affirmation that consciousness is not an emergent
property that comes into existence through material structures such as the
brain and the nervous system, but a vast field that constitutes the primary
reality of the universe. In meditation, when the gross layers of the mind
are stripped away, this field is experienced as unbounded and undivided
by objects and individual experiences. Underlying the diversified and
localized gross layers of ordinary consciousness there is a unified,
nonlocalized, and subtle layer: “pure consciousness.”
There is a noteworthy parallel here between insights that have been
present to the human mind for thousands of years and the implications of
the latest findings of the sciences.
17
The main—and blindingly obvious—parallel between the mystical (or
transpersonal) experience and the latest findings in quantum science is the
insight that we are all linked. We are a field of interdependent energies. We are
all One. If you experientially realize that, then you become responsible for
everything: for the entire planet, for all people, for every action, and every word.
Experience your place in the universe outside of space and time, and you will
feel the responsibility of resting in that love.
If the absolute consciousness that Ervin Laszlo and I are both describing is
truly the essence of reality—the field of fields from which all other phenomena
manifest—then the lesson that I am learning from resonating in harmony with
this field is that it is motivated by the act of creation. Its intelligence and
intention manifests in what I call the “complex creation principal.”
As I have come to understand it, while Absolute Consciousness is an
undisturbed field of all potentiality, we are actually the crystallization of the
experience of creation. We have manifested into material “reality” as a knot of
energy in time and space. We are no longer contained within the infinite sea of
potential. We now exist as an actuality—potential be damned. We have become
that “intense disturbance” in time and space. The Tibetans believe that we chose
to be incarnated into these times. So, too, do I believe that the things that my
consciousness is now motivated to search for in this physical universe are the
same things that motivate the absolute consciousness in its own search for
meaning. “As above, so below.”
*39
“Brahman, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute,” Ramakrishna said, “is
like a shoreless ocean. In the ocean visible blocks of ice are formed here and
there by intense cold. Similarly, under the cooling influence, so to speak, of the
devotion [bhakti] of its worshippers, the Infinite transforms Itself into the finite
and appears before the worshipper as God with form. That is to say, God reveals
Himself to His devotees as an embodied Person. Again, as, on the rising of the
sun, the ice in the ocean melts away, so, on the awakening of Knowledge [jñ
na], the embodied God melts back into the infinite and formless Brahman. . . .
Therefore people compare the love of God to the cooling light of the moon, and
knowledge to the burning rays of the sun.”
18 And while Ramakrishna is talking
in this passage about the appearance of God with form, this mechanism could
just as equally apply to the appearance of our own form, pulled out of the sea of
potential, just as the Gnostics surmised, as fallen G/ds unable to recognize our
own divinity.
If all of this “reality” is indeed shades of differentiated consciousness, then
most of the universe is in balance. It doesn’t worry about being in existence—it
simply is. Every physical thing in the universe is in harmony with its temporal
existence, whether it is the sun shining in the sky or my dog when he moves
from sleeping to becoming instantly alert if he hears the slam of a truck door.
Everything in the universe—so far—except us. For as humanity has been
infected with the Promethean knowledge of creation, so too have we been
infected with the doubts and fears that come with that high knowledge. As the
philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote: “Man alone of all existing things . . .
experiences the wonder of all wonders: that there is being.”
19 Just as I look
around in the darkest turmoil of my 5-MeO-DMT visions and ask who am I and
how did I come to be there, so too now does humankind look around in the
universe and wonder how it all came to be, while attempting to understand our
part in that plan. And somehow, through some weird quirk in human
programming, our Western industrial civilization decided about four hundred
years ago that we are Absolute Consciousness. We convinced ourselves that
there is nothing in our heads but ourselves, and G/d went silent. Now look what
a mess we have made of the world.
I am going to go out on a limb, and allow myself to be pigeon-holed as a
nut-job by all the good atheists like Richard Dawkins (and myself, before I
smoked 5-MeO-DMT), and say that while we have turned our backs on G/d and
declared him (or her or them) dead, G/d has been quietly watching and waiting
for enough of us to tune back in.
Nor am I alone; as I have mentioned previously, there are a number of
scientists and philosophers who are also starting to say much the same thing that
I am—that we have underestimated G/d and the possibilities that believing in
G/d’s existence could bring. In the first line of astrophysicist Bernie Haisch’s
book The God Theory he says: “Surely it is time for all of us scientists to
consider returning to God?”
20 And while (according to Haisch) 93 percent of the
members of the American Academy of Sciences reject the concept of God, in a
subsequent review for The Journal of Scientific Discovery, Professor Richard
Conn Henry has this to say about the book’s key ideas.
Let me quote a single sentence from his book, which I have chosen
because it so perfectly encapsulates my own understanding: “It is not
matter that creates an illusion of consciousness, but consciousness that
creates an illusion of matter.” That is correct physics: it is not
controversial in the slightest degree that there is no reality; this has been
demonstrated in both theory and experiment (Gröblacher et al., Nature,
446, 871, 2007).
*40
And yet in how many physics classes today are students made aware
of this most fundamental discovery? In all of my classes, I assure you; but
I am confident that this is not common. The illusion of matter, which is to
say the illusion of a really-existing world, is so strong, that I think most
scientists are unable to overcome it. It took me decades to finally realize
that this is not a joke, and that the universe is purely mental: that mind is
fundamental; matter merely an illusion—and that this is physics, not
philosophy (or religion).
And how, out of this, does God appear? Well, the only mind I know
exists is my own. My choice is solipsism or God. A leap of faith is
required, yes—but it is an easy leap indeed! Haisch, too, says his is “a
theory that looks promising, not scientific proof.”
21
At the conclusion of the review, Richard Conn Henry—a Professor in
Physics and Astronomy at the prestigious John Hopkins University in Baltimore
—has this to say:
In his Introduction, Haisch says “I have arrived at a personal worldview
that offers a satisfying and hopeful explanation of reality—a worldview
that is not only possible, rational, and compatible with modern science,
but compelling and capable of resolving some of the most intransigent
moral issues facing us today. It embodies a way out of our global dilemma
and so I offer it for your consideration.” I endorse this offer.
I am still personally uncomfortable mentioning God. When I made
the transition (2004) I composed “Great omniscient Spirit” (GoS), to keep
my notion pure, and free of the historical, often vicious, God. But I am
coming to think that this is a mistake; that we scientists should be in the
lead of the battle to reclaim God from the wrong-headed . . . I would like,
please, every scientist, to give consideration to how much better off we
would be, individually and collectively, if the God Theory could become,
once again, just as it was for Newton, the working hypothesis of modern
science. It beats hell out of reductionism!
22
If you can rationally accept the necessity for the existence of G/d within the
science and philosophy of the day, then it should be much easier to actually
realize that conclusion. And if proven entheogens are ritually used, a mystical
realization can result in a release of tremendous personal energy and
understanding.
Liberation Theology
Although a drug experience might seem “unearned,” our evidence has
suggested that preparation and expectation play an important part, not
only in the type of experience attained, but in later fruits for life.
Perhaps the hardest “work” comes after the experience which itself
may only provide the motivation for future efforts to integrate and
appreciate what has been learned.
WALTER NORMAN PAHNKE, DRUGS
AND MYSTICISM (THESIS), 1963
I have recently come across a new movement in radical Christianity called
“liberation theology,”
23 which I believe provides a good model for an effective
modern entheogen-based mystical tradition. Liberation theology, which began in
Latin America, focuses on the twin actions of mystical insight and pragmatic
activism. It is now practiced in more than a million small communities
worldwide, where its effectiveness among the most repressed and neglected of
the planet’s communities has earned it a reputation as being “only a theology of
radical, and even revolutionary, social and political action.”
24
While I have mostly ignored the history of Christian mysticism throughout
this book, it is important to mention that all over the planet there are on-going
attempts by radical Christian groups to recover the core mystical precepts of
early Christianity. I have also only briefly mentioned Islamic Sufism or the
Jewish Kabbalah, two mystical movements that, like the Tibetan and Hindu
esoteric traditions, are saturated with references to light and the twin ideas that
both consciousness and God are primarily composed of light. Numerous further
chapters could be written on the parallels in these traditions, but my knowledge
of them is barely sufficient to scratch the surface. It is safe to say, however, that
most mystical traditions share central concepts, such as the existence of God, the
idea that our human consciousness is a part or reflection of God’s consciousness,
and of the primacy of light—rather than matter—in the universe, with the human
soul/consciousness commonly being described in relation to that light.
We tend to forget that the origins of the Christian church are mystical. The
historical figure Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew and possibly an Essene, a member
of a Gnostic community that existed in Galilee. (John the Baptist is now believed
to have been an Essene.) Jesus himself was apparently personally inspired by
direct mystical experience of transpersonal realms and their revelations, as is
clearly expressed in the statement attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of St.
Thomas: I am the light that is over all things. I am all: from me all came forth,
and to me all attained.
Religious scholars believe that Jesus disappeared out of the holy land for a
number of years and then reappeared to teach his radical message for only twoand-a-half years before he was crucified (as were many other wandering
prophets and revolutionaries of the day). It could be argued that the mystical
content of Jesus’ teachings are the basis that separated early Christianity from
the multitude of competing philosophies that existed in those tumultuous days.
There is no doubt that the accounts of the resurrection and the subsequent
fanaticism of Jesus’ followers (including the mystical conversion of Paul on the
road to Damascus) greatly impressed the religious sensibilities of the time. What
was the most revolutionary concept in early Christianity—the one that set it
apart from competing ideologies of the time? It was that humanity could know
God personally; that “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21).
There has been some speculation that Jesus traveled to India in the years
when he disappeared from Galilee, where he became exposed to powerful Indian
philosophies such as karma and reincarnation, which he later incorporated into
his radical view of Judaism. This then resulted in the idea of an afterlife and the
early Christian values of compassion and charity, which represented a radical
departure from the vengeful Jewish belief system of the day. In any case, Jesus
expressed a pronounced mystical bent in his teachings; his followers may not
have understood that he wasn’t seeking a physical kingdom in this world but the
realization of a “higher kingdom” in another realm. At that time in Judaism ideas
like “heaven and hell” did not commonly exist. The idea that there could be an
existence for the soul in another realm after the body dies was a radical departure
from Jewish belief, whose interest in “an after-life” was minimal, as the
covenant between Yahweh and the Nation during life was seen as more
important.
The history of organized religion is of institutional dogma built upon the
foundation of direct mystical revelation. To a certain extent, dogma is the
inevitable mortification of the original sense of responsibility that the mystical
experience produces. Or as Colin Wilson expressed it, “[All] religions begin like
a mountain stream, and slowly turn into a rather muddy river.”
25 The
spontaneous act of inspiration ultimately results in rigid theocracies, passing the
power of knowing God over to the priests. But the role of that initial energy of
responsibility, the call to action that a powerful trans-personal experience can
provoke, cannot be ignored. The following quotation neatly explains this
phenomenon with regard to Christianity: “[T]here is a double composition to
following Christ; the mystical and the political. There is not first the mystical
and then the political. . . . The political is of the substance of the mystical.”
26
I agree wholeheartedly with this view. The feeling of responsibility that I
emerge from a 5-MeO-DMT experience with is not a result of the awe-induced
ecstasy of the experience—it is an essential component of realization. I believe
that charity and compassion are not necessarily natural to humans, they are
higher graces, and as our societies have grown more and more complex, they
have, correspondingly, only been earned by contemplation as the mature psyche
“develops.” This is a very difficult concept for the greedy materialistic modern
mind to even consider, let alone try to understand.
Once considered “virtues,” acts like charity and compassion are
characterized as weaknesses in today’s result-driven capitalist society. The
philosopher Jacob Needleman has pointed out that although we are both material
and spiritual beings, our culture has largely excluded the rich experience of the
sacred from systematic awareness. Since we have much more tangible material
experiences, we find it difficult to maintain a balance between the spiritual and
the material. Charity and compassion are therefore rarely seen as the reward of
spiritual labor (unless it is in the eyes of the enlightened beholder).
The result of the responsibility that is generated through a spiritual
epiphany is expressed in contemplative activism. The Reverend George Cairns
explains that, “The contemplative experience leads one to deeply understand that
the inner work and the outer work are fully intertwined.” Cairns further remarks:
In fact, contemplative activists are some of the most effective agents for
encouraging the liberation of individuals and systems in all of human
history. They are persons whose inner practice overflows into the public
sphere in exceedingly effective and powerful ways. They heal the split
and expose the great fallacy through their prayers and actions. Consider
this short list of persons of action in the twentieth century who have a
contemplative awareness: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas
Merton, Mother Theresa, Thich Nhat Hanh, and the Dalai Lama are but a
few. These people embody the contemplative potentialities of what it is to
be human and to act effectively on these understandings.
27
The realization that accompanies a spiritual awareness of the interconnectivity of all things is, first-and-foremost, experiential. You cannot explain
it, but you cannot help but believe it. You know it. This is the kind of gnosis we
will need to guide us through the storm of the oncoming years. If you accept the
full implication of that gnosis, then you are no longer a creature of chance alone
in a cold universe—you are an “informed” being, a creation of purpose. By
accepting that you have purpose, you must then accept the responsibility (or
choose to actively ignore what has been revealed to you—something that is
difficult to do after a mystical experience).
Extinction Denial
I started by saying that one of the most fateful errors of our age is the
belief that the problem of production has been solved. This illusion, I
suggested, is mainly due to our inability to recognize that the modern
industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the
very basis on which it has been erected. To use the language of the
economists, it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as
income. I specified three categories of such capital: fossil fuels, the
tolerance margins of nature, and the human substance. Even if some
readers should refuse to accept all three parts of my argument, I
suggest that any one of them suffices to make my case.
E. F. SCHUMACHER, SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL:
ECONOMICS AS IF PEOPLE MATTERED, 1973
Before I smoked 5-MeO-DMT, back when I was a cynical over-educated
pseudo-intellectual, I used to joke about an idea of mine that I called “the ten
billion” theory. Basically it went like this: Over the past two hundred years, we
have caused the human population to swell from around one billion people to
over seven billion, and the latest estimates suggest it will reach ten billion by the
year 2075. With so many mouths to feed, life becomes increasingly about
survival and less about a search for enlightenment, despite the optimistic
promises of the Industrial Revolution. What’s even worse, technological
advances have allowed us to pass along an increasing number of traits that—in
past environments—would have been considered to be inferior.
So to my (tongue-in-cheek) way of thinking, this means that if by some
miracle the current human society continues on unimpeded until the year 2050,
in ten percent of the human population (i.e., one billion) there will be the usual
proportion of geniuses, journeymen, and imbeciles. The remaining nine billion
will be genetically defective—the result of the accelerated reproduction of
inferior genetic traits, since our technology has allowed us to bypass many of the
tenets of natural selection. A society based on consumerism, informed by a
steady diet of television (or the Internet), and sedated with a plethora of
prescription drugs, only worsens the trend toward a dumber, more dysfunctional
general population. Which is why I joked that around ninety percent of people
these days are nothing more than standing “dead wood.”
Look around. What proportion of the planet do you think are leading
spiritually fulfilling lives? And how many people do you know who are plugged
into the television and their jobs, pumped full of legal uppers and downers, just a
couple of generations away from having microchips and feeding tubes surgically
implanted? You only have to read a book written eighty to a hundred years ago
to realize how much more intelligent people were then, how much they actually
used their brains, could follow a chain of complex ideas, and questioned the
status quo. The magazines and newspapers with the highest circulation today are
written at a ninth-grade level (down from the twelfth-grade level in the late
1940s).
28 Harry Potter books are routinely passed off as great literature, since
most adults are now only capable of reading children’s books. Television
programming targets the lowest common denominator in order to sell products
to the largest number of people. The less-informed the population, the easier
they are to manipulate. Fed a constant diet of “entertainment,” sans any
intellectual challenge, the mind stops growing and starts to wither. I spoke with
the great jazz photographer Herman Leonard one evening about this
phenomenon, and he was amazed that someone so young as me could see it. The
legendary eighty-six-year-old photographer has been friends with Louis
Armstrong, Marlon Brando, Miles Davis, and Duke Ellington, just to name a
few. With friends like that—and as the creator of some of the most beautiful
black-and-white images from the history of jazz—a viper like Herman seems as
qualified as any to comment on the intellectual prowess of the last few
generations. We agreed that this “dumbing down” of the general population has
been ongoing since the end of World War II, and that the general citizen is much
less intelligent or capable than he or she would have been even fifty years ago.
Now that the combined interests of industry and government have perfected
the use of television (which has only been around for a little over seventy years)
as an instrument of control and propaganda, we are producing a generation of
morons—spiritually and intellectually impaired half-humans—who are nothing
more than moldable little cogs for the ever-ravenous industrial-military machine.
A population too ignorant to be able to recognize that our society is destroying
our planet in a ravenous inebriated fog of what I have termed “extinction
denial.”
Abraham Maslow and Transcendence
Or at least, that was my theory. Sure it seems extreme, and admittedly one that
was circulated with a degree of humor. But since I have become a fan of the
British existentialist writer Colin Wilson and been introduced to the ideas of the
American psychologist Abraham Maslow, I’ve become convinced that not only
was I correct in my basic intuition, but in fact I wasn’t extreme enough!
Maslow saw human existence as a pyramid, where the smallest number of
the population (the tip of the pyramid) manages to escape the biological “fight
for survival” and reach the ultimate human state of transcendence, a state he
called “self-actualization.” Maslow had a list of self-actualized people, which
combined historic personages and people he knew; Aldous Huxley was included
on his list. To Maslow, self-actualized persons were: “reality centered, which
means they could differentiate between what was fake and dishonest from what
is real and genuine. They were problem-centered, meaning they treated life’s
difficulties as problems demanding solutions, not as personal troubles to be
railed at or surrendered to. And they had a different perception of ends and
means. They felt that the ends don’t necessarily justify the means, that the means
could be ends themselves, and the means—the journey—was often more
important than the ends.”
29
Self-actualized people are assumed to be rare in Maslow’s model—five
percent is the commonly used ratio (although Maslow himself said it was as little
as two percent of the human population!). This five percent composes “the
dominant majority” (not the ten percent that I allowed for!), which dictates the
evolutionary direction of any species, while within that five percent there is a
much smaller group—five percent of the five percent—that seek the highest of
human experiences—the “peak experience.”
The two types of peak experiences are relative and absolute. Relative
characterize those peak experiences in which there remains an awareness
of subject and object, and which are extensions of the individual’s own
experiences. They are not true mystical experiences, but rather
inspirations, ecstasies, and raptures. It is thought that probably the
majority of peak experiences fall into this category. Absolute peak
experiences are characteristic of mystical experiences, and are comparable
to experiences of great mystics in history. They are timeless, spaceless,
and characterized by unity, in which the subject and object become one.
30
Maslow called the attainment of this “absolute peak experience”
transcendence, and while he considered it the ultimate experience a human being
could have, it was assumed to only occur among a very small portion of the
people who had “peak experiences”—probably around five percent (that is, five
percent of the five percent of the five percent). This description of the “absolute
peak experience” seems as good as any other I have found in regard to my own
5-MeO-DMT experiences. Out of an adventurous life dedicated to the search for
such “peak experiences,” it is certainly the only “absolute experience” I have
ever encountered. The “five per cent of five per cent of five percent” who
experience an “absolute peak experience” could also correspond to the very
small number of 5-MeO-DMT users who experience a mystical “union with
God” while under the influence of this compound.
We are the sharpened point of the spearhead of humanity. We are the
“penetrators,” the “first-ones-into-the-unknown.” And thus we must be the
creators of our future, and we must lead our tribes back toward a transcendent
dialogue with G/d before it is too late. This is not the tribal God of war, nor the
God of industry that is exhorted from pulpits of propaganda and patriotism: I am
talking about the self-realized G/d. The only real G/d. The G/d contained within
each and every one of us.
A World in Crisis
Not long after I first smoked 5-MeO-DMT, I was looking in the mirror in a
bathroom one day, and an idea jumped into my brain as loud as a shout or a
command: Find the tribe! After some reflection, I took this as a sign to search
for the enlightened society of 5-MeO-DMT-smokers that I believed existed
(probably on the West Coast) who, for some unknown reason, had been keeping
this revolutionary compound under wraps. This search led to my toading
adventures with Yaron and to my return to Burning Man. But I eventually
realized that this tribe probably didn’t actually exist. At that point, the message
seemed to change (or maybe I had had it wrong the whole time). The message
became: Find your tribe. Build your tribe. And quit pissing around and get
started.
Find your tribe? Build your tribe? Noah, go into the hills, and make an Ark!
Sounds like “crazy people talk,” right? The only problem is, if you take a long
cold look at the state of the world, it might actually be the only sensible advice.
As we near the end of the petrochemical paradigm, we are beginning to
witness the enormous pains that will accompany our civilization as it runs out of
oil. Two hundred years of burning up the planet’s nonrenewable resources have
created an unprecedented explosion in the human population and its domestic
species.
*41 The human population on the planet doubled in the last forty years
and it may nearly double again by 2075.
31 We are within half a century of
completely using up that massive energy-bank, which took 3.8 billion of years to
create. A recent article quoted British Petroleum as having said, “The world
holds enough proved reserves for 40 years of supply . . . at current consumption
rates.”
32 This is not factoring in the rampant industrialized growth of India and
China. And if you believe an oil company’s take on how much is left, then I have
some nice lakefront property in New Orleans you might be interested in. History,
if our species continues to have such a thing, will undoubtedly consider this
period of our civilization completely insane.
The United States is now perceived to be run by oil companies, with its
military off on rogue oil-bearing land grabs, while nothing is being done on any
discernible scale to move our culture toward alternative forms of energy. In the
summer of 2001, when then White House Press Secretary Ari Fleisher was asked
if Americans should think about altering their lifestyles to conserve gasoline,
Fleisher declared that President Bush believed that the current (gas-guzzling)
lifestyle was “the American way of life,” and that “it should be the goal of policy
makers to protect the American way of life—the American way of life is a
blessed thing.”
33 The United States has 5 percent of the world population, and
yet consumes 23 percent of its energy resources. And as Gandhi, E. F.
Schumacher, and Ervin Laszlo have all pointed out, there are enough resources
on the planet to support our nearly 7 billion people (if we could somehow halt
our exponential population growth) with an adequate way of life—but the
wealthy nations (i.e., North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia) would need
to “voluntarily” cut back on their heavy consumption of the planet’s resources.
Judging by the above statement issued from the heart of the American
government, this seems extremely unlikely—and in fact, the developed nations
are pouring capital into China and India to encourage them to “catch-up” with
our own rate of consumption!
An overall estimate for the year 2009 defense budget in the United States
comes to a trillion dollars for that single year alone.
34 Meanwhile, every 2.5
seconds or so, someone on the planet (usually a child) dies of starvation; that’s
around 35,000 starvation deaths each day.
35 The standard of life is now
materially poorer for a greater percentage of people on this planet than it ever
has been and spiritually emptier for nearly all of us. It’s an ever-worsening
situation, due to overpopulation and a scarcity of resources, and one that we
seemingly cannot solve. Politicians flip-flop between talking about the economy
and conserving our environment, while nobody seems to realize that our
economy needs to go into recession for the global community as we know it to
have a chance of surviving. Meanwhile the gross domestic product of the entire
planet continues to grow at close to 3 percent a year. That’s a nearly 20 percent
increase in the world’s “production” for the first seven years of the twenty-first
century over the total production of the twentieth—which means (in real terms)
that we have consumed more of the world’s resources since the year 2000 than
we probably did in the first 60 years of the twentieth century! As William S.
Burroughs used to say, “Contact that! Identify with that!” Because the fact is,
our species has used up vast stores of our planet’s resources and released billions
of years’ worth of stored energy into our world civilization; and when it all runs
out, the bill will come due.
If you have been out in the world and seen a few things, or if you have read
any of the copious books written on the subject, or even if you only read the
newspapers (which these days have become the worst kind of propaganda), it is
easy to see that “the consumer society” can’t go on much longer. So where are
the theories about how the world’s economy will change when we no longer
have oil? What will we do when there are twice as many people on the planet
(and very little else)? The fact that most of humanity is humming along as “good
little consumers” and that our leaders of government and business rarely ask any
tough questions about even the very near future, makes me believe that the
modern mind has a built-in insanity that refuses to tally up the bill. As I have
said before, our species is suffering from “extinction denial.” The blindness of
contemporary society is without precedent, particularly since there are so many
educated voices who are now shouting at the top of their lungs that Rome is
about to fall.
James Lovelock, the scientist who proposed the Gaia hypothesis (that the
Earth functions as a sort of “super-organism”) has declared that he believes the
damage humans have done to the ecosphere has reached a point where it is
irreversible. A recent newspaper article (October, 2008: Miami Herald
International Edition) reported that a review of the world’s mammals by the
International Union of Conservation of Nature had concluded that 1 in 4
mammalian species were in threat of extinction—somewhere in the region of
1,150 species of mammals in total. It also reported that 76 mammal species had
become extinct since the year 1500. The IUCN’s report listed 44,838 of the
world’s total species as “threatened”; with 16,928 listed as “threatened with
extinction.” This report was the largest investigation of its kind and took more
than five years, involving more than 1,700 scientists around the world. The
IUCN describes itself as the world’s oldest and largest global environment
network. It is made up of more than 1,000 government and nongovernment
organizations and almost 11,000 volunteer scientists in more than 160 countries.
The effects of global warming are now so undeniable that even the most
conservative of groups (e.g., the Bush administration) no longer deny its effects,
although they continue to argue about why it is happening! Even former
politicians and actors, such as Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio, are using their
fame to draw attention to the dangerous straits we are in.
Ervin Laszlo has written several books suggesting that the human species
can bring about a change in consciousness in order to survive the oncoming
crisis that we’ve created.
36 One of these is the 1999 book The Consciousness
Revolution: A Transatlantic Dialogue, which is an edited transcript of
conversations between Laszlo, scientist Peter Russell, and transpersonal
psychiatrist Stanislav Grof. These three men’s calm dialogue reveals a sobering
(and terrifying) assessment of the depth and seriousness of humanity’s dilemma.
Yet Laszlo still maintained a positive outlook. Then in 2006, Laszlo released a
book titled The Chaos Point: The World at the Crossroads, in which he appears
to have reversed his previously positive assessment of our ability to pull
ourselves out of this impending crisis. Laszlo now believes that unless humanity
begins a massive shift in consumption and values within the next four years (by
2013), we will move past a tipping point and there will be no bringing our
civilization back.
37
So says “arguably [one of] the most profound thinkers alive today.”
38 But if
you are logical and you have been paying attention, using “all the available facts
to form the best hypotheses,” then you don’t need to be a genius to see that there
is no way out of this blind alley that the industrial revolution has led us down.
Here is a random example of the wide variety of astonishing numbers that are
readily available to demonstrate the exponential rate of increase of our
expanding population’s consumption of the planet’s resources: a little over a
century ago, the United States’ leading automobile manufacturer produced six
cars a day, while in 2007 alone the world produced 73 million automobiles and
trucks. There are a staggering 251 million registered vehicles in the United
States. China, whose production has been almost doubling each year,
manufactured 8.8 million cars in 2007. While we junked a billion vehicles in the
twentieth century, we will have produced nearly that many by the end of the first
decade of the twenty-first. And under our current economic model, all
production must increase . . .
The graph of our population growth (increasing dramatically) against our
available energy supplies (decreasing significantly; at an appalling rate, if you
consider the geological time scale they took to create) intersects between 2025
and 2030. Unless the human race has found abundant clean energy from either
the zero-point field, hydrogen fusion (fairly unlikely), or some other source, then
our society will hit its natural “ceiling”—known as an entropy watershed—and it
will all be downhill from there.
It is easy to see that there is no discernible decrease in consumption, let
alone any actual conservation of our rapidly extinguishing resources on a major
scale. And if you can agree that the world has a finite amount of resources then
you will come to a conclusion similar to mine: that in the not too distant future,
the resources of the planet will begin to see such significant shortages (oil,
water, top soil, wood, and so on) that we will not be able to sustain society at its
required energy levels. Our society will hit its entropy watershed, and then our
current style of civilization will completely unwind.
*42
Of course I knew a lot of this before I first smoked 5-MeO-DMT, and—like
most modern intellectuals overburdened with information—I felt powerless to
do anything to make a change. The 5MDE has changed that for me. As a modern
mystic, I have considered these same conclusions and then found the strength
and inspiration to try to take a stand. As I see it, our cancerous modern
civilization must collapse; for if it does not, it will take down the entire
ecosphere. As the majority of the nonrenewable resources on the planet run out
—in about thirty years or so by my estimate—and in concert with the radical
environmental crisis that our technology has created, there will be an upheaval
of society that will be without parallel in human history. Out of the rubble of that
society, over the centuries to come, survivors will emerge. You who have found
strength from the transcendental G/d within must start taking steps to build your
tribe and secure your future, to be part of the proactive 5 percent that will lead
by surviving and not part of the 95 percent who are likely to be left behind. The
future is dark, but it is clear to the enlightened. Now the task is to see if we can
live up to that responsibility.
The First Shaman
The reduction of the human population by environmental pressures to small
bands struggling to survive is not without precedent. The remarkable human
genome project sponsored by National Geographic has revealed an incredible
fact: that the human population was once a number of scattered tribes on the
verge of extinction.
39
What seems virtually certain now is that at a remarkably recent date—
probably between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago—one small wavelet from
Africa lapped up onto the shores of western Asia. All non-Africans share
markers carried by those first emigrants, who may have numbered just a
thousand people.
Some archaeologists think the migration out of Africa marked a
revolution in behavior that also included more sophisticated tools, wider
social networks, and the first art and body ornaments. Perhaps some kind
of neurological mutation had led to spoken language and made our
ancestors fully modern, setting a small band of them on course to colonize
the world.
40
It appears that some new cerebral development occurred that spurred the
next stage of human consciousness—apparently just when we needed it to
survive. The discovery of art, body ornament, and indeed spoken language
would all seem to require an inspiration beyond animal survival. Perhaps, as
humanity reached its lowest population ever—a tribe in numbering in the
thousands—we suddenly, inexplicably, discovered the voice inside our heads
that we would come to call God. Subsequently—due to this newfound ability
that apparently no other animal shares—we went on to become the dominant
species on the planet in a little over 50,000 years.
Think about that original moment—the birth of the first word. As we have
established, radical mutations seem to occur spontaneously—and I do not believe
that language is an adaptation that was slowly acquired over time. So now if you
will allow me a little poetic license, imagine if you will the lone hunter-gatherer,
strayed away from his small family and tribe, foraging for something for them
all to eat. The tribe’s hunting grounds have grown smaller and smaller, and they
have moved north and east, chased by the deteriorating environment, the hot
wind, and ever-increasing sands of the growing desert seemingly always at their
heels. The full moon is up and it is easier to hunt at night. But our early human
gives no thanks to the moon, simply realizing its existence in an animal way,
more interested in the immediate search for food than where that pale light might
come from. He (or perhaps she) feels the pressure of hunger. The world is
changing around the shrinking tribe, and somehow our hunter-gatherer poised
right there on the dawn of Homo sapiens sapiens knows this in an intuitive way,
but right now all he feels is a desperate hunger that roots him in the immediate.
He rests on the trunk of a fallen tree, its underside rotting against the dark red
earth. Seeing a large pile of dung mixed with the soft wood, he looks for beetles
or grubs that might sustain him, as well as for traces of game, and he sees a form
he has not seen before: a soft pliable fungus now growing upon the mixture of
dung and wet wood, the moonlight clearly illuminating these popping pale
nodes. Picking a handful, he examines these mushrooms by sniffing and finds no
noxious odors, just a damp smell of the earth. His hunger forces him to throw
any animal caution to the wind and he eats several handfuls of their abundance,
filling his stomach, while gathering still more to take to his family.
On the way back down the hill he has climbed, he stops to drink from a
small pond of water. Then, looking into it, he notices a most peculiar thing: the
moon above him, reflected in the water, now looks down at him as a giant eye.
Terrified, he looks up and sees that the moon is larger than he has ever noticed.
It is growing and growing until it is larger than the world, a giant eye staring
down at him and then eating him up in cold flames . . . until finally he sinks
down in a daze and dies a death of light that takes him from this world, to worlds
he could never have imagined before. Hours pass. But to our hunter-gatherer it
makes no difference, for he has moved into a realm far beyond his animal senses
of space and time . . . until finally he returns to his body, his new-consciousness
infused with that light, with the memory of symbols attached to things and
sounds attached to symbols. Once again he opens his eyes, and now he sees the
sun rising ahead of him. After a night passed in ecstasy, full of the mysterium
tremendum et fascinans that he has experienced and now seeing the light of
lights rise, he opens his mouth, and he emits something more than a grunt, more
than a howl, a sound that is now a symbol for meaning, a sound that tries to
explain the power and wonder of what he has just experienced, a sound to
express a new realization to the world. Opening his mouth to the universe, our
hunter-gatherer, who has now become the first shaman, who will become the
first Human breaks the silence of the world and shouts out the first spoken,
screamed, awe-struck word: “GOD!” For what other word could have come
first?
From that moment the direction and destiny of life on this planet was
radically altered. Another connection between the world of matter and the world
of in-formation had been made, a new higher interface. The first shaman, with a
consciousness now sharpened like a knife and a voice inside his head to lead his
tribe to safety, going on to decorate his body like the visions he saw, create tools
out of the forms that appear in his mind, and marking the walls to honor the
Gods he now sees. The greatest magic of the first shaman must have been the
first word. And from that moment, language would have spread like an infection,
bringing with it the radical new ability to store and transfer knowledge from
generation to generation, an inexplicable learned technology that would
transform the entire planet over the next 50,000 years.
A New Consciousness?
These days, having mostly lost that original ability to listen to G/d due to our
own intellectual arrogance, we may soon face the threat of extinction again.
Ironically, that may not be a bad thing for the future of the human species and
definitely not for the planet as a whole.
Historically, the human race definitely would appear to have evolved
through a series of evolutions of our consciousness, with the invention of
language being one of the most radical. Our evolution as a species is our
development of consciousness, for our physical body has remained essentially
unchanged in forty thousand years. Numerous thinkers both ancient and modern
—the Buddha, Sri Aurobindo, Teilhard de Chardin, Laszlo, and the modern
spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle, to name just a few—have espoused the view that
humanity is destined to undergo an “ultimate” flowering of consciousness that
will bring in a new understanding and a new age for humanity.
Now, I find it very difficult to believe that the billions and billions of
people in the world will undergo a mass transformation of consciousness that
will then allow us to fix the tremendous number of problems—social, political,
and environmental—that overpopulation and the Industrial Revolution have
managed to create. But I do find it credible that a humanity reduced to a series of
small tribes on the verge of extinction could make that evolutionary leap—as it
appears we did some 50,000 years ago. I also think that this transformation can
begin before the inevitable collapse of our nonrenewable-energy driven society.
Foresight alone may turn out to be the key to our evolutionary survival.
Thom Hartmann makes a convincing argument in the second half of his
book The Last Hours of the Ancient Sunlight for the importance of building selfsufficient communities to prepare for the inevitable collapse that is on
humanity’s horizon. Burning Man should be considered an expression of the
subconscious desire for such a future community—a place where we can be free
and express ourselves without fear and to find our own G/d in our own manner.
Historically, this type of community has a precursor in Gnosticism, a movement
that appeared at several points during Western history, which caused numerous
people to leave the cities of Europe to set up small, self-sufficient communities
dedicated to the pursuit of directly experiencing God.
There is no doubt in my mind that if humanity is to become strong enough
to survive the tests of the rest of the twenty-first century (and beyond), then we
will need to create communities that are validated by direct spiritual experience.
In the future society, we must regain the use of ritual, metaphor, and entheogens,
as vehicles of transcendence and realize that the ultimate vision of G/d is
formless, ensuring that the culturally bound manifestations of deities can no
longer be used as instruments of war and control. Tryptamines may be the only
sacraments strong enough to knock modern humans so totally out of our
rationalist box that they guarantee a genuine “value experience,” while for a
small number of users 5-MeO-DMT would be able to conduit the ultimate
human experience: the recognition of the true transcendental nature of G/d and
the subsequent experience of that G/d within.
Within the entheogenic community, facets of this experiment in modern
human spirituality have already begun. Within my own life, it is most obvious in
my Burning Man tribe, where a loose-knit group of people with tenuous
connections is steadily becoming more of a family. The intentional ritual use of
5-MeO-DMT has proven to be an integral part of our growth and identity.
Inspired by the power of my own voyages, the experiences within my tribe, and
from the knowledge that my research has steadily revealed, I have now adopted
the cloak of the mystic-philosopher. This book can be considered the pinnacle of
my delusion or the sum of my knowledge, depending on which position you take
on my sanity and seriousness. It is my hope that more people will come to
consider my ideas with interest, due to the intensity of their own direct
experiences.
Thanks to my epiphany by using 5-MeO-DMT, I now possess the
convictions of a man who believes he has experienced the intent of G/d, and who
is willing to let that G/d guide him. The future of my life increasingly appears
inexorably linked with the future community that I hope to help build. It is
within my tribe, and within the greater Burning Man community, that I have the
greatest hope of finding energized souls who carry irrevocable convictions
similar to my own.
God Consciousness Is Real
The task of our generation, I have no doubt, is one of metaphysical
reconstruction.
E. F. SCHUMACHER, SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL, 1973
While this book is my act of radical self-expression, it is also my call to
revolution. It declares the following manifesto: God consciousness is real. G/d is
still there, waiting. There is the possibility of a positive future for the human
race, or at least for that part of humanity that will survive the oncoming disaster
of our own making. That is why there has been a rise in the entheogenic
consciousness of the Western world; the telephone line is wired into our own
DNA. As many of us as possible need to open ourselves back up to our own
personally realized G/d and start listening again, before it’s too late.
Our generation may not have had much in the way of spiritual or political
leaders (and a good teacher is hard to find), but we do have rare scientists and
authors like Sasha Shulgin and the late Aldous Huxley, who walked down this
road before I was even born. Their words are guides for us, as sure as any Bible
or scripture. Consider the following paragraphs from the introduction to the
Shulgins’ encyclopedic work PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story. They perfectly
express my own views on the value of entheogens, and especially 5-MeO-DMT,
to our society.
I have stated some of my reasons for holding the view that psychedelic
drugs are treasures. There are others, and many of them are spun into the
texture of this story. There is, for instance, the effect they have on my
perception of colors, which is completely remarkable. Also, there is the
deepening of my emotional rapport with another person, which can
become an exquisitely beautiful experience, with eroticism of sublime
intensity. I enjoy the enhancement of the senses of touch, smell and taste,
and the fascinating changes in my perception of the flow of time.
I deem myself blessed, in that I have experienced, however briefly,
the existence of God. I have felt a sacred oneness with creation and its
Creator, and—most precious of all—I have touched the core of my own
soul.
It is for these reasons that I have dedicated my life to this area of
inquiry. Someday I may understand how these simple catalysts do what
they do. In the meantime, I am forever in their debt. And I will forever be
their champion.
41
My personal faith in the reality of my experience has only grown as this
investigation has proceeded. Evidence that my 5MDEs are true to the mystical
experience now seem to litter the cosmos like Christmas lights, and I have no
trouble believing in the veracity of my own experiences, even in times when I
would rather not. Passages like this one from Joseph Campbell’s The Inner
Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, where he is
explaining the common origin of ancient metaphors and the sacred power that
those metaphors can carry with them, only further that belief.
Amongst the most widely known and (formerly) commonly understood
symbolic signs inherited from Bronze Age times by the high civilizations
of both the Occident and the Orient were the sun and the moon: the latter,
the moon, which sheds its shadow to be born again, connoting the power
of life, as here engaged in the field of time, to throw off death—which is
to say, the power of life, as here embodied in each of us, to know itself as
transcendent of carnality; with the sun, the light which is unshadowed,
recognized as the light and energy of consciousness disengaged from this
field of time, transcendent and eternal.
In the context of these symbolic assignments, the cycle of a single
lunar month has been compared, by analogy, to the term of a human
lifetime, with the fifteenth night, which is of the moon becoming full,
equated with the human adult’s thirty-fifth year (in the reckoning of threescore years and ten as the human norm). On that very special evening
there is a moment when the rising moon, having just emerged on the
horizon, is directly faced across the world, from the opposite horizon, by
the setting sun. Certain months of the year the two, at this perfectly
balanced moment, are of equal light and the same size. By analogy, the
confrontation has been likened to that in the midmoment of a lifetime
when the light of consciousness reflected in the mind may be recognized,
either suddenly or gradually, as identical with that typified metaphorically
as of the sun. Whereupon, if the witness is prepared, there ensues a
transfer of self-identification from the temporal, reflecting body to the
sunlike eviternal source, and one then knows oneself as consubstantial
with what is of no time or place but universal and beyond death, yet
incarnate in all beings everywhere and forever; so that as we again may
read in the Upanisad: tat tvam asi, “thou art that.” [Italics mine.]
42
As universal, powerful, and ancient as this metaphor may be, still I was
unaware of it when—in the last month of my thirty-fifth year—“the light of
consciousness” exploded in my mind after I first smoked 5-MeO-DMT, and I
came to recognize the timeless, sun-like, eviternal nature of its source: a light
brighter than any sun. You can imagine the jolt of recognition that went through
me like a lightning bolt when I first read this transcendental passage from our
master mythologist. While science might not consider it a “proof” of any kind, I
personally have no problem considering it solid evidence that my views and
theories about the nature of the source of the 5-MeO-DMT experience have a
historical basis and are far from entirely wrong.
Let me conclude this lengthy chapter with an anonymous quote I found one
morning over breakfast from a spirituality column called “The Speaking Tree” in
The Times of India newspaper. After several years of reading every Eastern
philosophical text I could lay my hands on, as well as numerous volumes on
quantum physics, mysticism, and transpersonal psychology, it remains the best
phenomenological description I have yet found that mirrors my own 5-MeODMT experiences.
Then comes the state of dhyan, going back in time when there was
nothing physical, but just pure consciousness. You will find that you are
unable to draw boundaries to this fathomless space in front of you. There
are so many human beings. This only indicates that at some level we all
are one. . . . You do not achieve dhyan; you enter into the state of dhyan.
Finally comes the state of Samadhi. Samadhi is a state to be
experienced and not discussed.
I
FIFTEEN
So Begin the Days of Strangeness
The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the
mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be
seeking. I’ve never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think
they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke
mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries
bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.
KEN KESEY, “THE ART OF FICTION CXXXVI,”
THE PARIS REVIEW, 1994
The best things can’t be told: the second best are misunderstood.
ATTRIBUTED TO HEINRICH ZIMMER (1890–943) BY
JOSEPH CAMPBELL, THE INNER REACHES OF OUTER SPACE:
METAPHOR AS MYTH AND AS RELIGION, 2002
left India in December of 2004 and flew to Bangkok to meet my little sister and
my girlfriend who would soon become my wife (I had bought her diamond
engagement ring in India, but I had not yet proposed). I had never been so glad
to leave a country in my life. India had totally exhausted me—beaten me to the
ground—and the initial excitement of my discovery of 5-MeO-DMT had been
well tempered by the harsh physical realities of those three hard months in Asia.
But India had changed me in ways I did not know. It’s one of those places you
have to get away from before you can appreciate what happened to you while
you were there. My mind was clear after the long weeks of unhurried reflection,
and work on this book had already begun. Without really realizing it, I had
started out on my road to knowledge.
The three of us spent Christmas together in Bangkok and met at the airport
at 7:00 a.m. the next morning to fly to the islands off the east coast of Thailand.
My girlfriend had a group of friends on a yacht in Krabi on the west coast that
she wanted us to meet up with. She had left the travel arrangements to me, and I
had uncharacteristically not followed up on them. This was partially because I
had been trying to let my sister shape our trip in Thailand, since she had been
there previously (and I had not), and I didn’t want to seem like a bossy big
brother. And it was partially because it just didn’t seem like the direction we
were supposed to go, based on a vague feeling that was still strong enough to
cause my inertia every time I thought about booking our tickets to Krabi. Then
all the seats got booked leading up to Christmas, resulting in our only being able
to get tickets to the islands on Thailand’s less popular east coast. My girlfriend
wasn’t particularly happy about it, and she was rather surprised since she was
used to my being fairly efficient about such matters. But she didn’t make a fuss,
so we flew to Koh Samui early in the morning on Boxing Day, 2004.
We had barely found a room and made it to the beach when we first heard
about the tsunami that had just struck the west coast of the country, only a
hundred miles away. It seemed like paradise that morning on the beach where
we were, and the news had a sense of unreality about it. At first I thought that
there had been some kind of a terrorist attack, until—back at our bungalows—I
watched reports on TV, and I slowly began to realize the magnitude of the event
that had just occurred. Our initial concern was for my girlfriend’s friends in
Krabi (their boat was destroyed, but they all survived). Then I had a vision of the
three of us arriving hung over with our luggage, looking for a room as the killer
wave hit, and I instinctively felt that one of us would not have survived. One of
the three of us, at the least—my little sister, my soon-to-be fiancée, or myself—
would have been dead. We had just gotten very lucky indeed.
I later realized that the earthquake I had taken as a sign to smoke 5-MeODMT at that small temple in northern India a month earlier had been on the same
fault line that stretched down into the Indian Ocean, and had in fact been a
pretremor, a “warning shot” (if you like), of the massive 9.2 earthquake that
caused the catastrophic tsunami. Another circle of understanding seemed to
close.
The next couple of weeks in Thailand were sobering to say the least, as the
country struggled to regain its balance after the cataclysmic event.
Unfortunately, it seemed to set the tone for events to follow. Arriving back in
New Orleans after many months, the first thing I did was go to the funeral of a
friend who had drowned while having an epileptic fit in a hot tub. Four more
years of Bush and Co. were upon us, and the mood of the country was bleak as
the war in Iraq wore on. A personal slander of bizarre proportions then raised its
head after seven years, only to burn out as quickly as it appeared. Mardi Gras
was cold and quiet, brightened mostly by my own engagement (in full costume)
on Mardi Gras day. My father had a cancer scare, and several of my friends’
parents died. Captain Urquhart broke his back on a rope swing over the
Mississippi river and was lucky not to be paralyzed. My best friend called to tell
me that a mutual good friend, one of the most talented pilots I had ever known,
had died in a tragic hang-gliding accident.
The blows just kept coming, and I kept my head down. Without having
realized it while I had been there, my time in India had clarified a lot of things. I
was reading constantly, and the discoveries on these pages were starting to take
shape. But every time I tried to smoke 5-MeO-DMT, the power of it floored me
and the message remained that I needed to take a break for a while. No more
wandering around in the stratosphere for me. My feet were needed on the
ground. This saddened me, since I wondered where the love-filled explorations
of my early experiences had gone. But I (mostly) heeded the message and
pressed on with writing this book. I went to my Caribbean home for the summer
of 2005 and spent most of my time writing. I desperately wanted the book to be
ready for Burning Man 2005. But as my intellectual explorations widened, I
realized this would probably not be possible, so I went to the Man with a few
unfinished drafts for friends instead.
When Captain Urquhart and I drove out of New Orleans a little more than a
week before Burning Man in August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina was just
another storm lurking in the Atlantic off the coast of Florida. By the time the
weekend arrived, the storm had made its way into the Gulf and then undergone
the rapid expansion that would make it one of the most powerful storms in
recorded history. I was already in Black Rock City by then, setting up camp with
members of our new tribe, and Sunday my wife-to-be caught the second-to-last
flight out of New Orleans. (Southwest Airlines had the only planes that were still
flying.) We had booked her flight months earlier, since Burning Man was to
have been our unofficial honeymoon. (We ended up taking a while longer to
actually get married—I think we took two honeymoons first!) She’s a doctor
with her own practice and gets very little free time—it had not been without
considerable difficulty that she managed to take the time off. We had just gotten
unbelievably lucky again.
The Monday that the hurricane struck New Orleans was the only windy day
of the week at Burning Man. We sat inside our house-bus watching the dust
storm pummeling the tents and domes, while wondering what the wind was
doing to my wife’s hometown. I was preaching the power of positive thought,
since it seemed pointless to take any other approach, and I honestly believed that
the storm would turn north and east at the last minute, sparing the city. I figured
that the storm would move due to the difference in temperature between the
warm waters at the mouth of the Mississippi and the cooler water of the Gulf of
Mexico. But my wife, who had seen many hurricanes before, intuitively knew
better. She told me that when she looked down on New Orleans as she had flown
away in the airplane, leaving tens of thousands of less fortunate people behind
on the ground, she knew that her home town would never be the same again.
Unfortunately, we were both right.
The storm did turn, obliterating the area around the Bay of St. Louis in
Mississippi like a nuclear bomb and leaving New Orleans with surprisingly little
wind damage. It was the next day, when she called her father in New Orleans,
that we discovered that the canals that led off the earthen levees had failed—not
the levees themselves, as is often mistakenly thought—and the city we both
loved was filling up like a soup bowl. The federal government likes to spin it
another way, but the fact is that New Orleans survived Hurricane Katrina. It just
didn’t survive the shitty engineering of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Everybody with half a brain was over in Iraq, so nobody had a clue what to
do when the shit hit the fan. There was one National Guard helicopter in the state
—the rest were in Iraq. So were all the Louisiana National Guard’s amphibious
vehicles specially designed for the bayou, even though last time I looked, Iraq
was a desert, since Hussein drained off all that country’s swamps. I guess the
U.S. military doesn’t read National Geographic. After 9/11 and the ongoing
disaster of the Afghanistan/Iraq occupation, the fallacy of American invincibility
was over, once and for all.
For myself, 2005 will go down in history as a really tough year, but an eyeopening one, if nothing else. We pulled out of Black Rock City and quickly
returned to New Orleans, and work on this book virtually stopped for the next
nine months. America’s most costly natural disaster: these words don’t mean
much until they’re talking about your own hometown (or your wife’s). I could
write a whole other book about those first months in New Orleans, but the
thoughts I have on that matter have no place in this volume. My wife’s house
had ten-and-a-half feet of water through it. She lost close to everything personal
that she owned. A house that I owned took two feet of water in its downstairs
apartment. But now, comparatively speaking, we consider our losses so minor
that we barely bother talking about them. New Orleans was witness to
devastation on a biblical scale, and we feel lucky to have come through it with
the great majority of our friends and acquaintances still alive.
Suffice it to say that all the ideas I had been formulating about the necessity
of preparing communities that will be able to withstand the tumultuous years to
come, and all the intuitions I had about the importance of having a working tribe,
proved to be far more prescient then I could have ever imagined. I have seen the
response of normal people; I have seen the help that government (local, state,
and federal) can offer us; and I have a far better idea of how quickly things can
fall to pieces then I ever did when I began writing this book. I spent two months
living by generator waiting for someone else to return, had every U.S. agency
known to man stick a submachine gun in my face, and watched military
hummers dumping their garbage in the parking lot of the retirement home behind
my house. I sat there ignoring Hurricane Rita’s “mandatory evacuation,” when
the city’s civilian population was estimated at around 250 people, and my fiancé
and I were two of the few who watched that fat yellow full moon rise over a city
devoid of electricity, seeing it just like it must have looked two or three hundred
years ago.
I feel that I have been granted a vision of how quickly our civilization will
come apart, and how easily it can happen. I honestly believe that we don’t have
too much longer to go before this insane asylum we have built on the rewards of
the Industrial Revolution hears the strains of music that signal the beginning of
the last dance. In fact, the first chords of that tune may have already begun.
Through all the dirt and mold and grime and sweat and heat and mosquitoes
the size of humming birds, through all the hard bitter months when I gutted my
house and dragged what few possessions we could save from my wife’s home,
through all the weeks we gave shelter and support to shell-shocked friends as
they returned to New Orleans to sift through the wreckage of their lives, I was
glad that I had heeded the message of my later 5-MeO-DMT journeys and that I
had “come back down to the ground.” If there was ever a time in my life when I
needed to have both of my feet firmly planted on the Mother Earth, it was during
those months when most of the rest of the country seemed to have lost all
common sense. While the rebuilding of New Orleans is a monumental task that
will take years to realize, I can credit a lot of my “centeredness” during those
critical first months to the new man I had become thanks to the wonders the 5-
MeO-DMT experience had taught me. A man with faith in his heart truly can
move mountains. This is one more lesson I have learned.
Five years have passed since I first discovered 5-MeO-DMT. This book has
strayed far beyond the parameters I imagined for it that night walking the streets
of Pushkar, when I first considered the idea of writing about my experience.
There were several reasons why I wondered at that time if writing a book about
5-MeO-DMT was even a good idea at all.
The first (and main) doubt came from my recognition that writing a book
dedicated to what was at the time still an easily available, unscheduled, powerful
psychoactive tryptamine might draw unwanted attention from the authorities,
resulting in the scheduling of 5-MeO-DMT and thereby impacting the ease with
which it could be obtained. I suspect that many other users of non-scheduled
tryptamines and phenethylamines felt the same way that I did, listening to that
little voice in their heads that said, “Don’t ruin a good thing.” This may be the
reason why there was a cloak of secrecy around the fact that you could obtain 5-
MeO-DMT and other interesting “research chemicals” on the Internet around
that time.
There is no mention of the legal status of 5-MeO-DMT in TIHKAL, which
is the primary reliable source book on tryptamines that I have found. There is no
mention of 5-MeO-DMT at all in the second edition (1992) of Shulgin’s book
Controlled Substances: Chemical & Legal Guide to Federal Drug Laws, which
would lead one to believe that it was not illegal at the time that book was
printed. Jonathan Ott’s 1993 book Pharmacotheon (as well as the second edition
in 1996) lists 5-MeO-DMT as “not controlled.”
Daniel Pinchbeck, in his sophomoric take on “modern shamanism” titled
Breaking Open the Head (2003) mentions a privileged group at Burning Man
who called themselves “The Church of the Motherfuckers” who used a “white
smokable powder” that provided “the white light of God”—which I was quite
sure must have been 5-MeO-DMT, though Pinchbeck neither revealed the name
of the compound nor mentioned actually trying it. When I engaged in a sustained
investigation in an attempt to find out, it resulted in a lot of stonewalling by
those in the know, who said that they had been sworn to secrecy. However when
I asked Pinchbeck himself at a question-and-answer session at the World
Psychedelic Conference in Basel, Switzerland in 2008, he confirmed that it was
indeed 5-MeO-DMT, as I had long suspected. Maybe by then, since 5-MeODMT was no longer easily available on the Internet, he figured that it didn’t
matter anymore. But for the most part, in the late nineties and early years of this
century, no one was mentioning, in the print media (in the U.S.) anyway, that 5-
MeO-DMT was not illegal and readily available.
Websites were a different story however. Just prior to mid-2004, to
discover any of multiple companies selling an assortment of nonscheduled
“research chemicals,” including 5-MeO-DMT, all you had to do was type the
word “tryptamine” or “phenethylamine” into a search engine. The Internet was
the real popularizer and distributor of unscheduled psychoactive chemicals, and
the increased notoriety it provided eventually attracted government attention. In
July of 2004 the DEA busted a number of vendors for violations of the Federal
Controlled Substance Analogue Act. This action caused most of the remaining
vendors to close up shop, and those companies selling research chemicals today
have largely moved overseas or underground.
In October of 2007, a young man in Kansas City, Missouri was arrested on
four drug-related charges, one of which was due to his possessing a toad “with
the intent to extract the venom to smoke it.” Bufo alvarius venom may contain
trace amounts of bufotenine, a controlled substance, which could make it illegal.
Apparently David S. Theiss was charged with three counts of possession of a
controlled substance and one count of possessing drug paraphernalia; yes, the
toad was considered as “paraphernalia.”
1 This is the second toad-related arrest
that I am aware of in the United States. The first one happened in 1994, when
Robert and Connie Lin Shepard of Sonora, California were arrested on drug
charges, including the possession of four toads. Despite the fact that 5-MeODMT is not technically illegal, the DEA has arrested vendors who sold it in the
past. Practically speaking, this has made 5-MeO-DMT much more difficult to
obtain in synthetic form today; hence, publication of this book is unlikely to
have any impact on supply related issues. Strike reason number one not to write
this book.
The second reason I considered not writing this book is obvious—for my
own safety. I have chosen to write this book using a pseudonym in the hope of
remaining anonymous, and in keeping with an approach that all today’s
psychonauts would be wise to embrace. The reality of this unfortunate situation
was capably expressed by Hunter S. Thompson when writing about the “drug
scene” in 1967:
There is no shortage of documentation for the thesis that the current
Haight-Ashbury scene is only the orgiastic tip of a great psychedelic
iceberg that is already drifting in the sea lanes of the Great Society.
Submerged and uncountable is the mass of intelligent, capable heads who
want nothing so much as peaceful anonymity. In a nervous society where
a man’s image is frequently more important than his reality, the only
people who can afford to advertise their drug menus are those with
nothing to lose.
2
My wish for anonymity is partially due to the draconian political
atmosphere in most of the world today, but also because my identity is
unimportant. In a world where the “cult of personality” has run amok, I would
much rather have readers focus on the ideas I am presenting than on the person
behind those ideas, a fate that H.S.T. himself came to intimately know. While I
confess to a fondness for fiction, let me assure you that there is no fiction in this
account. I have tried hard to avoid elaboration and just relate my experiences as
they happened, which, when it comes to entheogens, is no easy task. But
ultimately I decided that the information that I ended up gathering for this book
was too important not to be shared.
The third reason I initially considered not writing this book was the fact that
I have been writing for many years; and although I mention drugs frequently
enough in my fiction writing, I did not want to be pigeonholed as a “drug
writer.” Since that time, I have had the opportunity to reacquaint myself with
writers like Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, and Terence McKenna. I have also
discovered other fine writers like the Shulgins, Jeremy Narby, and the great
Peruvian novelist César Calvo. And I have also come to reconsider the role of
William S. Burroughs—whom I consider one of the great writers of the
twentieth century—within this pantheon. (See appendix 5 for my reflections on
William S. Burroughs’ role in the history of DMT.) Thus, I now consider it an
honor to be able to participate in this particular branch of revolutionary Western
literature.
In truth, the most obvious reason I considered not writing this book was
because I wondered, “What’s the point?” How could I hope to put into words the
all-encompassing totality of the inexplicable power and mystery of the 5MDE?
Or hope to rationally relate even a fraction of it? How can a man who had no
discernible belief in God in his life explain how smoking a white powder caused
him to realize—in his heart, soul, and finally mind—the undeniable existence of
G/d? What skeptic would believe that a laboratory chemical had caused me to
have a genuine mystical experience during which I believe I experienced a union
with the Mind of G/d? From the outside, the whole idea is ridiculous. From the
inside, its essence seems both sacred and untranslatable. Describing the ineffable
is the same problem that mystics have been facing for thousands of years. So
what new light could I hope to reflect in any book about 5-MeO-DMT?
I decided I should write this book from a “safe dosage” point of view,
because many heads don’t even know that there is a difference between 5-MeODMT and “normal” DMT. This is a dangerous simplification and should be
avoided. Even extremely experienced, intelligent, largely well-read heads have
accidentally smoked substantial overdoses of 5-MeO-DMT, due to the fact that
they did not know that it was significantly more potent than DMT, and they
based the amount that they took on the appropriate weight for DMT. There is
also a definite phenomenological difference between the effects of these two
tryptamine “cousins,” particularly at lower doses. This book tries to address
these differences and correct any misconceptions by providing factual
information (as well as speculative theories) about 5-MeO-DMT and its safe use.
Ultimately there are really only two reasons for writing this book: me (the
writer) and you (the reader). In that first year after smoking 5-MeO-DMT, I
swam in a sea of radical ideas, and at times I felt like a drowning man,
desperately looking for an island of firm ground to stand on. When the idea
came to me to write this book, I resolved to write it for those people who had
already fallen into “the intellectual black hole.” Hence, this book is for the souls
who have been out there swimming in post-5MDE seas without any form of
guidance. If you are one of these people, and perhaps we have even met out on
the playa, I pass this book along to you like a fully stocked life raft. Without this
framework, and without the continuing effort and adventure of intellectual
discovery that has built it, I would be like a fish attempting to swim in a washing
machine—utterly overwhelmed by the rapid changes in direction and sudden
shifts in equilibrium that the revelations of the 5MDE have created in what had
previously seemed like a safe and familiar medium.
If you are a budding 5-MeO-DMT aficionado currently in the grip of a
similar wave of discovery, then I hope that this book and my theories can in
some small way provide you with a scaffolding coherent enough to allow you to
construct your own elucidation. I suspect that you will be open to my ideas, and
that many will resonate within you. Know that there are others who have already
crossed this ocean before you, and who have found wonders on “the other side.”
In keeping with one of the founding principles of Burning Man, this book is my
gift of “radical self-expression” to the Burning Man community, to the countless
artists and individuals whose annual inspiration has been a major fount of energy
for the completion of this work. I offer it with all blessings and praises to G/d as
the ultimate source of everything written here. This book and its creation has
been a journey toward the center of myself and toward G/d, and thus is one of
the most important things that I have managed to accomplish with my life so far.
I consider myself incredibly blessed to have been allowed the experience, and it
is my sincere hope that others may enjoy the same transformation of mind and
spirit that 5-MeO-DMT has allowed me. For those who have never tried 5-MeODMT, I present this work as an invigorating mental exercise, an attempt at the
kind of synthesis of science and mysticism that I fear has mostly been
abandoned since the death of Pythagoras. If you have made it this far, I thank
you for reading it.
In closing I would like to share with you one last magical 5-MeO-DMT
experience, which happened as I was completing the first Burning Man edition
of this book. I came home to my house in the Caribbean after an afternoon of
kite surfing and realized that instead of finishing the book like I was supposed to
be doing, I actually felt like smoking some of the mystery-in-question instead. In
the previous year-and-a-half I had smoked very little 5-MeO-DMT; it had
become too powerful, and I had been heeding the clear message that I needed to
stop for a while. And I had been up to my ears in disasters and hard work. But I
had been back in my ivory tower in the islands for two months, getting strong
and healthy again, and the memory of those anxious weeks after Hurricane
Katrina were mercifully beginning to fade. So when I started to feel that it would
be a good day to step through that door—without the nervousness that had
accompanied my last few explorations—my excitement increased as I raced
home determined to follow through on my intuition.
I decided that I would dip into my precious toad venom supply. Nearly two
years had passed since I had gone down to Mexico on the bus, but incredibly I
still had some of the crystallized venom in my freezer. Somehow I am never
really sure what constitutes the appropriate time to break out my most precious
treasure. But this day seemed to be the perfect day. I considered waiting for my
best friend (who owns the downstairs apartment of our house) to return, so that
we could both try the venom. But I realized once I opened the small plastic vial
that I still had quite a bit left and that there would be plenty for my friend when
he arrived.
With the inspiration upon me, I couldn’t wait any longer. So I filled a glass
pipe with a screen, a tiny bit of herb, and a solid layer of toad venom on top. As I
packed the venom into the pipe, I noticed that it was no longer really a crystal
anymore, but seemed almost like a matted fiber, soft to the touch. I realized that
water vapor had somehow soaked into the crystallized toad venom, re-hydrating
it, and I wondered if this might have spoiled the venom completely.
“Typical,” I thought to myself, “You went through all the trouble of going
to the desert and milking toads, and now you have let one of the rarest drugs
known to man sit around and decompose, while all the time you’re writing a
book about how amazing a substance it is. Idiot.”
But I packed the bowl anyway, figuring that I would see what would
happen when I torched it. I made my way over to an easy chair, deciding to
smoke in a completely relaxed position for a change, instead of the upright lotus
position I generally like to adopt. I gave the bowl a good torching and tasted the
flavor of the weed, but I also could taste the familiar 5-MeO-DMT taste, and
smell its distinctive odor, so I knew that all the potency of the venom had not
been lost. The three times prior that I had smoked the venom, I had never
achieved the same kind of full out-of-body release that I achieved with synthetic
5-MeO-DMT. I thought this was probably due to dosage (since there was no way
to tell how much 5-MeO-DMT the venom contained), so I did not expect such a
release now. I held my breath as long as possible and was surprised to see that
there was still smoke when I exhaled.
A billowing cloud of exquisite dark fractals flowed across my
consciousness. As I took a couple of breaths, I felt the experience intensify while
I tried to relax and let the visions flow. I was still aware of the fact that I was
sitting in my armchair, but the essence of the wonder that is the 5MDE was also
available to me, and I felt my connection to that mystery field solidify and
increase in potency as it moved through me.
I had recently been reading Colin Wilson’s novel The Philosopher’s Stone,
and I was struck by the similarities between the narrator’s vision of the world
after he had devised a simple operation that improved the power of his
brain/imagination and my own rush of sensation that had accompanied those
heady days after I first smoked 5-MeO-DMT. As far as I know, Colin Wilson is
not interested in 5-MeO-DMT or any kind of mind drugs. He believes advanced
mental capabilities are possible for all humans, but we generally don’t exercise
them. In his masterwork The Occult, he calls this underused capacity of the mind
“Faculty X.” With his assertion that the human brain has an inherent capability
to tap into its unused potential in mind, I tried to use my strength of
concentration to increase my own grip on the mysterious field I was entering.
The results, while mild, seemed positive. I could feel a transpersonal connection
with the universe and a deep sense of love—the effect was peaceful and healing.
Right then I heard the sound of my friend arriving on his bicycle, every
creak of his spoke like a ringing bell, and I laughed at my own greediness: of
course he would arrive at the peak of my experience! I had the urge to shout out
for him to come up, but then a wave of images and sensations swept over me and
I lay back in the chair, trying to hold on to the experience for as long as possible.
Dislocated in time, I felt an overwhelming gratitude for being allowed the
experience, for my best friend who was just outside, and for my wife who was a
continent away. I was grateful for our love and our luck and the fact we had
come through the last year intact and stronger. I felt grateful for every second of
my life.
3
I felt gratitude all the way down to my innermost core. The overall
impression I got from the toad venom, just as I had from the other times I had
smoked it, was healing—pure and simple healing. Toad is undoubtedly strong
medicine.
Soaking that healing up as long as I could, I had only one problem: I felt
like I needed to take a leak. So I got up and unsteadily made my way to the
bathroom. Staring at myself in the mirror, I could see my physical reality flicker
in and out of the field, and I realized that I was higher than I had thought.
Relieving myself was difficult, as I knew I needed to go, but my brain just didn’t
seem capable of telling my plumbing to work. Finally I managed to pee and then
made my way back to the easy chair, thinking that my friend would soon come
upstairs to see what was going on.
Picking up the glass bowl and looking at its contents in curiosity, the
scientist in me noticed that the venom had blackened and re-solidified in a hard
layer across the top of the bowl. The hog in me saw that there was still plenty
left. I felt so grateful for the experience I had just had that I wanted to share the
venom with some people I loved; it seemed wrong to hold onto it all for myself.
But I knew there was more in the freezer, and I rationalized that I had probably
taken most of the 5-MeO-DMT in the venom with the first hit, so the second hit
should inevitably be milder. Nevertheless, I was grinning when I raised the pipe
back up to my lips, still high from the first pipe, and the little voice in my head
said, “Greedy, greedy,” as I sucked in with a strong and steady draw.
The effect was obvious immediately, even before I exhaled my breath in a
short stunned gasp that contained no smoke. It was just like the 5-MeO-DMT
trip report from TIHKAL that I quoted in the Introduction, which says, “The
entire universe imploded through my consciousness.” That is as good a way of
describing it as any. Everything I have tried to say in this book (and an
incalculable amount of other things) all happened simultaneously in a cosmic
flash of pure insight. I went through all the different levels that I have described
as One, moving through a timeless reality in a manner impossible to describe. I
saw the teeming multitudes, I heard dogs barking and children playing, and I
expanded out beyond the stars—all the while fearless and at peace, cocooned in
a field of immeasurable love.
Pure love—there is no other way to describe it. It was the same love I had
found my first time, the same love that had come when I asked it to name itself;
it was the love that had been missing during my last few experiences, replaced
by that awesome power. Yet I knew the love and the power were the same. Their
tangled braid represented the creation principle of the universe and beyond, from
the infinite emanation of forms, to the form-without-form that I can only call
G/d. That mighty love drew me up and pulled me in. Lost in that moment
outside of time, I knew that love was me, and my wife, and my friends, and my
dog Koda who had died. Love was M.O.M.’s Ball and Burning Man. Love was
this life we were all blessed with, this planet, this galaxy. Love created all of it,
since love is the creation principle. Love is All. It makes everything possible and
ultimately guides the universe in some mysterious unknowable way, and if the
light is the energy of God, then the love is God’s plan.
In the preface to Alex Grey’s book Sacred Mirrors, Allyson Grey relates a
shared psychedelic experience between the two artists that would shape both
their personal and artistic futures.
On June 3, 1976, we simultaneously shared the same psychedelic vision:
an experience of the “Universal Mind-Lattice.” Our shared consciousness,
no longer identified with or limited by our physical bodies, was moving at
tremendous speed through an inner universe of fantastic chains of
imagery, infinitely multiplying in parallel mirrors. At a superorgasmic
pitch of speed and bliss, we became individual fountains and drains of
Light, interlocked with an infinite omni-directional network of fountains
and drains, composed of and circulating a brilliant, iridescent love energy.
We were the Light, and the Light was God.
4
That light of love drew me up and made me understand what was
happening, what I was really seeing, until the singular realization as bright as a
burning star exploded in my mind brighter than the dawn of any day:
I exist! With G/d. This is real! This is reality. G/d exists!
And for a single eternal moment outside of time, G/d and I were One: the
Light of lights, the most sublime cosmic love and intelligence, Consciousness
recognized as the beginning and the end of everything.
Two things made this toad venom experience unique: the “softness” of the
experience (with an almost total lack of fear) and the fact that the entire time I
was partially aware that I was still sitting in my armchair. My separate
consciousness was somehow able to resonate with what I consider an “ultimate”
5-MeO-DMT experience (the union with G/d), and yet bizarrely at the same time
still be cognizant of my physical existence. At the point when my mind actually
fully opened up to union with G/d, I think I did lose contact with this physical
reality (and more time passed than I realized, probably around ten minutes). At
one point I remember abruptly coming out of the experience—without the usual
disorientation that accompanies the come-down of a 5MDE—and seeing my
hands on my knees and the surroundings around me. I was still dislocated in
time and wondering what was going on, unable to recall any past. Then I
realized exactly what had happened, as I tried to hold onto the last fleeting
moments of the light and the love.
Three years after my initiation, this was undoubtedly the most beautiful 5-
MeO-DMT experience that I have ever had. Laughing with the sheer
exhilarating joy of it, I collapsed out of the chair and lay spread-eagle on the
floor. At that moment nothing I have written in this book seemed relevant, not a
single word came close to describing how I felt, and I laughed at the absurdity of
attempting to describe it. Confounded by the sheer Zen nature of the 5MDE, I
realized that I could have summed this whole book up in a couple of words:
“Know G/d.” Or even more simply in one word: “God.” And still, no one
without the experience would be able to understand. The revelation confirmed
that I was G/d, that G/d was in me, and that G/d was in all of us. Like the
Gnostics believed, our purpose in life is to bring ourselves closer to G/d, to
improve ourselves in order to be more than we are, to fill ourselves up with that
light. What possible use was my silly book compared to that? Then that voice
came to me like it does, loud and clear inside my head: “Don’t you stop. Just
keep going.”
And so I have. Giggling
like an excited child,
high on love. Thinking all the while,
That came out of a toad?!
T
Epilogue
What is this strange and bitter miracle of life? Is it to feel, when furious
day is done, the evening hush, the sorrow of lost, fading light, far
sounds and broken cries, and footsteps, voices, music, and all lost—and
something murmurous, immense and mighty in the air?
THOMAS WOLFE, OF TIME AND THE RIVER:
A LEGEND OF MAN’S HUNGER IN HIS YOUTH, 1935
A remembered truth is a dead thing.
WALLACE FORD MUHAMMAD
his is apparently the book that refuses to end, as one final strange event
occurred that seems to demand inclusion.
A rather clueless Englishman recently built a large house next to mine in
the Caribbean. After telling us that his house would be modest and not block any
of our view, he then chose to build his two-story garage as close to my tower as
he possibly could. He explained to me later that he hoped that I wasn’t upset he
had changed his mind about the layout of his house, because he had realized that
I would “be able to look in his pool.” While the proximity of this garage may
seem like a petty complaint to many of you, the effect of a giant white wall
within ten feet of you is rather shocking after you have been used to a view of
mountains and a lush picket of native trees and palms (most of which he has now
cut down). He owned a large piece of land, so the garage didn’t need to be that
close to our house. It was just an ignorant move on his part, and I had to struggle
within myself not to be angry about my new neighbor.
Problem was, everything this guy did was backward. Just from watching the
construction of his “dream home,” I had a feeling that something was going to
go wrong and that this house would end up a nightmare. I found out that he was
a croupier at a big casino in Europe, and I thought that was typical; he had
undoubtedly watched hundreds of people throw away their lives, so it was easy
not to give a fuck about your new neighbors. I found it hard to believe that
people could move through life so blind and uncaring about even the basic well
being of the others around them, and I wondered how karma could allow
someone like my new neighbor the outward trappings of success. Instinctively I
knew that, as time went by, I would receive some illumination on my musings.
But I had no idea how quickly my questions would be clarified.
On the Englishman’s second night in his dream home, a group of armed
men came to rob him. From a security point of view, his house was designed all
wrong. It had a huge wall with an electric gate in the front of the house and a
low wall in the back, which his assailants basically just hopped over. As it turned
out, all that he had over his slatted wooden doors was insect screening, which the
thieves simply sliced with a knife to gain entry. More than likely, the thieves
knew all this and more, informed by either his ex-hooker girlfriend (who was
alone in the house with him) or his builders, I suspect.
The thieves came to his side door at around 1:00 a.m. on a Sunday night.
While they were getting into his house, they must have noticed that I had left
both a metal gate and my screen door open—something that I usually never do.
(We had smoked a little bubble-hash that night and promptly passed out.) Two
of the thieves made their way through the hedge onto my property, went up the
stairs to the second story of my tower, and then came in through an open door
while my wife and I were asleep upstairs on the third floor. We had just come
back from a few days in another town and had belongings scattered all over the
second floor. The thieves stuffed a number of these into a small leather backpack
of my wife’s: jewelry, my expensive Canon camera, and—most shockingly—the
laptop that contained the first complete draft of this book.
Satisfied with what they had found, the thieves left my house again, but as
they came down the stairs, they woke my friend who occupies the first-floor
apartment. Although he is usually the kind of person who would just rush right
outside to see what was going on, he had the sense to quietly peer out the
window first. When he saw two men hiding behind a large flax plant, he turned
on the outside light, which sent them scattering back next door.
Two other men with guns had woken my neighbor out of a deep sleep, and
he was being marched around his house while his girlfriend did all the talking
(my guess is she knew the thieves), until he finally coughed up 6,000 euros in
cash that he had at the house (a fortune in that country). Since the robbers now
had what they were looking for, they made a move to tie up the Englishman and
his girlfriend. Then, as one of the men put his pistol in his waistband and bent
over to tie the Englishman’s feet, the gun accidentally went off, and the intruder
shot himself in the leg!
I had been sound asleep through the robbery of my own house. But the
sound of a gunshot close to my tower, where I usually only hear crickets and
cane toads, sent me flying out of bed. My friend from downstairs was out in the
garden by now, trying to figure out what the hell was going on, and once I heard
him shout that we had intruders, I had my pants on as quickly as possible and
went down my bedroom stairs. It was then that I realized with a sickening
certainty that we had been robbed, since one glance told me that my laptop
computer and camera were gone.
Our hapless neighbor emerged from his house, announcing that he had just
been robbed. Although my friend jumped on his dirt bike and went looking for
the thieves, it was obvious that they had gotten away into the wilderness behind
our houses. The Englishman was spooked and wanted someone to talk to, but I
felt little compulsion to ask him in. He had shown us no reason to by this point,
and now he had brought all this shit down on our heads. But really, I was mad at
myself for leaving the gate and a door unlocked and for leaving my laptop
downstairs. (I usually keep all the valuables on the third floor.) Then it slowly
sunk in that my computer was gone and, with it, the years of work I had spent on
this book.
My wife and my friend tried to console me, realizing the significance of the
missing laptop straight away. Yet I felt strangely calm. Even if I could write it
all again, there was no way that it would be ready by Burning Man, and so the
whole purpose seemed somehow lost. The more I thought about it, the more I
had to assume that this was one book that obviously didn’t need to be written.
My 5-MeO-DMT theories and experiences were clearly meant for my personal
enrichment only. I must have had it wrong all along, I decided. There could be
no other real answer.
We got up again at dawn and went looking for anything that the thieves
might have dropped. We found a small bag of my wife’s jewelry, a pair of jeans
of my neighbor’s, and the hole cut in the wire fence where the thieves had
entered, but that was all. I went back to bed ruminating on all the time I had
spent on my manuscript and decided that it was the knowledge that was
important—all the new things that I had learned—and the book itself was just
the manifestation of my over-active ego. My wife kept telling me how sorry she
was, but after a year that had included a tsunami and a hurricane, I couldn’t feel
too sorry for the loss of a mere book. She also told me that I would have to write
the book again, but I couldn’t really see it. Another of life’s lessons I kept telling
myself. The next book I wrote I would make sure to back-up!
The following morning we were heading out for breakfast when I bumped
into my friend on his bicycle at the bottom of the stairs, and he offered his
condolences again on the stolen laptop. Having watched me write the book over
the past few years he knew as much as anyone how much it meant to me. I
replied with my philosophical “the world must be trying to teach me something”
answer. He laughed, and commented on how much we had both changed since
we had first smoked 5-MeO-DMT.
“The old you would have been crying for this guy’s blood,” he said with a
grin and a nod to the neighbor’s house. I had to admit it was true. The younger,
less enlightened, version of myself would have wasted no opportunity in telling
my neighbor exactly what I thought of him. Then I had to admit that I had fought
the compulsion to verbally rip into the guy the previous night, after I had
discovered that my laptop was gone.
“I’m just glad no one got hurt,” I said. “None of us wanted to wake up and
find our neighbor dead. I can’t be angry with this guy, because he’s so clueless.
He believes himself as a victim in all this, I’m sure, not even realizing he
brought it all down on his own head. The old me might have wanted to kill the
guy, but now the new me is just struggling to decipher the messages that the
world is giving. Like, why was I so stupid that I forget to close the gate?” I was
struggling to understand how I could have got caught up in my neighbor’s bad
karma and lost the very thing I had spent the previous few years working on.
Life could be strange, I knew that much—and sometimes quite cruel. But still
this didn’t seem right.
My friend cycled off on his cruiser, and my wife and I headed down the
driveway toward the road, when my neighbor saw us and shouted out. “Hey
guys, if you come over, I think I have got some good news for you.”
We walked next door not really wanting to see the guy. I’d had enough by
now and figured that he was going to tell me that the police had offered extra
security, or something equally inane. (The police had been laughing their tits off
when they left his house at three in the morning—I had seen them from the
shadows of my balcony.) When we got onto his property he waved at us and
held up my wife’s leather backpack.
“I found this at the back wall,” he explained, “It’s got a camera and laptop
in it, and I figured it was probably yours.”
Which it was. And which is why you are able to read the final pages of this
book right now—because the mighty, mighty, universe gave it back to me. The
thieves had dropped the backpack getting their injured party over my neighbor’s
wall, and had apparently either not noticed, or decided not to go back over to
recover it, since they already had 6,000 euros and a serious leg wound.
My wife got back virtually everything that was stolen from her. The only
things I lost were my silver toad ring from the Great Frog in London and my
silver “Om Mani Padme Hum” bracelet that I bought in Dharamsala—the two
things that most represented my current view of the world and my G/d, two
possessions that I prized and rarely took off, but that are ultimately only symbols
of a much greater treasure that can never be taken from me. This is the greatest
treasure that a man can ever discover—the secret treasure that he carries within.
Yet still, despite myself, despite all the universe has tried to teach me, there
is a part of me that can’t help but see in my mind: the hapless thief, with my
bulging silver ring and wide stiff bracelet stuffed in the front pocket of his jeans,
pistol in his waistband, and as he’s bending down, the rounded head of my toad
ring managing to push itself deeper and deeper into the inviting hole of the
pistol’s denim-covered trigger guard . . .
G/d moves in mysterious ways. Hare Om!
APPENDIX ONE
Resources
Erowid
www.erowid.org
Erowid’s mission statement reads, “Erowid is a member-supported
organization providing access to reliable, non-judgmental information about
psychoactive plants, chemicals, and related issues. We work with academic,
medical, and experiential experts to develop and publish new resources, as well
as to improve and increase access to already existing resources. We also strive to
ensure that these resources are maintained and preserved as a historical record
for the future.”
If you’re looking for any kind of information about tryptamines (or any
other psychoactive compound all the way down to tea and coffee), this Internetbased organization is the place to start. Each important compound has its own
“vault” (such as the 5-MeO-DMT vault) that lists a bewildering amount of
information on subjects like history, use, laws, and chemistry, along with a
number of “personal experiences” that are well worth the visit alone. With
quotations and analysis from the Shulgins’ PIHKAL and TIHKAL and Jonathan
Ott’s Pharmacotheon, the information on tryptamines is as good as it gets. If you
want to do something constructive to help fight government propaganda, then
join Erowid at one of its many membership levels; it is quite simply the most
important weapon we have.
www.erowid.org/archive/sonoran_desert_toad/almost.htm
Albert Most’s Bufo alvarius: The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert
(1984).
The Lycaeum
www.lycaeum.org
This is another website that has a wealth of information about tryptamines.
The Schaffer Library of Drug Policy
www.druglibrary.org/schaffer
The Schaffer Library of Drug Policy has a section on “psychedelics.”
Shroomery: Magic Mushrooms Demystified
www.shroomery.org
Although this site is primarily about magic mushrooms, it does have a great
DMT forum with lots of information and extraction recipes.
Ayahuasca.com
www.ayahuasca.com
This website describes itself as the “homepage of the Amazonian Great
Medicine” and has all the information on ayahuasca you could ever want.
Serendipity
www.serendipity.li
This site covers a wide variety of topics, which include an informative
three-part DMT history.
www.serendipity.li/dmt/sacred.pdf
Moving Into the Sacred World of DMT
This article from The Entheogenic Review is (in my opinion) by far one of
the best I have ever read about the more spiritual aspects of DMT use, by
someone who has been around it for forty years. A must read.
Podomatic: The Entheogenic Evolution
www.entheogenic.podomatic.com
Martin Ball’s entheogenic podcast based in Ashland, Oregon. Martin has a
Ph.D. in Religion and Philosophy and has written books about magic
mushrooms and Salvia divinorum. These days he is as big a convert to 5-MeODMT as I am! His podcast features information, speculation, and topical
interviews, all set to groovy music. His unique contribution to the Burning Man
community is a theme camp that houses something called the God Box. Check
out both Martin’s podcast and the God Box if you can.
www.5meodmt.net
The name pretty much says it all: a reference site for 5-MeO-DMT.
Web pages specific to Bufo alvarius (Sonoran Desert toad) include
www.erowid.org/animals/toads/toads.shtml
www.bouncingbearbotanicals.com/colorado-river-toad-p-368.html
www.herbalfire.com/toad.htm
The Entheogen Review
www.entheogenreview.com
The Entheogen Review was a (mostly) quarterly publication that—from
1992 through 2008—served as a clearinghouse for data about the use of
visionary plants and drugs. Subscribers shared information about the cultivation,
extraction, and use of entheogens. Over the years they published numerous
recipes for ayahuasca analogues, as well as several techniques for extracting
DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. Their Autumnal Equinox 2008 issue featured my article
“Where is God in the Entheogenic Movement?” Although The Entheogen
Review is no longer publishing, both print and electronic copies of their issues
can be obtained via the website listed above.
N
APPENDIX TWO
Tryptamine-Containing Plants
umerous plants contain psychoactive tryptamines, and—so far as I am
aware—none of these plants are themselves specifically scheduled (except
in Louisiana, when the intended use is consumption). Below I mention a few of
the plants that contain higher amounts of DMT and 5-MeO-DMT, and I note the
range of their content based on analyses reported in the literature. This
information is from the 2007 compendium Some Simple Tryptamines, second
edition, by Keeper of the Trout & Friends; citations for the primary sources
reporting on tryptamine content are all provided in that book. Unless otherwise
noted, all weight ranges listed refer to analysis of dried plant material. It is
important to realize that natural products can vary dramatically with regard to
potency, and in most cases there are not very many distinct analytical data points
(from multiple researchers, reporting on multiple plant samples) to go on. If a
single figure is given rather than a range, it is because no further quantitative
analysis data was available. A plant’s genetics and environment, as well as the
time of year and even the time of day of harvesting, can all play a part in the
concentration of its alkaloids. Hence, the range of figures provided below for
each plant should only be seen as a “rough guide” related to chemical content.
Also, some of these plants may contain other chemicals (psychoactive,
nonactive, or toxic) along with the targeted tryptamines reported on here. Those
considering performing extractions on any plant materials should further inform
themselves of the entire chemical profile of a plant as well as of the laws in the
country that they live in. Manufacture (including extraction), possession, or sale
of a controlled substance is a crime in many countries, and can result in a
lengthy prison term and significant fines.
Acacia maidenii: DMT in bark at 0.36%; 5-MeO-DMT in trace amounts
Acacia obtusifolia (= A. intertexta): DMT in bark at 0.1–0.7%; 5-MeO-DMT
possibly present in trace amounts
Acacia phlebophylla: DMT in leaf at 0.3%
Acacia simplicifolia: DMT in bark at 0.81%
Anadenanthera peregrina: DMT in immature seeds at 0.16%; 5-MeO-DMT in
roots 0.678%
Desmanthus illinoensis: DMT in root-bark at 0.34%
Diplopterys cabreana: DMT in leaf at 1.46%; 5-MeO-DMT in leaf and
dried stem in trace amounts
Meliocope leptococca (= Evodia leptococca): 5-MeO-DMT in aerial parts
0.21%
Mimosa tenuiflora (= M. hostilis): DMT in root-bark at 0.31–11%
Phalaris aquatica: 5-MeO-DMT in leaf at 0.01–0.28%
Phalaris aquatica cv. AQ-1: DMT at 1+%; 5-MeO-DMT in trace amounts
Phalaris arundinacea P.I. 172442 Turkey (cv. Turkey Red): 5-MeO-DMT in
leaf is the predominant alkaloid from a total wet weight alkaloid range of
0.0025–0.045%
Pilocarpus organensis: 5-MeO-DMT in leaf at 0.41% (Caution: Shulgin and
Shulgin 1997 and Ott 1994 both pointed out that other species of
Pilocarpus are known to contain the poisonous cholinergic chemical
pilocarpine.)
Psychotria carthaginensis: DMT in leaf 0.0–0.65%
Psychotria viridis: DMT in leaf 0.1–0.34%
Virola calophylla: DMT in leaf at 0.15%; 5-MeO-DMT in bark at trace
amounts
Virola rufula: DMT in bark at 0.19%; 5-MeO-DMT in bark at trace amounts
Virola theiodora: DMT in bark at 0.003–0.25%; DMT in flowering shoots at
0.44%; 5-MeO-DMT in bark at 0.11%
I
APPENDIX THREE
Serotonin, Melatonin, 5-MeO-DMT, and
the Pineal Gland
n his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule Rick Strassman, M.D., proposes the
convincing hypothesis that DMT is produced by the ancient and mystifying
pineal gland, which lies nestled up against the base of our brain. Since the book
was published in the year 2000, Strassman’s hypothesis has increasingly been
circulated, both within the entheogenic community and without, as a fact. But as
it stands today, this hypothesis has remained unproven, and DMT has not been
found in the pineal. Due to the lack of sustained ongoing research in this matter,
it is unlikely that there will be any breakthroughs in this area in the future
What is a fact is that the pineal is a rich source of both serotonin and the
methlytransferases enzymes that transform (methylate) serotonin, melatonin, and
tryptamine into psychedelic compounds. The presence of these compounds in
the pineal in such high quantities is the basis for Dr. Strassman’s hypothesis that
the pineal is the source of the endogenous DMT that has been found in the body.
It would seem worthwhile to examine some of these naturally occurring
compounds a little closer and to examine their relationship to 5-MeO-DMT,
which, like DMT, is also an endogenous entheogen.
Serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine or 5-HT) is a neurotransmitter that is
produced throughout the brain and the gastrointestinal tract and seems to be
responsible for higher functions of behavior such as planning and other timerelated events.
1 Serotonin is found in all animals and some plants and is
produced in the human body from dietary L-tryptophan, an essential amino acid.
The fact that serotonin is a tryptamine is the reason that both DMT and 5-MeODMT are able to cross the blood brain barrier (BBB); their similar molecular
shape allows them to “key in” to the receptor sites that are found on the end of
neurons.
In addition to serving as a neurotransmitter (which is responsible for the
communication between the nerves cells by relaying electric impulses from one
cell to another), serotonin is also the metabolic precursor of melatonin.
According to researcher Jace Callaway, “Serotonin’s major function is basically
one of inhibition within the complex neurochemical pathways of the central
nervous system (CNS), as if to screen out spurious bits of data to allow one to
better focus on the task at hand.”
2 Many psychotropic compounds affect at least
some aspect of serotonergic activity, and deficiencies in serotonin and
tryptophan have been linked with mental disorders such as violent alcoholism,
anxiety, depression, and suicide.
What is of interest to us here is the fact that serotonin can serve as a
precursor in healthy humans for the production of 5-MeO-DMT and 5-hydroxyDMT (bufotenine). From another metabolic route, DMT can be produced
following the formation of an endogenous tryptamine.
3 Bufotenine has been
found in human urine.
4 However, due to its polarity, it is generally thought to be
unable to cross the BBB, and any psychoactivity from exogenous bufotenine has
been speculated to be due to conversion to 5-MeO-DMT in the body.
5 There is
some evidence from bioassay studies that this statement is not correct; however,
how bufotenine could cross the BBB has not been explained.
Melatonin has also been linked to the production of entheogenic
compounds within the human body. Melatonin production occurs at night or
when the eyes are closed, such as during meditation.
6 Like serotonin, DMT, and
5-MeO-DMT, it is also a tryptamine (N-acetyl-5-methoxy-DMT). It is the
primary pineal hormone and is present in primitive pineal glands.
7 According to
R. A. Masters’ book Darkness Shining Wild: An Odyssey to the Heart of Hell &
Beyond, “Mantak Chia (2004), following Ananda Bosman, speculates that
greatly increased melatonin levels, as induced through prolonged time in utter
darkness, result not only in increased DMT and 5-MeO production, but also in
other substances that inhibit the very enzymes that normally break down DMT
and 5-MeO. Darkness retreats, featuring lengthy immersion in complete
darkness, are perhaps best known in Tibetan Buddhism.”
8 As mentioned earlier,
Mantak Chia instruct his pupils in Thailand that this is what is happening during
their month-long darkness retreats.
9
Due to the pineal’s role in producing endogenous tryptamines like serotonin
and melatonin, I personally find Dr. Strassman’s suggestion that the pineal gland
might be the source of endogenous DMT production convincing, and others give
it credence as well. In a May 1983 talk at a UCSB conference titled
“Psychoactive Drugs Throughout Human History,” Dr. Andrew Weil remarked
that “dimethyltryptamine . . . is almost certainly made by the pineal gland in the
brain.” Nevertheless, others have expressed doubt about Strassman’s theory.
Keeper of the Trout, a writer with a background in chemistry, has stated that it
seems unlikely to him that DMT could be created out of melatonin as the result
of a simple enzymatic conversion, and he also feels it is even more improbable
for such a thing to occur cyclically, which Strassman proposes as a possibility.
10
Trout has suggested that if a chemical with psychedelic activity actually exists in
the pineal gland, a better candidate would be one of the 6-methoxylated
betacarbolines (the 6-substitution in a beta-carboline is in the same spot as the 5-
substitution in a tryptamine). He states that these compounds are much more
likely to cyclically be inter-converted with melatonin via an enzymatic
reaction.
11
Through psychonautic bioassays, Claudio Naranjo found both 6-
methoxyharmalan (which has been produced in vitro from melatonin
12
) and 6-
methoxytetrahydroharman to be “hallucinogenic,” stating that the subjective
effects for each became apparent with an oral dose of approximately 1.5 mg/kg.
(This equates to doses around 100–150 mg according to Sasha Shulgin, who
found no activity himself in bioassays of up to around 100 mg of 6-
methoxytetrahydroharman.)
13 Naranjo described these two compounds as being
“of a less hallucinogenic nature in the strict sense of the word, their effect being
more akin to a state of inspiration and heightened introspection,” (although
perhaps higher doses might produce more psychedelic results).
14 There appear to
be no further bioassays of these chemicals reported in the literature. Sasha
Shulgin has described this area of human pharmacology as remaining as “a rich
and promising virgin field for exploring.”
15
It is somewhat odd that no one has
done any further studies, considering that these chemicals aren’t controlled in
any way and they are relatively simple to synthesize.
16
Someday, with further scientific investigation, it is possible that evidence
for both pineal-produced DMT and 5-MeO-DMT may be discovered. However,
it has been pointed out by Trout that testing for DMT in the pineal gland of a
living human being would be hugely problematic. And since DMT is
aggressively destroyed by oxidation and other means, there may not be any
remaining in the pineal gland of a cadaver.
17 Strassman himself found no DMT
present in the pineal glands he obtained from “about ten” human cadavers, and
he noted that for such a test to obtain the most accurate results, the brains would
have to be removed immediately at the time of death and placed into liquid
nitrogen to halt any breakdown of the compound.
18
A
APPENDIX FOUR
Is 5-MeO-DMT the Most Potent
Entheogen Known to Humanity?
lthough I have touched upon this topic within the main confines of this
book, since my assertion that 5-MeO-DMT is the most potent entheogen
known to humanity remains highly controversial (among non-5-MeO-DMT
initiates!), I think I need to examine this subject a little further.
There are of course two ways to define the potency of any given entheogen
—physiologically and phenomenologically. And herein lays the main confusion
about the veracity of my claims. With a minimum effective dosage of
approximately 5 mg when smoked, physiologically 5-MeO-DMT is most clearly
not the most potent entheogen we know. (It is even less so if we accept the idea
that at around 100 mg 5-MeO-DMT is active if eaten.) That honor would have to
go to LSD, which is sold at the street level (these days) at around 50 mcg! The
dose of “street acid” in the sixties and early seventies was much higher—
frequently in the region of 300 to 500 mg—or 6 to 8 times the dose of today’s
acid! This tremendous potency of LSD has also given me cause to consider its
tremendous value as a crystal. These days (so I was told at World Psychedelic
Forum in Basel, Switzerland) a gram of pure LSD can fetch as much as $25,000
dollars (with its “street value” far eclipsing that). I would imagine this qualifies
LSD for the title of “world’s most valuable crystal!” LSD is physiologically one
of the most potent substances known to humans. You could eat the same amount,
50 mcg, of cyanide, or even plutonium, and it would pass through your body
without any noticeable effect.
Since LSD (and a number of other entheogens) are considerably more
potent by weight than 5-MeO-DMT, it cannot be considered “the most potent”
physiologically. However, phenomenologically this distinction becomes much
more blurred. Numerous attempts have been made to establish a methodology
for rating the phenomenological aspect of an experience—most notably
Strassman’s Hallucinogen Rating Scale and the system that chemist Alexander
Shulgin uses to rate the various compounds he has invented. However, it does
not appear that it is possible under any rating system to consider any compound
the most potent, since these systems essentially rate the experience and not
necessarily the compound itself. To determine the “most potent” entheogen
phenomenologically, statistical analysis of experience reports would need to be
undertaken, with a balanced number of user reports for each compound provided
and with a high enough number of sample reports for there to be any validity.
Unfortunately a study as extensive as this seems unlikely in the current political
climate.
In the absence of such studies, to rate 5-MeO-DMT (or any entheogen for
that matter) phenomenologically we can only examine the accounts of
experiences of those individuals who have been able to try a wide variety of
entheogens and see how they rate 5-MeO-DMT within the entheogenic
pantheon. Terence McKenna clearly thought that 5-MeO-DMT was more
“forceful” than “normal” DMT, and he preferred the more “magical” aspect of
DMT. Robert Augustus Masters compared his single 5-MeO-DMT experience to
ayahuasca by stating, “It resembled my ayahuasca journey at its most titanically
wild and insane, sped up and intensified a hundredfold.”
1 And in TIKHAL, there
are a number of trip reports (including the one quoted at the beginning of this
book) that seem to indicate the tremendous intensity of the experience, although
Shulgin himself adds little to the discussion. While Daniel Pinchbeck broods on
his DMT experiences at length in Breaking Open the Head and presumably had
the opportunity to try 5-MeO-DMT with The Church of The Motherfuckers at
Burning Man, he makes no mention of 5-MeO-DMT at all in that book. One
would think that if Pinchbeck had indeed experienced 5-MeO-DMT, he would
have found it worthy of inclusion in his own investigation aimed at “the heart of
contemporary shamanism.”
The greatest confirmation I have of the veracity of my claim comes from
those individuals I have met who have experienced 5-MeO-DMT at the same
transcendental level that I have. They all agree 100 percent that their 5-MeODMT experiences are in a league of their own, well beyond any other
experiences they have had on any other entheogen. I probably get an e-mail once
every couple of months from an individual who has read one of the initial
versions of this book, and who is clearly glad that someone else has experienced
the same transcendental knowledge of G/d that they have. This is all the more
remarkable when you consider that there are only around 500 Burning Man
copies of Tryptamine Palace out there, and the book has received close to no
publicity as yet. In fact, apart from a couple of mentions in The Entheogen
Review, the only prior publicity that I am aware of Tryptamine Palace ever
having received was when it was discussed on Dr. Martin Ball’s entheogenic
podcast before he had ever had the opportunity to experience 5-MeO-DMT
himself.
When I listened to that podcast, I could tell that Martin was undoubtedly
comparing the experiences related in the book to experiences of his own (on
other entheogens), and finding the claims within my book somewhat far-fetched.
It is natural for humans, especially if they have spent years studying a certain
subject, to believe that their experiences are as valid as anybody else’s and to
dismiss more “extreme” claims as hyperbole. Hence my personal pleasure and
gratification upon receiving the e-mail I got from Martin the day after he had
experienced a full 5MDE, quoted in chapter 3, “The Aftermath.” Martin now
fully agrees with me that 5-MeO-DMT is phenomenologically in a class of
entheogens of its own, which he explains in the introduction to his latest book,
The Entheogenic Evolution: Psychedelics, Consciousness, and Awakening the
Human Spirit. Here Martin describes some of the history of his own interest in
entheogens:
In the years that followed, I continued to explore the shamanic and
mystical states of consciousness that mushrooms opened up for me—what
I considered to be my “personal” schooling as I made my way through my
graduate program. After finishing graduate school, I discovered Salvia
divinorum, and began working with that magical plant, eventually using
those experiences as the basis for my book, Sage Spirit: Salvia Divinorum
and the Entheogenic Experience.
I spent over a decade working with mushrooms, and then later salvia,
exploring shamanic consciousness and practice. I felt I had a fairly good
understanding of how these two visionary medicines worked and what
kinds of experiences they made possible, but through it all, I would never
claim that I had experienced God in a direct sense. Certainly, I had many
profound and deeply meaningful spiritual encounters, but there was never
a moment where I felt secure enough to say that I had absolutely
experienced a force that I would describe as God. In fact, if asked if I
believed in God, I would give a fairly cogent Buddhist response about the
impermanent and empty nature of existence and how all our concepts are
relative, and how even in the Buddhist wheel of reincarnation gods are
still conditioned by karma and not absolute. I had my intellectual and
philosophical views, but no real experience to base those views on.
2
He then goes on to describe how this situation was radically changed by his
first successful “full-release” on a potent, high 5-MeO-DMT mixture of toad
venom, Phalaris grass extract, and Psychotria viridis extract that was vaporized
in a pressurized chamber of argon gas(!).
Within the space of a few heartbeats, I had completely expanded into God.
Eyes open in absolute awe and wonder, the room dissolved, my ego
dissolved, my entire world dissolved. Everything I had ever known or
thought or felt dissolved away into absolute pure nothingness. There was
nothing to see, nothing to experience, nothing to perceive. Absolutely pure
nothingness. And this nothingness was pure consciousness. And it was
love. Infinite love and infinite perfection. . . . And this state was not a
thing. It was not an object of perception. It was not a concept. It was not
an emotion. It was not anything that I could describe in any way. In fact,
when asked later, I vaguely described it as “living starlight,” but even that
was not accurate, for in truth, it was nothing.
But that no-thing was everything.
It was God.
And it was my deepest nature.
I was one with God.
Not my ego self. That was thoroughly obliterated through the
impossibly fast 5-MeO-DMT expansion. It was not as though I identified
my personal sense of self with God. Rather, the deepest core of my being,
not my ego-identity, was identical with God. As a finite being in a body
with a sense of self and identity, I was an expression of God. At my core,
at the very deepest level, my nature as an incarnated being was one with
that pure consciousness. I was one with that infinite love, that infinite
source of creative energy in which all things exist in absolute and
unquestionable perfection. In those few heartbeats, this beautiful and
sacred medicine had opened me up to the All. I had accepted my own
divinity.
“Thank you, God!” I called out as my hands reached up towards that
infinite expanse of nothingness, a few moments after the hit of
psychedelic medicine flowed out of my lungs. Eyes wide open, gaping in
sheer awe at the mysterium tremendum, I embraced God, and the embrace
was returned.
“Thank you,” I said, over and over and over again, lasting the better
part of an hour as the medicine expanded me out into the farthest reaches
of cosmic consciousness and then gently brought me back to myself. I was
so overwhelmed that I began crying and laughing at the same time. It was,
beyond any doubt, the most beautiful, profound, and total experience of
my life. Nothing in my psychedelic or spiritual history could have
prepared me for this divine embrace. It was so total, so complete, so
beyond any sense of doubt or wonder or skepticism. It was absolutely
undeniable. I could hardly believe that it was true. I could hardly believe
that I was saying that word: God.
3
In this account, Martin Ball has clearly phenomenologically encountered
the same experience as I have—union with God. (And was apparently as
surprised by that as I was—even though he had read my book beforehand!)
Similarly, all the people I know who have experienced 5-MeO-DMT at what I
call at its “fullest” unanimously agree with me that 5-MeO-DMT’s entheogenic
effect—its ability to allow you to realize the existence of God—is without
parallel. And that it is the most powerful entheogen that they have ever
experienced, though clearly from a phenomenological point of view, and not a
physiological one. But try to express this to someone who has not experienced 5-
MeO-DMT at its fullest, but who has had “entheogenic” experiences of their
own on other compounds. These people are the ones who will tell me that I
cannot describe 5-MeO-DMT as “the most powerful entheogen known to
humanity,” even when they admit that their own “entheogenic” experiences have
paradoxically fallen short of union with God.
From my side I have tried to remain open to the fact that there are other
entheogens that can provide this same truly entheogenic effect of union with
God, and have done so historically. Otherwise we would never have come up
with the term entheogen in the first place, right? Compounds like ketamine, 2CB, 2C-I, DOC, DOM, DIPT, LSD, DMT at high doses, even magic mushrooms
have been known to produce “union with God” in individuals, and their accounts
are readily available in the volumes of entheogenic literature and on Erowid
(www.erowid.org). I find ketamine among the most interesting, since it seems to
me that it works a lot like 5-MeO-DMT (phenomenologically) by basically
anesthetizing the body into believing that it is dead, thus freeing the
consciousness to return to the source. I have friends who believe they have
approached “the face of God” on ketamine, and it is the only compound other
than 5-MeO-DMT that I have had a true out-of-body experience on—somewhat
bizarrely while sitting at a bar in Bangkok! But I can’t say that I find the
physical effects of that compound appealing.
But the one account I have always kept in the back of my mind as a
reminder of the fact that other compounds are capable of providing the same
entheogenic effect as 5-MeO-DMT is probably the most famous account in
“LSD literature,” after Dr. Hofmann’s legendary bicycle ride itself. That is the
account of Stanislav Grof, the noted LSD and transpersonal researcher, of his
own first LSD experience.
*43
In the fall of 1956, after graduating as a clinical psychiatrist in Prague, Grof
volunteered as a test subject for the clinical trials of LSD that were being
conducted at his university. Grof had been working as an aide on these trials, but
could not apply to be a subject until he had graduated from the university. His
initial LSD session appeared to be progressing normally. A few hours into the
session, a lab assistant hooked Grof up to some EEG equipment and turned on a
powerful stroboscope, as Grof had agreed to take part in an experiment studying
how brainwaves might become entrained via flashing light while under the
influence of LSD. Grof describes his experience:
I was hit by a vision of light of incredible radiance and supernatural
beauty. It made me think of the accounts of mystical experiences I had
read about in spiritual literatures, in which the visions of divine light were
compared with the incandescence of “millions of suns.” It crossed my
mind that this was what it must have been like at the epicenter of the
atomic explosions in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Today, I think it was more
like Dharmakaya, or the Primary Clear Light, the luminosity of
indescribable brilliance that, according to The Tibetan Book of the Dead
(Bardo Thödol), appears to us at the moment of our death.
I felt that a divine thunderbolt had catapulted my conscious self out
of my body. I lost my awareness of the research assistant, the laboratory,
the psychiatric clinic, Prague, and then the planet. My consciousness
expanded at an inconceivable speed and reached cosmic dimensions.
There were no more boundaries or difference[s] between me and the
universe.
4
This experience completely shattered Grof’s paradigm, and set his course of
lifelong study of the realms of human consciousness. He relocated to the United
States where he eventually was hired as the Chief of Psychiatric Research at the
Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. During his professional career, Grof has
personally conducted over 4,000 clinical psychedelic sessions “with substances
such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DPT, and MDA”
5 and has had access to
over 2,000 sessions from his colleagues. (His clinical trials on psychedelics
lasted until 1974 and were the last approved studies in the United States until
Rick Strassman’s trials with DMT at the University of New Mexico in the
nineties.) After LSD became illegal, and all work with psychedelics stopped,
Grof and his wife Christina developed the technique of holotropic breathwork as
a means to access transpersonal realms without the use of entheogens. They have
since supervised over thirty thousand holotropic sessions. Grof is considered the
“Father of Transpersonal Psychology,” and he was the founding president of the
International Transpersonal Association.
Stanislav Grof is obviously a heavyweight—perhaps the greatest authority
on entheogens and consciousness in the world. Because his strobe-light
experience on LSD seemed phenomenologically so similar to my 5-MeO-DMT
experiences, I have always kept his account of that “initiation experience” in the
back of my mind as evidence against describing 5-MeO-DMT as “the most
powerful entheogen known to humanity.” Clearly there are other entheogens—or
combinations of entheogens and other psychological techniques—that will
produce the same effect as smoking 5-MeO-DMT. I managed to mostly retain
that mental position, until I read Grof’s account of the first time he tried 5-MeODMT, from his recent book: When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-
ordinary Realities.
The beginning of the experience was very sudden and dramatic. I was hit
by a cosmic thunderbolt of immense power that instantly shattered and
dissolved my everyday reality. I lost all contact with the surrounding
world, which completely disappeared as if by magic. In the past,
whenever I had taken a high dose of psychedelics, I liked to lie down and
make myself comfortable. This time, any such concerns were irrelevant
because I lost awareness of my body, as well as of the environment. After
the session, I was told that after taking a couple of drags, I sat there for
several minutes like a sculpture, holding the pipe near my mouth. . . .
In all my previous sessions, I had always maintained basic
orientation. I knew who I was, where I was, and why I was having unusual
experiences. This time all this dissolved in a matter of seconds. The
awareness of my everyday existence, my name, my whereabouts, and my
life disappeared as if by magic. Stan Grof . . . California . . . United States
. . . planet Earth . . . these concepts faintly echoed for a few moments like
dreamlike images on the far periphery of my consciousness and then faded
away altogether. I tried hard to remind myself of the existence of the
realities I used to know, but they suddenly did not make any sense.
In all my previous psychedelic sessions there always had been some
rich specific content. The experiences were related to my present lifetime
—the story of my childhood, infancy, birth, and embryonal life—or to
various themes from the transpersonal domain—my past life experiences,
images from human history, archetypal visions of deities and demons, or
visits to various mythological domains. This time, none of these
dimensions even seemed to exist, let alone manifest. My only reality was
a mass of radiant swirling energy of immense proportions that seemed to
contain all existence in a condensed and entirely abstract form. I became
Consciousness facing the Absolute.
It had the brightness of myriad suns, yet it was not on the same
continuum with any light I knew from everyday life. It seemed to be pure
consciousness, intelligence, and creative energy transcending all
polarities. It was infinite and finite, divine and demonic, terrifying and
ecstatic, creative and destructive—all that and much more. I had no
concept, no categories for what I was witnessing. I could not maintain a
sense of separate existence in the face of such a force. My ordinary
identity was shattered and dissolved; I became one with the Source. In
retrospect, I believe I must have experienced the Dharmakaya, the
Primary Clear Light, which according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
the Bardo Thödol, appears at the moment of our death. It bore some
resemblance to what I encountered in my first LSD session, but it was
much more overwhelming and completely extinguished any sense of my
separate identity. [Italics mine]
6
So says one of the world’s greatest authorities on entheogens and
consciousness: a man who has either tried, or seen tried, virtually every class of
consciousness-expanding compound there is. At the end of the day there is not
much point arguing which entheogen is the most powerful—since a variety of
entheogens can bring about the ultimate entheogenic realization. I can only
really say what works as the strongest entheogen for me, and perhaps for Stan
Grof and Martin Ball as well. I have stated my case for 5-MeO-DMT’s place in
that pantheon, and now I will leave it for the rest of you to decide.
W
APPENDIX FIVE
William S. Burroughs, the Godfather of
DMT
There is no thing to fear . . . Your [ayahuasca] consciousness is more
valid than “Normal Consciousness.”
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS, THE YAGE LETTERS
illiam S. Burroughs (1914–1997): The elder statesman of the Beat
Generation, writer, poet, performance artist, social revolutionary, junkie,
homosexual, weed-grower, fugitive, and the drunken assassin of his wife Joan in
the most infamous modern case of “William Tell.” Other writers more talented
than I have written screeds about the life of this remarkable counterculture icon
who managed to outlive all his contemporaries despite the tremendous odds of
his own brutal existence. I have stated repeatedly that I think Burroughs is one of
the most important writers of the twentieth century, but his role in the
“entheogenic revolution” has always caused me problems. In my original draft I
included Burroughs in my dedication to “the fathers of Western entheogenic
literature.” Then, before I sent the book to the printer for the first Burning Man
edition, I took his name out. Now, nearly three years later, I have had to reinstate
him into my pantheon of the greats, for I have come to realize that one of the
least known aspects of William S. Burroughs’ long life is that he was effectively
the modern “Godfather of DMT.”
Since Burroughs is primarily known for his opiate addiction, this may seem
like an outlandish claim, but the evidence is there. I also believe that there is
equal evidence—and I think this is an important point that has never been picked
up by any of Burroughs critics or chroniclers—that Burroughs’ early exposure to
ayahuasca, and later to pure injectable DMT, had a critical effect on his life’s
work and was perhaps the main influence in the development of his unique and
revolutionary style of writing. I also believe that many of Burroughs’ apparently
cryptic comments and life-long obsessions can attributed to his early ayahuasca
and DMT explorations, and are better understood in that context. For example,
his quote from the little-known Ah Pook Is Here (1979), “When I become death,
death is the seed from which I grow,” could be read as a classical description of
the experience of the shamanic psychospiritual death and rebirth, something that
Burroughs himself experienced as early as the 1950s on yagé, and one that
countless entheogen users have since experienced. “All present, all past and all
future can be contained in a single note of music” (The Western Lands, 1987) is
something that many tryptamine initiates have reported, including this author,
while his oft-quoted assertion that “language is a virus” is another common
intuition among DMT users and a theme that Terence McKenna explored at
length.
Burroughs and Ayahuasca
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The intersection between Burroughs and DMT
began in 1953, when Burroughs journeyed to Colombia in search of the
legendary (even then) South American shamans’ DMT-rich brew that was
known by either its Spanish name yagé or its (then) scientific name telepathine.
Today, of course, we call yagé by a phonetic approximation of one of its many
original names: ayahuasca. But even as recently as 1993, when I personally first
had the opportunity to try ayahuasca on a trip to Ecuador, it was still commonly
being called yagé. (Terence McKenna is probably the one who effectively
changed that with the popularity of his book Food of the Gods.)
Burroughs was looking for a cure to his opiate addiction, and yagé had a
reputation for being able to reform addicts. In Bogotá, he met the great plant
explorer and ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, who was a fellow Harvard
alumnus and who had just recently named and classified Banisteriopsis caapi—
the creeping ayahuasca vine that is the heart of the brew in question. Showing
Burroughs samples of the vine, he told Burroughs that telepathine’s reputation
was all rubbish and that he himself had only seen “colors and squiggly lines”
when he had taken yagé. But he informed Burroughs where he could find the
brujos—the Spanish word for a male witch, as the local shamans were then
called—who would prepare yagé for him; and then—in what must have been
one of the strangest traveling combinations in history—actually journeyed with
Burroughs to the Sibidnoy, a (then) remote region of the Colombian Amazon.
There Burroughs immersed himself in the consumption of yagé: a
sometimes terrifying experience that he would describe to his friend Allen
Ginsberg in surreal prose in a series of letters that became the basis for the
publication of The Yage Letters more than a decade later, after Ginsberg had
traveled to Colombia and tried yagé himself. If it were for no other reason than
that sublime book, I would have to include Burroughs as one of the “fathers of
Western entheogenic literature”—since it would be more than two decades later
before the likes of the McKenna brothers would try to follow his path. While
certainly there had been other Westerners who had taken yagé at that time or
earlier, not all of them were anthropologists or botanists, and none of them wrote
about their extraordinary experiences as did Burroughs. Therefore The Yage
Letters is one of the earlier known examples of “Western entheogenic literature,”
while Burroughs’ trip to Colombia could be considered the precursor for the
current popularity of ayahuasca tourism that is all the rage in Peru and Ecuador.
Thus Burroughs is “the Godfather of ‘recreational’ ayahuasca.”
Burroughs and DMT
But Burroughs’ links to the history of DMT use do not stop there. In the late
1950s and early 1960s, Burroughs was living in London, England. He was
reputedly working on a theory of “neurological geography,” with the idea that
the cortical areas were divided into the heavenly and the diabolical. In the
following passage, from Ghost of a Chance, Burroughs explains his take on the
bicameral mind.
A rift is built into the human organism, the rift or cleft between the two
hemispheres, so any attempt at synthesis must remain unrealizable in
human terms. I draw a parallel between this rift separating the two sides of
the human body and the rift that divided Madagascar from the mainland of
Africa. One side of the rift drifted into enchanted timeless innocence. The
other moved inexorably toward language, time, tool use, weapon use, war,
exploitation, and slavery.
1
Due to his tremendous intellectual curiosity, Burroughs had learned about
DMT and managed to obtain a supply of the pure compound from a chemist
friend in London. His small circle of friends in London included a number of
psychiatrists, and it was with them that Burroughs experimented with injecting
DMT—presumably to test some of his theories. Timothy Leary recounts a story
about Burroughs injecting one of his psychiatrist friends and then injecting
himself, only to have his friend “freak out” during the trip and ask Burroughs to
inject him with a sedative. Burroughs then prepared the necessary injection, only
to discover that his friend had turned into “a wriggling bejeweled serpent on the
floor,” leaving Burroughs puzzled about how to find a vein in such a marvelous
spectacle of a creature.
Burroughs reputedly stopped using the drug after having taken a massive
100 mg injection. He supposedly wrote Timothy Leary a letter warning him of
the evils of the compound.
You can imagine, then, Burroughs’ amusement a few years later when “the
psychedelic sixties” broke out and LSD was all the rage. For someone who had
taken both massive quantities of ayahuasca and had injected himself with 100
mg of pure DMT, I doubt that LSD really seemed like that big of a deal.
Burroughs himself wrote little about LSD or mescaline, despite his relationship
with Timothy Leary, Neal Cassady, and other counterculture figures. As a result,
most reviewers of his life take the position that Burroughs thoroughly disliked
psychoactive drugs. While this may have been the case after his overdose of
DMT in London, it certainly seems unlikely during his decade-long progress
from yagé to the intravenous injection of DMT. In any case, the reports of
Burroughs’ injecting DMT are once again among the earliest accounts of any
kind of “non-sanctioned” DMT use that we have, so I crown him “the Godfather
of recreational DMT.” (It would not be until half a dozen years later that the
chemist Nick Sand would discover that DMT was—thankfully—smokable.)
Was DMT an Influence on Burroughs’ Writing?
Was DMT an Influence on Burroughs’ Writing?
In truth, Burroughs was always an outsider. He was not really a member of the
Beat Generation; they were just boys compared to him. He never considered
himself a “Beat writer,” and his writing style is very different from that of the
Beats like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, or Gregory Corso. It was clearly he
who influenced them and not the other way around—Burroughs seems to have
had few influences other than history itself. But I believe that if there is one
single influence that can be most clearly seen in his writing, it is the influence of
DMT.
Queer and Junkie, Burroughs’ first two published works, while daring in
their content, show no indication of the radical experiment in the English
language that Burroughs writing would later become. It is in the language and
themes of Naked Lunch, his most famous book that was published in 1959 and
written in Tangiers, Morocco, after his encounters with yagé in Colombia, that
the grand experiment in writing begins that would create his reputation as a
“literary outlaw.” The linear progression of his earlier works ends here with this
convulted visionary novel that takes place in a shadowy world called the
“Interzone,” which in itself could be a combination of Tangiers and the strange
shifting worlds one encounters on ayahuasca. Both humans and non-humans
occupy Interzone; it is the home of narcotic-fluid excreting creatures Burroughs
calls mugwumps, which appear to have an alien nature. Since Burroughs was
infamous for his heroin use, reviewers tend to treat all “drug references” in
Naked Lunch as metaphors for opiate use. But heroin and opium are not known
to produce visual hallucinations, and the novel is full of hallucinatory moments.
Typewriters speak and turn into giant cockroaches that are “Agents of
Interzone,” alien-type creatures abound, and the whole novel seethes and writhes
with hallucinatory imagery. This would seem to have been far more influenced
by Burroughs’ yagé experiences than due to any amount of opiate use.
Transformation—of creatures into humans, humans into aliens, aliens into
machines, and so on—is one of the main phenomena listed over and over again
in many ayahuasca and DMT accounts. Burroughs’ “talking-typewriters”
themselves would seem to presage McKenna’s “self-replicating transforming
mechanical elves.”
But for me, the most telling example in Naked Lunch of the influence of
Burroughs tryptamine use is the state of mind of the protagonist of the novel,
Bill Lee, who is obviously based on Burroughs himself. Lee is not writing a
novel; he is writing a report for the Masters of Interzone, who are the Masters of
the Universe. The idea that the point of human existence is to write a report for
the “Masters of the Universe,” or—as I have described it in this book, to create a
record of experience in the zero-point field—is a common intuition among
tryptamine users, and one that I often promote myself. (You are reading my
report.)
Further evidence for the influence of tryptamines in William S. Burroughs’
writing can be found in virtually any of his books that followed. Take this
passage from the introduction to the little-known Ah Pook Is Here (1979).
The Mayan codices are undoubtedly books of the dead; that is to say,
directions for time travel. If you see reincarnation as a fact then the
question arises: how to orient oneself with regard to future lives? Consider
death as a dangerous journey in which all past mistakes will count against
you. If you are not orienting yourself on sound factual data, you will not
arrive at your destination, or in some cases you may arrive in fragments.
What basic principles can be set forth? Perhaps the most important is
relaxed alertness, and this is the point of the martial arts and other systems
of spiritual training—to inculcate a psychic and physical stance of alert
passivity and focused attention. Suspicion, fear, self-assertion, rigid
preconceptions of right and wrong, shrinking and flinching from what
may seem monstrous in human terms—such attitudes of mind and body
are disastrous. See yourself as the pilot of an elaborate spacecraft in
unfamiliar territory. If you freeze, tense up, refuse to look at what is in
front of you, you will crack up the ship. On the other hand, credulity and
uncritical receptivity are almost as dangerous.
2
This passage includes a number of recurring themes in Burroughs’
lifework: the Mayan codices, time travel, space travel, books of the dead. These
are all themes that reappear in the work of both Timothy Leary and Terence
McKenna decades later. And yet this passage reads like an analogy of being on
DMT—even if DMT is never mentioned. In his letters to Ginsberg, Burroughs
describes yagé as both “time travel” and “a spaceship.” And Burroughs’ was
something of an expert on the Mayan calendar—he reputedly did Ph.D. work on
Mesoamerican civilizations and had a corresponding interest in the Mayan
predictions for “an end in time” that once again predates Terence McKenna’s
interest by decades.
Numerous further examples can be found in Burroughs’ work. But the most
telling influence of the unique nature of the DMT experience that I can see is
Burroughs’ dedication to “the cut-up technique” that his friend Brion Gysin
invented. Probably the most radical attempt at redesigning the format for the
novel attempted during the twentieth century, Gysin’s and Burroughs’ technique
involved “cutting up” pages of writing and then randomly reassembling them
into a new form. Here is a description of how this technique worked.
The book’s field of vision takes in a full 360°. The main intention of
Burroughs and Gysin has been to free the text from the page, to free the
word from the surrounding matrix. Not actually, but by placing the text
and graphics at the extreme limit of readability. Not so that these elements
are unreadable in an absolute sense—in other words, so that they escape
comprehension—but that, within the confines of the printed book, they
reach a point indicative of unreadability.
How in the final analysis is the book to be defined? It eludes
definition just as it eludes itself; a prey to unfathomable anamorphosis, it
rubs itself out and rewrites itself; it allows itself to be read, only to slip
away. The Third Mind jumbles the linguistic network, simultaneously
revealing and antagonizing it. It is a strategic device for confronting
semiotic assaults. But for it to do so, it calls on a fourth author—yourself
—to establish the operational field of another book, an invisible book that
you can make visible.
3
It seems obvious to me that what Burroughs was attempting to do with this
technique is to recreate the distinctly tellurian and nonlinear world of the DMT
experience in writing—“The Third Mind jumbles the linguistic network,
simultaneously revealing and antagonizing it”—a place where what happens is
more important than meaning. “An invisible book you can make visible,” with
the random rearrangement of text designed to decode its hidden meaning.
Burroughs’ randomness “is one with a very limited definition: the cut-up is
random ONLY as far as [its] results are unintended.” Tellingly Burroughs
himself states, “From my point of view there is no such thing as a coincidence.”
4
This sounds to me like his experiences with yagé and DMT had clearly revealed
to him a world of extraordinary synchronicity.
My final piece of evidence for Burroughs’ lifelong (but unnoticed) interest
in matters regarding shamanism and DMT would seem to be confirmed by his
friendship with the noted shamanist William S. Lyon. An account from The
Road to Interzone, a book on Burroughs by Michael Stevens, describes one of
Lyon’s visits to Burroughs late in his life, with a surprising reference to a
Terence McKenna book contained within it.
After awhile another visitor showed up. Burroughs looked up and said,
“It’s Bill.” Brad answered the door and I was introduced to William S.
Lyon, the author of Black Elk and one of the contributors and editors of
Shaman’s Drum magazine. Lyon and Burroughs got along very well and it
was a pleasure to have him there as Burroughs bounced off what I guess
were real life routines. I had heard about it and I was now seeing it and
hearing it with my own eyes and ears. . . . Lyon had a copy of The Ticket
That Exploded that he wanted Burroughs to sign. As he went about it
Burroughs talked about shamanism, healing, and that bull. . . .
At one point Lyon asked Burroughs if he still had his copy of True
Hallucinations. Burroughs said he didn’t know where it was. Lyon said he
needed it because another friend of his wanted to read the book. After
batting it around for a little bit Burroughs animatedly scuttled around in
and out of rooms without the wheelchair and without a cane looking for it.
He finally came back to the living room while Lyon was in the kitchen, sat
down next to me and said, “I can’t find it . . . Scout’s honor.” I believed
him until I saw the trace of a smirk on his lips.
5
That is classic William S. Burroughs right there—holding his cards close to
his chest. His influences were his own, and he mostly kept them to himself,
preferring his work to do the talking. While my personal fascination with the life
and work of Burroughs is undoubtedly evident in this book—for I am one of
those writers who believe that Burroughs may be the only American writer that
will still be read in the twenty-second century (if we make it there)—in this
essay I believe I am the first person to clearly point out his links to the
tryptamine realm and the influence that it had on his work. Virtually all of his
biographers have somewhat paradoxically taken the point of view that
Burroughs was actually against the use of psychoactive compounds and have
relegated him to being the greatest “junkie” of all time; so it is my intention here
to “set the record straight” and recognize William S. Burroughs, the most
famous “literary outlaw” of the twentieth century, in his rightful role as “the
Godfather of DMT.”
I
APPENDIX SIX
Heaven and Hell—Potential Negative
Effects of 5-MeO-DMT
feel that it is both wise and necessary to end this book with an examination of
the potentially negative effects of smoking 5-MeO-DMT. While I most
definitely do not want to cause a negative mind-set or be the cause of paranoia
for anyone who may be considering experimenting with 5-MeO-DMT, I realize
that since I have only described the potentially liberating effects of 5-MeO-DMT
in ecstatic terms, it is only correct that I also convey the seriousness of the
potentially negative effects that—in a small number of cases—have been known
to occur. These are very real and can be exceedingly powerful, adversely
affecting the unfortunate user for days, weeks, months . . . and even years to
follow. These potentially negative effects are not restricted, as some might think,
to the novice initiate, or to users with little experience in entheogens. No matter
how spiritually or psychologically prepared the user may think he or she is, 5-
MeO-DMT opens up new realms of consciousness that have never been
accessed before. There are well-documented cases of experienced entheogen
users suffering from the unique terrors and pitfalls they behold there.
5-MeO-DMT gets mentioned a couple of times in the collection Tripping:
An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures
1 although none of the
accounts are very appealing. In one, the user collapses immediately into a severe
white hole, and when she finally returns to consciousness nearly half-an-hour
later, her husband has dialed 911. She had barely been breathing and her vital
signs were weak. This experience is similar to my own accidental overdose
(related in chapter 4). Erowid also has a number of negative reports in its 5-
MeO-DMT vault. The quarterly journal The Entheogen Review kindly has
allowed me to reprint this article from issue 8(4): 136–37, which appeared under
the heading: “5-MeO-DMT WARNING.”
I know someone who had a severe and prolonged response to a vaporized
20 mg dose of 5-MeO-DMT. This person had done all the usual
entheogenic substances for some years and was careful and intelligent.
She had done her research and when offered this dose by a good friend,
she agreed to do it but questioned the amount, as she felt that it should be
5–10 mg. Her friend assured her that he had done it, and others too, many
times without problem.
Immediately on ingesting, she became unconscious for half-an-hour,
then came ’round groggy and remembering nothing. The sitter encouraged
her to walk and eat something, however this was difficult for her. From
that time on she experienced difficulty in sleeping, fear upon closing her
eyes, and three nights later awoke at 3:30 am in the grip of a very severe,
intense, and frightening panic attack. These attacks continued nightly,
with nausea, vertigo, and heart palpitations during the day. Ativan®
(lorazepam) was prescribed and later Klonopin® (clonazepam). Her
doctor did a full check and said that her blood pressure was elevated, but
that she had no apparent physical problems.
Her symptoms persisted for eight weeks. Normally this person has
slight, intermittent asthmatic symptoms around cats and mold. On coming
’round from the 5-MeO-DMT overdose, and for the eight weeks following
it, she experienced breathing difficulties that usually occurred at night and
when having panic attacks. This person is not unduly sensitive, was taking
no medications, and had not eaten or drunk anything untoward. In fact,
she had fasted the day before. Acupuncture was useful in the latter part of
the eight weeks, but the Klonopin® was essential in controlling the
symptoms.
I have read many things about this material and even spoke with
Charles Grob, whom I know. No one had heard of such a prolonged
reaction (until now) and it occurred to me that The Entheogen Review
might like to let readers know that great care should be taken with the
dosage of 5-MeO-DMT. Dr. Grob did say that if the blood pressure goes
up too much during the session, it could precipitate a stroke. My friend
was a very healthy woman of 59. I do hope this may be of help to others;
information and warnings should be made available, and I feel that this is
a volatile and unpredictable material.—A. S., CA2
This account was followed by an editorial comment:
People do seem to have quite varied reactions to 5-MeO-DMT, from mild
to severe, but this is the first time that we have heard of aftereffects lasting
for eight weeks. When trying any new compound it is advisable to start
with a low dose, and gradually work one’s way up. In the case of very
potent materials, such as 5-MeO-DMT, great care must be taken to make
sure that the dose is accurately weighed, and this can be difficult if one
doesn’t own a scale that weighs with a 1–2 mg accuracy. 20 mg would
definitely be an overdose for most people, and we agree that it is
important to report the situation that you described as a warning to others
to be extremely careful with dosing.
3
There is also the following “trip-report” from TIHKAL (with an unknown
but large amount smoked):
I observed the subject pass very quickly into an almost coma-like state.
Within seconds his face became purple and his breathing stopped. I
pounded his chest, and breathed for him, and he seemed to emerge in
consciousness, with the comment, “This is absolute ecstasy.” He stopped
breathing a second time, and both heart massage and mouth-to-mouth
resuscitation was provided. Again, he recovered and managed to maintain
a continuing consciousness and achieve a partial recovery. In the awake
condition he was increasingly lucid, but on closing his eyes he became
possessed with what he called “The energy of terror.” He could not sleep,
as upon closing his eyes he felt threatened in a way he could not tolerate.
Three days later, medical intervention with antipsychotic medication was
provided, which allowed the recovery of an acceptable behavior pattern in
a few more days.
4
The slim record thus clearly shows that 5-MeO-DMT can be both
extremely unpredictable and powerful without precedent. But undoubtedly the
most compelling rendition of the perils of smoking 5-MeO-DMT that I have
encountered comes from the book Darkness Shining Wild: An Odyssey to the
Heart of Hell & Beyond, by Robert Augustus Masters, with the sobering subtitle
Meditations on Sanity, Suffering, Spirituality, and Liberation. If you take the
idea of Bernard Haisch and others on polarity with any seriousness—the idea
that all things must have an opposite for reality to emerge—then this book is the
antithesis of Tryptamine Palace, the literary yang to my own written yin. Thus I
find it as fascinating as I do terrifying.
A psychotherapist since the late 1970s, Masters describes himself as “a
group leader, and teacher of spiritually deepening practices.” His essays have
appeared in publications ranging from Magical Blend to the Journal of
Transpersonal Psychology. He is also an apparently successful author of several
“self-help” books, such as The Way of the Lover and Love Must also Weep. With
speaking engagements all over the world, Masters had amassed a considerable
following: a psychospiritually oriented community with multiple chapters in
Canada, Australia, Europe, and a headquarters somewhere near San Luis Obispo.
Masters was “leading” this community in early 1994, when (after an earlier
experimentation with ayahuasca), he smoked 30 mg of 5-MeO-DMT on the
“enthusiastic recommendation of several members” of that same community.
In his book Masters actually writes that he smoked 30 grams of 5-MeODMT, but this is clearly a mistake since it would be both lethal and impossible to
consume, so I am assuming that this was a typo and the correct amount should
be 30 mg. This amount is a full third higher than that noted in the warning from
The Entheogen Review, and is approximately the same as my own first
(uninformed) dose of 5-MeO-DMT. I must state again that I consider 30 mg
dosages to be definitely too high, and obviously dangerous. Part of the reason I
have written this book is so that other uninformed users will not be tempted to
try such a large dosage as I did!
In his account of that fateful incident, Masters had to actually take two hits,
which is rather strange in itself, and I can only assume that the 5-MeO-DMT
melted down as it had when I overdosed. Here is Masters’ description of what
happened next.
What I saw in front of me—the pipebowl, the faces of Marcelo and
Nancy, the room, the framed sunlight, everything—immediately shrank
into a rapidly contracting circle, as if it all were being viewed through
some quickly closing aperture of a camera. In less than ten seconds, I
became completely—completely—unconscious of waking/physical
reality, finding myself bodiless in a horizonless horror that was madly and
monstrously pulsating, moving far too fast, in all directions at once.
It resembled my ayahuasca journey at its most titanically wild and
insane, sped up and intensified a hundredfold. I knew that I was in very
serious trouble; I was completely disconnected somatically, unable to
locate or feel my body (as in sleep-dream), unable to locate myself—or
anything else—anywhere in particular. I had no body, not even the
slightest semblance of a dream-body or mental-body, and I had absolutely
no sense of where I was. And what was I now? I was wide awake, but
could not leave this domain, as I might leave a dream once I knew I was in
a dream.
What remained of me was but a ghostly speck of awareness, an
entombed locus of ricocheting attention in a completely unfamiliar locale,
pervaded with a sickening despairing intuition that the “waking state” me
was in grave danger, perhaps already dead.
If what “I” was immersed in possessed any discernible or translatable
form, it was vaguely reptilian, full of scaly-headed waves that were both
surface and depth, both organic and metallic, sliding in and out of form.
No limits, no edges, no exit. It was timeless, boundless Chaos,
continuously creating and consuming itself on every sort of scale with
unimaginable power and ease and significance. . . .
In the shadowlands of the Unimaginable floated I, bodiless yet
pinned. Terror and Awe locked in boundless embrace.
5
According to Masters’ account, “Twice in fifteen minutes or so, I almost
died, suffering not only respiratory failure, but also apparently having seizures
(of which I had no previous history). Again, I had no awareness of this—all I
was conscious of was the madly pulsating, sentient Wonder-Horror that seemed
to be the very bedrock and breath of reality, bereft of horizon, including itself in
every form, every possibility, every alternative to itself.”
6
Masters’ account of his “seizures” and apparent lack of breathing should
not be disregarded—he had CPR performed on him while he was “locked as if in
rigor mortis, purple-faced and unbreathing.” Overdoses occupy a category all of
their own. It seems clear from this account that his dosage was way too high.
Thus the cause of his problems could be credited to a lack of information about
the compound (5-MeO-DMT) involved and over-enthusiasm on the part of his
“follower” who undoubtedly wanted to make sure that the good doctor “got off.”
As has been repeatedly stated throughout this book, if you are experimenting
with an entheogen you have no previous experience with, start low. Alexander
Shulgin’s explanation of how he developed his bioassay system (in PIHKAL) for
the new compounds he creates is essential reading for any would-be psychonaut.
Two Sides to Ego-Death
I in no way wish to degrade the life-threatening danger that Masters believes he
was in (he describes it as his near-death experience throughout the book), but it
seems clear to me that phenomenologically Masters and I actually experienced
approximately the same psychological event—a psychospiritual ego-death—the
mysterium tremendum et fascians of experiencing the full formless totality of
existence. Yet while I regarded my 5-MeO-DMT experience as a paradisiacal
liberation and the “recognition of recognitions,” Masters only found horror in the
experience—his terror clearly outweighing his awe. It seems that it was his
psychospiritual ego-death that caused him to have ongoing problems—not the
physical near-death he believes he nearly suffered. Consider this next passage
describing his mental state in the weeks and months after his experience.
Death, it seemed to me, was no escape at all, nor even the entry point into
oblivion, but rather was the very process through which the whole cosmic
drama could continue. The unrelenting, unboundaried Wonder and Horror
and Mystery of it all—peering through me at me from all angles—made
me tremble and want to totally disappear. It was so fucking inconceivably
real, and I (and everything else) seemed so blatently dreamlike, so
conspicuously unreal—had I ever really existed? Had anything?
And if manifest existence was but the Absolute “making an
appearance” then what exactly was I? I did not dare pursue such questions
too closely—and yet I could find no significant distance from them—for I
felt incapable of bearing their “answers.
7
Passages like these astound me, for I have felt the same things and
considered the same questions, but all the time with a sense of joy and gratitude,
for I believe that I have been presented a “key” for unlocking some of the
greatest secrets of existence. 5-MeO-DMT paradoxically confirmed the reality of
existence for me, the reality of who and what I am. All the things that Masters
mentions above are the same forces that helped me to shape this book—but
viewed from the absolutely polar point of view. How could it be that Masters
and I could have arrived at such opposite destinations from the same pivotal
event? Aldous Huxley’s comments about the physical effects of psychedelics
offer a helpful perspective:
The negative visionary experience is often accompanied by bodily
sensations of a very special and characteristic kind. Blissful visions are
generally associated with a sense of separation from the body, a feeling of
deindividualisation. . . . When the visionary experience is terrible and the
world is transfigured for the worse, individualization is intensified and the
negative visionary finds himself associated with a body that seems to
grow progressively more dense, more tightly packed, until he finds
himself at last reduced to being the agonized consciousness of an
inspissated lump of matter, no bigger than a stone that can be held
between the hands.
8
In terms of the physical difficulties that some people encounter on 5-MeODMT, this presents the question of what came first, the horse or the cart? Or to
put it more clearly, are the anxieties actually a physical reaction to the compound
or are they a mental reaction to the apparent willingness of part of our
consciousness to leave the bodily form? I tend to believe that the latter is true,
and that because a full-5-MeO-DMT release so closely resembles a NDE, the
“ego-mind” will put physical stresses upon the body in an effort to keep the
mind grounded in this reality. The body tensing up during a 5MDE is generally
the first sign of problems—while the deepest 5MDE journeys appear to be
accompanied by an intense physical “calm”—so much so that witnesses are
often concerned that the participant does not appear to be breathing.
It must be also noted, however, that Huxley linked negative effects to
physical deficiencies in the body—and one has to wonder if these “negative
effects” are not in some way related to a serotonin imbalance in the body (see
appendix 4). Masters himself speculates on these possibilities in one of his
footnotes (chapter 8) and notes that “[bufotenine] catalyzed life-threatening
circulatory crises and cyanosis (‘plum-colored face’) when injected into
unsuspecting(!) patients”—which sounds a lot like his own reaction to his
second toke of 5-MeO-DMT. Masters wonders if some enzyme in his body
caused 5-MeO-DMT to “de-methylate” into bufotenine (O-methyl transferase,
the enzyme found in our old friend the Bufo alvarius, methylates bufotenine into
5-MeO-DMT). Judging by the severe physical reactions that a very small
percentage of 5-MeO-DMT users suffer, it would seem like this could be a
promising area of potential research.
In his essay Heaven and Hell (1955), Huxley examined what he called “the
antipodes of the Mind,” and offered this view on the subject.
Like heaven, the visionary hell has its preternatural light and its
preternatural significance. But the significance is intrinsically appalling
and the light is “the smoky light” of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the
“darkness visible” of Milton. In the Journal d’une Schizophrène [by M.A.
Sechehaye, Paris, 1950], the autobiographical record of a young girl’s
passage through madness, the world of the schizophrenic is called le Pays
d’éclairement—“the country of lit-upness.” It is a name which a mystic
might have used to denote his heaven. But for poor Renée, the
schizophrenic, the illumination is infernal—an intense electric glare
without a shadow, ubiquitous and implacable. Everything that, for healthy
visionaries, is a source of bliss brings to Renée only fear and a
nightmarish sense of unreality. The summer sunshine is malignant; the
gleam of polished surfaces is suggestive not of gems, but of machinery
and enameled tin; the intensity of existence which animates every object,
when seen at close range and out of its utilitarian context, is felt as a
menace.
And then there is the horror of infinity. For the healthy visionary, the
perception of the infinite in a finite particular is a revelation of divine
immanence; for Renée, it was a revelation of what she calls “the System,”
the vast cosmic mechanism which exists only to grind out guilt and
punishment, solitude and unreality.
Sanity is a matter of degree, and there are plenty of visionaries, who
see the world as Renée saw it, but contrive, nonetheless, to live outside the
asylum. For them, as for the positive visionary, the universe is
transfigured—but for the worse. Everything in it, from the stars in the sky
to the dust under their feet, is unspeakably sinister or disgusting; every
event is charged with a hateful significance; every object manifests the
presence of an Indewelling Horror, infinite, all-powerful, eternal.
9
Masters experienced that “Indwelling Horror” for months and years to
come, the full account of which is contained in his remarkable book. (One
reviewer states it is “as if Buddha had a terrifying psychotic episode.”) He spent
sixty-three consecutive nights after his 5MDE/NDE sitting in “terror and
madness,” either unable to sleep, or—more terrifyingly for him—falling back
into the 5-MeO-DMT experience in his sleep. A single night’s rest without fear
followed—only for the sleepless terror to return. In his waking time, his own
identity was threatened; the psychospiritual dissolution of his ego had challenged
his view of himself so soundly he was no longer sure of who he was. His
worldwide “psychospiritual community”—which he readily admits had clearly
been held together by his apparently considerable ego—fell apart from internal
divisions once the cult of his personality was insufficient to keep it together.
Feelings of intense dread would suddenly descend upon him without
warning, nightmares continued to rule his nights, and he began to wonder if he
was going insane from the constant terror—“terror” is a word he uses over and
over again in his account. He ended up having to take Ativan (three times a day)
to “stabilize” his daily life, his work falling apart around him. Then, ten years
later, he delivered his remarkable book of “meditations on sanity, suffering,
spirituality, and liberation.” Mercifully, he emerged from this long ordeal with a
new sense of spiritual awakening, with the view that his traumatic experience
had been necessary for his spiritual development. (His book also presents some
fascinating insights regarding the close links between madness and creativity.)
Unfortunately, due both to the laws of polarity and to the same logic that
requires that only a very small percentage of 5-MeO-DMT users will ever be
able to experience the ultimate liberating experience of Oneness with G/d, I
think it is inevitable that a small percentage of 5-MeO-DMT users must
experience the realms of hell. And that a very percentage—the five percent of
the five percent of the five percent of Abe Maslow’s “ultimate peak experience”
turned upside down—will undergo an experience equally as destroying as
Masters’. However, the similar language of our books and apparently of our
desires (he already had a psychospiritual Gnostic community, while I now hope
to one day help create one), and the completely opposite initial psychic
transformations—coupled with the extreme severity of Masters’ reaction—
forces me to wonder what was so different in his makeup and experience that he
journeyed to hell, rather than to the heaven that some other users will
experience?
Entheogenic Paradox
Apparently this is an essential paradox of the use of entheogens. The key that
opens one man’s door to heaven can equally easily open another man’s door to
hell, even if, outwardly, the two individuals involved may seem similar. Colin
Wilson, the British existentialist writer, examines this bizarre anomaly and
recounts the difference in the mescaline experiences of two great intellects and
writers: Jean Paul Sartre, and Aldous Huxley.
In the second volume of Mlle de Beauvoir’s autobiography, The Prime of
Life, she reveals that Sartre took mescaline. She describes Sartre’s
experience as this: “He had not exactly hallucinations, but the objects he
looked at changed their appearances in a most horrifying manner;
umbrellas had become vultures, shoes turned into skeletons, and faces
acquired monstrous characteristics, while behind him, just past the corner
of his eye, swarmed crabs and polyps and grimacing Things . . .”
10
Colin Wilson notes this passage from Sartre’s novel Nausea, which clearly
seems to have been influenced by Sartre’s mescaline experience, since it was
written within the same year.
And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had
suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract
category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into
existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all
that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an
appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous
masses, all in disorder—naked with a frightful, obscene nakedness.
11
Colin Wilson then asks us to consider Huxley’s account of his initial
experience on the same compound.
The word “naked” recalls Aldous Huxley’s use of it in describing his own
mescalin experiences in Doors of Perception. But there is a curious
difference. What Huxley says was “what Adam saw on the morning of his
first creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.” It
would seem also that mescalin delivered Huxley from the world of
inauthenticity . . . Huxley became aware that things existed in their own
right, but the realization was entirely pleasant. Huxley uses the word
istigkeit [coined by the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart] to describe it:
“is-ness.”
. . . Huxley goes on to mention that mescalin may have one of two
effects; it may plunge the drug-taker into heaven or hell, depending on his
mind or nervous constitution. A man who feels a basic dislike or distrust
of life will probably find himself in hell.
12
The difference between the two men seems clear: according to Sartre’s
philosophy, the world has completely no meaning. Sartre expresses this most
clearly in his most famous work, Being and Nothingness (1943). And if the
world has no meaning, then there can be no transcendence. His own philosophy
of the world closed Sartre off from the possibilities of the mescaline experience.
(Interestingly enough, the passage from Sartre is very similar to many of Robert
Augustus Masters’ passages from Darkness Shining Wild.) Aldous Huxley, on
the other hand, had already undergone a spiritual transformation from being one
of the most famous agnostics of his generation to becoming arguably the West’s
most famous philosopher of mysticism, even before he had taken mescaline.
Huxley could certainly be considered an authority on the subject of
transcendence and had already had mystical experiences of his own; he was thus
uniquely “primed” for the revelations of the mescaline experience.
It is because of who Huxley was before he took mescaline for the first time
that makes The Doors of Perception the most important and influential book on
entheogens that will ever be written. Huxley had spent half his lifetime studying
spirituality and mysticism, and his knowledge was both highly respected and
encyclopedic. So when he told the world that mescaline had opened up his soul
and mind like no amount of meditation or contemplation before it, a lot of
learned people took notice. The Doors of Perception itself is an amazing
compendium of thoughts about art, religion, spirituality, schizophrenia, and the
nature of existence. His theories about the Mind as a reducing valve, or “filter”
for reality, and the comparison he makes between the mescaline experience
terminology from Buddhism and Hinduism, and most specifically, the Tibetan
Book of the Dead, laid the groundwork for the future discussion of
“psychodelics” for years to come. There will probably never be another book
like The Doors of Perception, because it is doubtful that there will ever again be
the possibility of an unprejudiced, chance crossing of one of the world’s greatest
scientist-philosophers with an emerging technology for the mind like mescaline.
As Huxley readily admits, he was always a poor “visualizer,” and the
mescaline experience was not what he expected; he had thought he would be
carried off into William Blake’s world of fantastic visions. Instead he saw “the
veil of reality lifted.” 5-MeO-DMT is phenomenologically a lot different from
mescaline, and one can only wonder what Huxley would have made of an
experience as disorienting and all encompassing as the 5MDE. Robert Augustus
Masters seems like a throwback to Huxley’s age of philosophical search and
discovery, and in the following passage from the introduction to Darkness
Shining Wild, I think may have found a clue to the essential difference between
our initial separate experiences.
And yet here it is, apparently immune to meditative practice and cathartic
discharge—breath awareness, awareness of body and mind, prayer and
pranayama, Vipassana and Dzogchen, bodywork and yoga and running
and relaxation practices, raw emotional release, psychospiritual insight,
tears and tears and deeper tears, providing at best a sporadic, extremely
fragile relief. Short-lived interruptions of terror.
13
While Masters is describing the various ways he was trying to control his
unabated terror, he is also running off a formidable list of esoteric techniques
that he had learned over the decades. All of the techniques he mentions require a
focusing of the mind, with the ultimate goal being the identification of Self with
the Ground of Being. It seems very apparent that Masters has been on that hunt
for more than twenty years. So when he took his hit of 5-MeO-DMT, I’m pretty
sure he felt he would be able to “control” the experience once he was in there.
Only there is no controlling 5-MeO-DMT. And in many ways I believe what you
need to be able to do at the height of the experience is paradoxically the opposite
of yogic techniques—you have to be able to de-focus and completely let go.
One of the extreme sports that I spent twenty years chasing offers a good
analogy. In paragliding it is possible to turn within the circumference of a
thermal and rise up from the ground at rates in excess of fifteen hundred feet per
minute—I consider this one of the most thrilling experiences I have ever
encountered. But if you have the misfortune to enter or exit this same thermal
incorrectly, then the soft body of the paraglider (which doesn’t have tubing like a
hang glider and is inflated by constant air pressure) can collapse, sometimes
entirely. This can then cause the glider to “ball up” behind you, and send you
into a terrifying spin. My point is that you have to train yourself (or at least I
did!) to do something quite extraordinary if this should happen: in the instant
after the collapse, you have to do nothing—or to be accurate, you have to wait
for the glider to reinflate, at which point you then “dampen” the ensuing surge.
In the moment that all hell breaks loose, you have to have the confidence (or
faith) to do nothing but wait. This can be a pretty damned hard thing to do,
especially if you are nervously close to the ground. But if you do react and pull
on a brake or do anything to try and alter the situation—as many beginnerintermediates do—then you actually cause the next collapse, and surge, and
collapse, and spin. This results in a situation of increasingly violent action and
reaction, which in paragliding we call cascading.
I have seen numerous people try to “control” or “come out” of their 5-
MeO-DMT experience—something that is virtually impossible to do. These
attempts at retaining their identity (and ego) seem to greatly increase the anguish
of their situation, as they cascade from one egocentric internal dilemma to the
next. The best thing you can do at the height of the experience when your whole
life seems to have come to that one unbelievable moment outside of space and
time is to do nothing—and, if you can, just let yourself go. Let yourself dissolve.
Rid yourself of your “I” and go dance with the Supreme State of Being. Because
you can’t take your ego with you to the party.
Consider this following passage from Dr. Masters where he describes his
constant fear of reentering his experience.
If I indeed was—as I vainly hoped a few short-lived times—in the throes
of actual ego-death, I was nonetheless apparently stuck in the passageway
(no longer, so to speak, in an amniotic universe), despite my times of
emergence. Proferred notions from well-meaning others—shamanistic
crisis, spiritual emergency or just plain purification—were of no use to
me. Conceptualizing did not, as it often had before, distance me from my
feelings, but now only suffused them with a shiveringly creepy
transpersonal paranoia. Never had I worked so hard at being present, and
never could I remember being so scared.
14
A passage from Joseph Campbell’s The Inner Reaches of Outer Space:
Metaphor as Myth and as Religion sheds an interesting light on this issue. He is
discussing pranayama, the Tantric yoga breathing technique, in which the left
nostril and breathing passage are said to embody our lunar (temporal)
consciousness, while the right represents our solar (infinite) consciousness. He
says:
[It is] at Yuktatriven. , “The Meeting Place of Three Rivers,” that the
differentiated lunar and solar energies at last blend into a single fire,
which then, like a blast, ascends with the awakened kundalin into and
along the central way. Until this fusion of the two breaths occurs, the
central portal remains closed. The embodied lunar consciousness of the
practicing individual must first, that is to say, be experienced as in fact the
same as the universal solar consciousness by which all beings are
energized and given light. Otherwise the mind will either remain locked in
materiality, imagining the body and its experience to be of matter alone,
or fly rapt away on some supernatural fancy, as though (the universe being
of matter alone) soul or spirit should be sought somewhere else.
15
This passage equally explains the fate of the unsuspecting 5-MeO-DMT
initiate. To recognize the Ultimate Reality, you must transcend your ordinary
reality—and in that process the “you” gets left behind. Or to clarify, the “you”
has to let go of “yourself ” because, essentially, “you” cannot go along for the
ride—“you” can only release the part of “you” that is timeless to return to its
ground of being. If you rigidly attempt to hold onto your “I-dentity,” you will
not be able to “dissolve” into the transcendental ground. So, if there is a
fundamental difference in the ground of Masters’ experience on 5-MeO-DMT
and in my own, it is in the fact that I had no expectation attached to my first
5MDE (since I knew so little about the compound), nor, due to the
overwhelming intensity of the experience once it began, do I recall any
inclination or attempt to try to control it . . . from what I can remember I was
simply swept away in a blissful tide of being, which was probably the best thing
that could have happened to me. In Masters’ case, on the other hand, a
combination of fear, ego, and a mind trained in being able to focus on the ground
of being actually may have prevented his consciousness from taking that final
leap into the unknown.
When Masters contacted Stanislav Grof a few days after his experience to
get his advice, Grof advised him to take no medicines and to try to achieve “full
catharsis,” even if it meant being held down by a number of his followers to do
so. But by then Masters’ overwhelming fear seemed to be way too far past the
point of ever allowing him to “let go”—and he was not tempted to take Dr.
Grof’s advice.
In his book The Cosmic Game, Stanislav Grof has this to offer:
[T]he ego death that immediately precedes rebirth is the death of our old
concepts of who we are and what the world is like, which were forged by
the traumatic imprint of birth.
As we are purging these old programs from our psyche and our body
by letting them emerge into consciousness, we are reducing their energetic
charge and curtailing their destructive influence on our life. From a larger
perspective, this process is actually very healing and transforming. And
yet, as we are nearing its final resolution, we might paradoxically feel that,
as the old imprints are leaving our system, we are dying with them.
Sometimes, we not only experience the sense of personal annihilation, but
also the destruction of the world as we know it.
While only a small step separates us from the experience of radical
liberation, we have a sense of all-pervading anxiety and impending
catastrophe of enormous proportions. The impression of imminent doom
can be very convincing and overwhelming. The predominant feeling is
that we are losing all that we know and all that we are. At the same time,
we have no idea what is on the other side, or even if there is anything
there at all. This fear is the reason that at this stage many people
desperately resist the process if they can. As a result, they can remain
psychologically stuck in this problematic territory for an indefinite period
of time.
The encounter with the ego death is a stage of the spiritual journey
when we might need much encouragement and psychological support.
When we succeed in overcoming the metaphysical fear associated with
this important juncture and decide to let things happen, we experience
total annihilation on all imaginable levels. It involves physical destruction,
emotional disaster, intellectual and philosophical defeat, ultimate moral
failure, and even spiritual damnation. During this experience, all reference
points, everything that is important and meaningful in our life, seems to be
mercilessly destroyed.
Immediately following the experience of total annihilation—“hitting
cosmic bottom”—we are overwhelmed by visions of light that has a
supernatural radiance and beauty and is usually perceived as sacred.
16
It may be that Robert Augustus Masters was in fact moments away from
“enlightenment,” but the power and fear of his ego-mind was such that it would
not let him undergo that final annihilation that would have allowed him to
identify his own consciousness with the “cosmic consciousness” itself. The
result was that he became “trapped” in his own “ego-hell,” unable to identify
with anything at all—even himself. Both his “lunar” (temporal) and “solar”
(cosmic) consciousnesses presented themselves, but they were unable to take the
final step and merge—leaving “the central portal” firmly closed.
This phenomenon of the “mind-being-at-large” on a 5MDE, while the
tattered remains of your ego flop around with your “meat” on the floor,
continues to affect me personally. It is one of the main reasons I prefer to smoke
5-MeO-DMT alone. For when I smoke 5-MeO-DMT in the company of others, I
have found myself increasingly embarrassed by the behavior of my “meat and
ego,” or more specifically, my behavior as I return to my “skin-encapsulated
ego” from a 5MDE. It seems that if there is any personal point of focus for my
ego-mind to grab onto as it returns from the state of undifferentiated
transcendence, I start babbling the most ridiculous egotistical inanities. For
example, if I have a close friend from my paragliding days in front of me, I will
latch onto him and start talking about how amazing our flights were together. Or
I will recall old girlfriends, and openly discuss my sexual history in graphic,
almost pornographic terms. I grab onto everyone in the circle and tell them how
much I love them and how much they all mean to me. This very unenlightened
behavior was really beginning to bother me, until I decided that this literally was
my ego-mind, which I had transcended and left behind, but to which I ultimately
had to return. (This obviously doesn’t happen when I am alone, because my ego
has nobody to latch onto.)
I have a ton of ego—way more than most, my wife constantly tells me—
and yet it clearly can’t come with me when I transcend it. But the ego still has to
be somewhere. So it makes sense that it should remain behind with my matterbound form. This is the reason why, when friends ask me if I would like them to
film one of my 5MDEs so I can watch it later, I always tell them “NO.” I have
no interest in seeing what my meat is up to when I am gone; as far as I am
concerned those actions are irrelevant. I am now actually trying to train my
friends who witness my 5MDEs to tell my “ego-mind” to be quiet when it
reappears and to try and get me to “lay back down” in the experience and let my
deeper-self retain contact with the field. But with my eyes still shining wild from
the light I have just encountered, I usually tell them that they are out of their
minds, along with the now common instruction that if they loved me they would
“bury that vial in the ground and never let me near it again!”
This phenomenon has also made me reconsider the idea of reincarnation
and of escaping this wheel of form. I used to think that a higher reincarnation
would be easy and obvious: wouldn’t all sentient beings wish to climb the ladder
of existence toward Buddhahood and enlightenment? Wouldn’t everyone accept
that option and take paradise? But if the next level of existence, the next
dimension of being, cannot be experienced by this “form,” then the “I” would
have to be released, let go of for eternity . . . And in that moment you will be
tempted by all the beautiful things you have experienced in this world, all the
love, and wonder, and joy. And your ego will be offered the opportunity to either
return back to everything you have known and loved, to all the things you have
not yet done or mastered, or to transcend to a place “you” cannot know, and that
your ego cannot go. “You” must give up both the world and your I-dentity for
the Mystery. As someone who loves this planet, and loves this life, and still has
lifetime after lifetime of things he would like to see and do, I can now appreciate
what an awesomely difficult choice that will be.
Clearly this essay has wandered and threatens to become a book of its own! But
in returning to the theme with a hope of closing, I will recount the very few
negative encounters with 5MDE I have witnessed or encountered. As I
mentioned in the Burning Man chapter, my good friend Captain Urquhart
believes he suffered adverse effects from his Burning Man 5MDE some months
after it occurred. He suffered from fainting fits, a general feeling of lightheadedness, and an increased sensitivity to smoking weed. He has no interest in
ever trying 5-MeO-DMT again.
Several people have vomited during their experience while I have been
sitting with them. I deal with them all the same way: by rolling them into the
recovery position, ideally before they vomit. Each time, their physical
discomfort seemed obvious and also seemed to come from “fighting the
experience,” so to speak. Once they vomit, they generally calm right down, the
psychological “blockage” they were encountering purged with their physical
discharge.
My wife had a dark and violent first 5MDE, much darker and more violent
than she actually verbalized to me. She remained silently fearful of the
compound for some time, but living with me, I guess it was inevitable that she
would try it again. Upon her second release she went to a remarkable “love
zone”—a place where her body would suck in every iota of breath it could
manage and then she would shout, “I love . . . I love . . . I love . . .” at the top of
her voice, over and over again, for at least five minutes. She returned from her
experience with this overwhelming sense of love, and she was amazed at the
difference between her two polar-opposite experiences. She now goes to this
very beautiful place when she (very) occasionally feels the desire to have a
5MDE.
I have watched numerous people experience apparent difficulties within
their 5MDE who have absolutely no recollection of any difficulty once they
return; in their minds they were in a place of love and joy, and they often have a
hard time believing the accounts of their physical difficulties from concerned
witnesses. No one that I have ever watched smoke 5-MeO-DMT has had any
short or long-term psychological difficulties that I am aware of, nor has anyone
required any form of antidepressant or any other form of medication. There is,
however, one more experience that I witnessed that was followed by a tragedy,
and while I have given this one experience more thought than any other single
experience I have ever witnessed, I still have no answers. Like so many other
facets of the 5MDE, it is, in its essence, as much of a mystery as the Mystery we
are contemplating.
This experience occurred shortly after my own epiphany on 5-MeO-DMT,
when I was still incredibly excited for all of my friends to try 5-MeO-DMT. It
was only a couple of weeks after I had first smoked 5-MeO-DMT, and only the
second time I tried it. I was in New Orleans for my thirty-sixth birthday, and
when my wife (at that time my girlfriend) had asked me what I wanted to do, I
told her I wanted to have a 5-MeO-DMT session with close friends, instead of
any kind of a party. So she invited a few close friends over to her house, and that
was what we did.
Now everyone had been hearing from me about how amazing and lifechanging 5-MeO-DMT was, so they were obviously pretty curious to try it. The
only problem was that when I had previously smoked it in Portland, we had
imbibed it using the “chasing the dragon” technique off tin foil—a technique at
which my friend in Portland was quite expert. But when I tried it with my friends
at my wife’s house, I couldn’t get the hang of it all, and neither myself, my wife,
or Captain Urquhart released using that method. Frustrated, I put a dose in a pipe
on some weed, and managed some kind of a release, which was in itself
apparently something to witness—I grabbed my wife quite hard by the forearms
and shouted “Breathe, Breathe, Breathe!” as I managed to find my way back to
that zone I had first encountered.
There was one other close friend there with us at this time. He was a great
fan of psychedelics, and after he had witnessed my experience, he was all ready
to be next in the psychonaut chair. Once I had gathered myself from my own
experience, I packed him a bowl. My friend took a long steady hit on the pipe,
obviously trying to fill his lungs up with the smoke as much as he could, and
then he went into a very spooky 5MDE, obviously dark and discomforting. As
he came out of it he was extremely disoriented and he kept apologizing for
something over and over again, telling us to tell his wife and his kids that he was
sorry, but for what he couldn’t or wouldn’t tell us. This apologizing and general
disorientation went on for some time, along with him repeating that, “he never
wanted to try that 5-MeO-DMT again.” I was quite worried about him, since I
had only previously witnessed two other real 5MDE releases and I had no
reference upon which to base my friend’s experience. He seemed so out-of-sorts
that I was thinking I would have to drive him home, when he suddenly seemed
to pull himself together, and within half an hour he seemed as if he was back to
his normal self. We smoked a little weed and chilled out some more, and finally
he said he was fine and drove himself home a little after midnight.
Still I was worried about him, and so the next day I called him up. He was
laughing on the phone, saying that the experience hadn’t been that bad, and even
that he might like to try 5-MeO-DMT again sometime in the future, so I figured
that he was all right. But when I asked him about the heavy “guilt” that he had
obviously experienced, he had no recollection of it, nor of mentioning his wife
or children. I found this very strange, but everything about 5-MeO-DMT seemed
pretty strange at the time. And I had witnessed so few 5MDEs at that point that I
had little to compare his experience with anyway (unlike now, when I have come
to realize that it is probably the strangest reaction that I have ever seen). I was
still processing my own experiences, so I didn’t give his a lot more thought. That
is, I didn’t give it much more thought until I was back in my home in the
Caribbean about a month later, and I received an email from Captain Urquhart
telling me that this same friend had died in a tragic and unnecessary accident
around his house, the details of which I don’t need to go into here.
At first my fear was that this tragic accident had something to do with his
state of mind after his 5MDE. But when I later talked to his wife she told me that
his mental outlook had been great—they had just had a two-week holiday in the
Caribbean without their kids and he had been tanned and happy and relaxed,
with no mention of any lasting ill effects from his 5MDE. I was deep into my
own ongoing experimentations with 5-MeO-DMT at the time, and it wasn’t until
later—when I really began to believe that the 5MDE was capable of taking my
consciousness out of this physical realm and to a place outside of space and time
—I began to wonder about what had happened during my now-dead friend’s
experience. So dark and heavy was his guilt upon returning from his 5MDE—
with the numerous admonishments that we should tell his wife and kids that he
was sorry—I began to wonder if he had not glimpsed his own senseless death
that was just a few weeks away. The portal of time opened wide enough that the
short remainder of his life was laid out like a page.
There is no answering a question like that—not in this life anyway—and
only a disconcerting wonder that I am sure I will carry with me for the rest of my
life. And if my friend did see his own death, he certainly did not remember it
afterward. Nor apparently could he have avoided it. But no matter what you
might think about my thoughts on this matter, one incontrovertible fact remains:
5-MeO-DMT opens the door to the Mystery of Mysteries, and when we smoke it
we have no clue what we may discover once we pass through that door. So it is
always best to prepare yourself the best you can for the Unknown you will
encounter. For—as both I and Robert Augustus Masters would attest—if you
smoke 5-MeO-DMT, you need to be prepared for the fact that your life may
never be the same again.
The choice is always ours. Then, let me choos e
The longest art, the hard Promethean wa y
Cherishingly to tend and feed and fa n
That inward fire, whose small precarious flame ,
Kindled or quenched, create s
The noble or the ignoble men we are ,
The worlds we live in and the very fates ,
Our bright or muddy star .
ALDOUS HUXLEY, ORION, THE CICADAS
AND OTHER POEMS, 1931
Footnotes
*1 N,N-dimethyltryptamine
*2 “Materialism is the belief that reality consists solely of matter and energy,
the things that can be measured in the laboratory or observed by a
telescope. Everything else is illusion or imagination. Reductionism is the
belief that complex things can be explained by examining the constituent
pieces, such as the illusion of consciousness arising from elementary
chemical processes in the brain.”
1
*3 “First: the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized
consciousness—the world of things and animals and men and even gods
—is a manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities
have their being, and apart from which they would be nonexistent.
Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the
Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a
direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate
knowledge unites the knower with that which is known. Third: man
possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which
is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is
possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and
therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature
with the spirit. Fourth: man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose:
to identify himself with his eternal Self and so come to unitive
knowledge of the Divine Ground.”
3
*4 DMT is metabolized very quickly (and this is probably the case with 5-
MeO-DMT as well). In a study conducted by Kaplan et al. in 1974, less
than 1.8 percent of the DMT dose injected in human subjects could be
found in the blood at any time after the dose had been given, and the
maximum amount recovered from urine unchanged was 0.16 percent of
the dose, with 0.069 percent of the dose as the mean for seven subjects.
Kaplan’s group opined that it would be unlikely that any DMT produced
endogenously could be detected in the blood. However, a study proposed
by the newly formed Cottonwood Research Foundation—the
Endogenous Hallucinogen Assay project—has recently set the goal of
developing novel ultra-sensitive technology in order to measure DMT, 5-
MeO-DMT, and bufotenine, as well as their metabolites. For more
information, see www.cottonwoodresearch.org.
*5 Bufotenine (5-HO-DMT) is also found in a variety of plants, mushrooms,
and in human blood and urine. 5-MeO-DMT is the methyl ether version
of bufotenine.
*6 In 2006, a paper was published detailing findings and recommending
taxonomic changes based on the largest phylogenetic analysis of living
Amphibia accomplished to date. One result of the work described in this
370-pound tome, is that Bufo alvarius had its name changed to Cranopsis
alvaria. Later that same year, the name was changed by implication to
Ollotis alvaria. Then at the end of 2008, another name change was
required, due to rules of seniority, with the (final?) accepted species
name landing on Incilius alvarius. Because these name changes were so
recent, and since virtually all of the sources I’ve cited herein use the
older name, I have decided to retain the use of Bufo alvarius throughout
my book in order to keep things simple. No one wants to have to look at
“Incilius alvarius (= Bufo alvarius)” over and over again, right? For the
same reason, I have retained the use of Bufo marinus, which—based on
the paper’s change—was switched to Chaunus marinus, and was later
changed by implication in 2007 to Rhinella marina. For more related to
these changes, see D. R. Frost et al., “The Amphibian Tree of Life,”
Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 297 (2006): 1–370,
and D. Frost, Amphibian Species of the World Online, vers. 5.2 (2008),
http://research.amnh.org/herpetology/amphibia/references.php?id=2893.
*7 As an alkaloid from the Psychotria viridis plant, DMT is the main active
entheogen in ayahuasca.
*8 It has been theorized that the psychoactive component of kykeon came
from ergot—the starting material for the semi-synthetic drug LSD—that
grows on barley. This identification holds further weight since Demeter
(who ordered the construction of the Eleusinian sanctuary and described
how kykeon was to be made) is sometimes called Erysibe—a word that
means “ergot”—and the symbol of the Mystery was an ear of grain.
From R. G. Wasson et al., The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of
the Mysteries (New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1978), and J. Ott,
Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History
(Kennewick, Wash.: Natural Products Co., 1993).
*9 On February 21, 2006, a unanimous Supreme Court decision regarding a
preliminary injunction related to a UDV chapter in the United States
granted that specific chapter the legal right to continue using and
importing ayahuasca until a final decision is reached in their case against
the government. While this decision does not create blanket legalization
of ayahuasca for religious users, it is—at the least—a step in the right
direction.
*10 Although there is one report that 5-MeO-DMT was not orally active at a
35 mg dose (Shulgin and Shulgin, 1997), and it is widely thought to be
inactive orally, Jonathan Ott (2001) more recently found via personal
bioassay that 30 mg of 5-MeO-DMT was orally active for him,
producing a “threshold effect.” Another underground psychonaut
reported weak activity orally from using a dose of either 50 mg or 100
mg (unfortunately this person’s memory of the dose used was not clear);
the effects were more physical in nature, resembling only very mild
smoked doses without any out-of-body effects. Oral doses in the 50 to
100 mg range represent at least two times (and possibly over three
times) the quantity of material needed for a strong smoked dose. This is
a waste of valuable sacrament, particularly since oral doses have not yet
been reported to produce a “full” out-of-body 5MDE. Hence, I continue
to regard 5-MeO-DMT as being essentially inactive orally without the
concurrent use of MAO inhibitors.
*11 In a Rolling Stone magazine interview, William S. Burroughs pointed
out that in the book 1984, George Orwell predicted a draconian society
where citizens would be forced to take drugs and then be indoctrinated
via the use of a television screen. The frightening reality is that by the
end of the twentieth century our society willingly accepted this method
of brainwashing as one of the benefits of “freedom,” and the military–
industrial complex now controls its “citizens” in ways far more
sophisticated than Orwell could have ever imagined.
*12 As a mountain-athlete of more than twenty years, I pathologically dislike
this media-invented word—but its now common acceptance in the
vernacular forces me to use it.
*13 A marked increase in synchronicity is a common result of entheogenic
revelation. Stanislav Grof devotes a full chapter of his book When the
Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-ordinary Realities to his own
remarkable experiences with the phenomenon of synchronicity.
*14 In the second and third phases of the Tibetan bardo of dharmata, the
“luminous” bardo of the after-death—very fine lights are said to spring
from your heart, linking you with the various Buddhas and deities.
According to Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying,
“. . . the rays and beams of light are like lasers, piercing everything.”
*15 Although some readers have been disturbed by my use of the word
occult, which—primarily due to the excesses of Hollywood—is often
regarded as implying witchcraft and dark forces, according to the
American Heritage Dictionary it means: “1. Of, relating to, or dealing
with supernatural influences, agencies, or phenomena. 2. Beyond the
realm of human comprehension; inscrutable. 3. Available to only the
initiate; secret: occult lore.” If my New Orleans 5MDE doesn’t fall into
that category, then I don’t know how else to classify it!
*16 Dennis McKenna also appears to have taken a similar journey at La
Chorrera, only more severely disorienting and with a correspondingly
quicker return. For an account of that experience, see Terence
McKenna’s book True Hallucinations and the McKenna brothers’ cult
classic The Invisible Landscape.
*17 Justin Case has reported that pyrolyzed doses of 5-MeO-DMT can be
repeated at three to ten minute intervals (at least ten times in a row);
even after three days following this approach, no tolerance built up. He
actually found himself more sensitive to the per-dose effect once he was
well into the evaluation (K. Trout, Some Simple Tryptamines, second
edition [Austin, Tex.: MydriaticProductions, 2007]). Although tolerance
or desensitization does build up rapidly with DMT (within three to five
minutes), it also disappears fairly rapidly. Formal testing by Strassman
using injected DMT has shown that any tolerance is entirely gone after
thirty minutes (R. Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule. A Doctor’s
Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical
Experiences [Rochester, Vt.: Park Street Press, 2001]), and it is clear,
from the reports of multiple psychonauts, that smoked DMT is fully
effective if one waits an hour between doses.
*18 Not all psychonauts share my views on the differences between natural
and synthetic entheogens. On this topic, Sasha Shulgin himself once
wryly quipped that he is, himself, a product of nature, and thus the
compounds he creates are a product of nature.
*19 Attributed to the Dharma Punks.
*20 McKenna professed a preference for DMT; he seemed to think that 5-
MeO-DMT was just too intense.
*21 Teilhard de Chardin proposed that the goal of evolution as a species was
toward a final unity, a “coaxing of life forms toward future perfection.”
4
He called this final perfect moment of realization, “The Omega Point.”
Chardin himself was a close friend of Sir Julian Huxley, Aldous
Huxley’s older brother.
*22 Large doses of DMT can, however, achieve virtually the same “peak”
effect as 5-MeODMT—that is, a transcendental point past imagery—it’s
just getting there that’s harder, due to the amount required.
*23 Puthoff’s discovery was inspired by the earlier work of an English
physicist named Timothy Boyer. A recent study of the hydrogen atom
by Boston University professor Dan Cole showed that, if you let an
electron lose energy—as it must according to the laws of
electrodynamics—and simultaneously take into account the energy it
picks up by constantly being buffeted by the fluctuations of the zeropoint field, you can reproduce the complex quantum behavior of the
electron in the ground state of hydrogen. This is a major extension of the
earlier simple harmonic oscillator models of Boyer and of Puthoff, and
does indeed suggest the possibility that the zero-point field provides the
foundations for atomic stability; B. Haisch, The God Theory: Universes,
Zero-Point Fields, and What’s Behind It All (York Beach, Maine: Red
Wheel/Weiser, 2006).
*24 Rueda had spent nearly two decades working with SED theory
(stochastic electrodynamics). This little known and apparently
frequently misunderstood field (B. Haisch, The God Theory: Universes,
Zero-Point Fields, and What’s behind It All [York Beach, Maine: Red
Wheel/Weiser 2006]) accepts the existence of the zero-point field as real
for all practical purposes, and uses ordinary electrodynamics to describe
the field as equivalent to completely random electromagnetic waves. By
using a combination of “ordinary” classical physics formula and zeropoint energy fluctuation calculations, SED can explain certain bizarre
quantum effects without becoming embroiled in complex quantum
theory. According to Bernard Haisch, what is not understood is that to
physicists like Rueda, SED is a useful tool, an analytical technique, and
not an alternative physics. It was this approach that allowed the laws of
inertia to be defined by SED mathematics.
†25 By deriving F = ma using an entirely different set of mathematics,
Rueda and Haisch fulfilled the orthodox scientific requirement of a
mathematical “independent verification.” This mathematics required a
much more complicated “four-vector” version of this equation that is
used in special relativity theory.
16
*26 Even the basic “distinctions” made between a frog and a toad and a
mushroom and a toadstool are the same: there is no classifiable
difference. The different terms are not based on toxicity as many people
presume. They arise simply from attitude: whether or not a culture views
the frog/mushroom positively or, as a toad/toadstool, negatively. This
simple cultural anomaly was the initial inspiration for the Wassons’
examination of mycology throughout the world.
*27 Toad venom contains extremely powerful and highly toxic cardiac
glycosides called bufogenin and bufotoxin; Meyer and Linde, 1971, as
cited in W. Davis and A. Weil, “Identity of a New World Psychoactive
Toad,” Ancient Mesoamerica 3 (1) (1992): 51–59.
*28 Since then I have come to realize that both forms of DMT have been
available on the playa since at least 1996 if you knew the right people.
However, while popular post-hippie compounds like 2C-B were readily
available through the psi-trance community, no smokable tryptamines
were offered to me in 2004. I apparently wasn’t hanging out with the
right drug geeks. Both forms of DMT are apparently now available on
the black market—thanks, no doubt, to a plethora of extraction recipes
that are available on the Internet or published in journals like The
Entheogen Review. See appendices for more information.
†29 This was at the height of the new-millennium LSD drought, a
consequence of the now infamous 2000 Kansas missile-silo bust. The
DEA claimed that the supply of blackmarket LSD in the United States
dropped a staggering 95 percent after this single sting.
*30 Radical self-expression is one of the founding principles of the Burning
Man community. For those of you who don’t know it, Burning Man is a
great deal more than just a party. See www.burningman.com for more
information
*31 Cosmologists now estimate that that there could be anywhere from 100
million (Shapley) to 100 billion (Su-shu Hang) life-bearing planets
within our cosmos. (Even larger estimates also exist [Brown]). And in
2003, the Hubble Telescope found the first planet in an ancient part of
our own galaxy, with an estimated age of 13 billion years. In the last
fifteen years, ninety extrasolar planets have been found from the
scrutiny of twelve hundred stars in our vicinity, which are similar to our
own sun. In 1979, Carl Sagan and colleagues elaborated upon an
equation proposed by Frank Drake in 1960 to calculate the statistical
probability of advanced civilizations in our galaxy; according to their
computations, up to a million intelligent civilizations could exist in our
galaxy. Statistically, the chance that we are all alone in the universe gets
slimmer and slimmer every day.
*32 I did get the opportunity to photograph the Dalai Lama a few weeks later
at the opening of the enormous university. This was due entirely to luck,
since the Indian security wouldn’t let me into the hall where he was
going to speak but left me alone on the steps where His Holiness passed
within a few feet of me. Khyentse Rinpoche’s secretary—one of the
people who had told me that they needed a photographer—then escorted
me into the hall. I heard the Dalai Lama speak and, more importantly,
laugh, which reminded me of my 5-MeO-DMT belly-rolls, a laughter
that comes from somewhere deep within. Whatever one thinks of the
Tibetan religion and philosophy, there is no doubt that their selection
process found a remarkable leader for them at the time of their direst
need. One can only wish that the rest of the world could find such
enlightened leadership.
*33 The American ghettos were similarly flooded with destructive and
highly addictive drugs at the same time as radical black political groups
like the Black Panthers appeared. As William S. Burroughs has pointed
out, the U.S. government was involved in illegal wars in Indochina in
the 1970s, when the ghettos were flooded with heroin, and then in illegal
wars in Central and South America in the 1980s, when the ghettos were
flooded with cocaine.
*34 The Kennedy family was no stranger to LSD. Robert Kennedy’s wife
Ethel had undergone LSD therapy for alcoholism.
*35 As a side note, Leary’s former associate Cord Meyer is one of the prime
suspects for the identity of the infamous Deep Throat, Washington Post
reporter Bob Woodward’s key “intelligence community” source. Ben
Bradlee, who was Cord Meyer’s brother-in-law, and the person who
identified Mary Meyer’s dead body, was the editor of the Washington
Post.
*36 Well, not exactly the same reason—he doesn’t smoke tryptamines, as far
as I know. But increasingly, it wouldn’t surprise me if he has.
*37 William Blake remarked, “If the doors of perception were cleansed
every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” This quote was, of
course, the inspiration for the title of Aldous Huxley’s book.
*38 Joseph Campbell is referring here to terminology coined by Adolf
Bastian (1826–1905), the German ethnologist of the nineteenth century,
to define certain reoccurring mythic motifs common to all the religious
traditions of the world. Bastian identified “folk ideas,” Volkergedanken,
as localized representations and applications of the universal or
“elementary ideas,” Elementargedanken. Carl Jung (1875–1961) would
later redefine these mythical motifs as “the collective unconscious.”
*39 Attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the father of the magical and
religious movement known as Hermeticism. Representing a congruence
of the Egyptian God Thoth and the Greek Hermes, Trismegistus’s
Hellenistic Egyptian pseudepigraphical writings have heavily influenced
the Western Esoteric Tradition. The Tarot card “The Magician”
represents the Hermetic intuition expressed as, “As above, so below.”
*40 The Gröblacher et al. citation appears in the original extract text and is
not part of the Notes for this book.
*41 People talk about the fact that there are now over 6.6 billion people in
the world (www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html); what about the
fact that there are currently 1.5 billion cows! See
wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_cows_are_there in_the_world.
Accessed January 28, 2009.
*42 Terence McKenna came up with the end-date of December 21, 2012,
which coincides with the culmination of the Mayan calendar. His
proposal has aroused a great deal of speculation, and now other authors
seeking popularity are running with it. Unless we get struck by a comet
or an asteroid on that day (or someone goes mad on the nuclear trigger),
then it strikes me as unlikely that any singular event on a specific day
will precipitate a global collapse. In many ways this is irrelevant, since I
do agree that we are clearly in the midst of a series of ongoing events,
which have begun in the last century and will accelerate until our final
societal collapse. We are within a shift between ages and paradigms, and
the dramatic sort of change that will eventually come about would be
difficult to achieve in a single day.
*43 Of course, Ken Kesey’s account of being an “LSD guinea pig” in a
psychiatric hospital in the early sixties (in the USA) probably rivals Dr.
Grof’s in the “fame” category, since it was immortalized in print by
Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. That account is
undoubtedly better known by the general public, while Dr. Grof’s
account is probably the more often discussed among the so-called
entheogenic community.
Endnotes
Preface
1. Check out www.Burningman.com for more information.
Introduction. How This All Began
1. Condensed from a definition of material realism provided by Bernard
Haisch, The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What’s
Behind It All (York Beach, Maine: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2006).
2. Vladimir Nabakov, Pale Fire (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962).
3. A. Huxley, from the Introduction to the Isherwood-Prabhavananda
translation of the Bhagavad-gita (1944).
Chapter One. The 5-MeO-DMT Experience
1. This description of Stanislav Grof’s fourth prenatal matrix (BPM IV) is
found in S. Grof, The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of
Human Consciousness (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1998).
Chapter Two. 5-MeO-DMT: Science, Discovery, and the History of
Human Use
1. S. T. Christian et al., Gas-Liquid Chromatographic Separation and
Identification of Biologically Important Indolealkylamines from Human
Cerebrospinal Fluid,” Biochemical Medicine 14 (1975): 191200.
2. J. Narby, The Cosmic Serpent (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam,
1998).
3. M. S. Fish, “Piptadenia Alkaloids. Indole Bases of P. peregrina (L.)
Benth. and Related Species” Journal of the American Chemical Society
77 (1955): 589295.
4. R. Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary
Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences
(Rochester, Vt.: Park Street Press, 2001).
5. T. Hoshino and K. Shimodaira, “Über die Synthese des Bufotenin-MethylÄthers (5-Methoxy-N-Dimethyl-Tryptamin) und Bufotenins (Synthesen
in der Indol-Gruppe. XV),” Bulletin of the Chemical Society of Japan 11
(3) (1936): 22124.
6. I. J. Pachter et al., “Indole Alkaloids of Acer saccharinum (the Silver
Maple), Dictyoloma incanescens, Piptadenia colubrina, and Mimosa
hostilis,” Journal of Organic Chemistry 24 (1959): 128587.
7. G. Legler and R. Tschesche, “Die Isolierung von N-Methyltryptamin, 5-
Methoxy-N-methyltryptamin und 5-Methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamin aus
der Rinde von Piptadenia peregrina Benth,” Die Naturwissenschaften 50
(3) (1963): 9495.
8. J. Ott, Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and
History (Kennewick, Wash.: Natural Products Co., 1993/1996).
9. V. Erspamer et al., “5-Methoxy- and 5-hydroxyindoles in the Skin of Bufo
alvarius,” Experientia 21 (1965): 504.
10. D. R. Frost et al., The Amphibian Tree of Life,” Bulletin of the American
Museum of Natural History 297 (2006): 1370.
11. W. Davis and A. Weil, Identity of a New World Psychoactive Toad,”
Ancient Mesoamerica 3 (1) (1992): 5159. There are other candidates
from the animal kingdom used in rites of passage and ritual—ants,
scorpions, and poisonous snakes, to name a few—but they are none too
safe or savory, and none produce an entheogen near as powerful as 5-
MeO-DMT.
12. Bufotenine had been found a decade earlier in normal human blood and
urine (see Fr. Franzen and H. Gross, “Tryptamine, N, N-
Dimethyltryptamine, N, N -Dimethyl-5-hydroxytryptamine and 5-
Methoxytryptamine in Human Blood and Urine,” Nature 206 (1965):
1052). Around that time 6-methoxytetrahydroharman—which in 1961
had been reported (under the name adrenoglomerulotropin) as a pineal
gland hormone (see G. Farrel and W. M. McIsaac,
Adrenoglomerulotropin,” Arch Biochem Biophys 94 (1961): 54344)—
was also characterized as a “hallucinogen” based on human bioassays
(see C. Naranjo, “Psychotropic Properties of the Harmala Alkaloids,” In:
Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs. D. H. Efron, ed.
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967).
13. S. T. Christian et al., Gas-Liquid Chromatographic Separation and
Identification of Biologically Important Indolealkylamines from Human
Cerebrospinal Fluid,” Biochemical Medicine 14 (1975): 191200.
14. C. M. Torres and D. B. Repke, Anadenanthera: Visionary Plant of
Ancient South America (Binghamton, N.Y.: Haworth Herbal Press,
2006).
15. A. Shulgin and A. Shulgin, TIHKAL: The Continuation (Berkeley, Calif.:
Transform Press, 1997); and J. Ott, Shamanic Snuffs or Entheogenic
Errhines (Solothurn, Switzerland: Entheobotanica, 2001).
16. R. E. Schultes and A. Hofmann, The Botany and Chemistry of
Hallucinogens, second edition (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas,
1980); and B. Holmstedt and J-E. Lindgren, “Chemical Constituents and
Pharmacology of South American Snuffs” In: Ethnopharmacologic
Search for Psychoactive Drugs, D. H. Efron, ed. (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1967).
17. Mark Plotkin, private conversation, 1992.
18. A. Shulgin and A. Shulgin, TIHKAL: The Continuation (Berkeley, Calif.:
Transform Press, 1997).
19. Anon, “Journal of a Voyage up the Amazon and Rio Negro by Richard
Spruce, San Carlos del Rio Negro, June 27, 1853.” From J. Ott,
Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and History
(Kennewick, Wash.: Natural Products Co., 1993/1996).
20. Jon Hanna, private communication, 2009.
21. Legal Highs presents a dose range for 5-MeO-DMT from 3.5 to 5 mg, an
amount substantially lower than what I would consider an effective
dosage.”
22. Jeremy Bigwood and Jonathan Ott, DMT,” Head (1977).
23. M. V. Smith, Psychedelic Chemistry (Port Townsend, Wash.:
Loompanics Unlimited, 1981).
24. Jeremy Bigwood and Jonathan Ott, DMT,” Head (1977).
25. M. Aldrich, R. Ashley, and M. Horowitz, High Times Encyclopedia of
Recreational Drugs (Ephraim, Wis.: Stonehill Publishing Company,
1978).
26. W. Beifuss and J. Hanna, Jonathan Ott Speaks. . . ,” The Entheogen
Review 8 (1) (1999): 25.
27. For more information, see www.alternet.org/story/12393/.Accessed
January 28, 2009.
28. J. Ott, Shamanic Snuffs or Entheogenic Errhines (Solothurn,
Switzerland: Entheobotanica, 2001).
29. See www.universal-tao.com/dark_room/index.html.
30. Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, revised and
updated (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002).
31. C. M. Torres and D. B. Repke, Anadenanthera: Visionary Plant of
Ancient South America (Binghamton, N.Y.: Haworth Herbal Press,
2006).
32. J. Ott, Pharmacotheon: Entheogenic Drugs, Their Plant Sources and
History (Kennewick, Wash.: Natural Products Co., 1993/1996).
33. Ibid.
34. M. Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).
35. R. Walsh and C. Grob, Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore the
Continuing Impact of Psychedelics (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2005).
36. H. L. Bergson, The Two Sources of Mortality and Religion (Notre Dame,
Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1935), as cited in H. Smith,
Cleansing of the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of
Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals (New York: Jeremy P.
Tarcher/Putnam 2000). Also see P. de Flice, Poisons sacrs. Ivresses
divines: Essai sur quelques formes infrieures de la mystique (Paris: Albin
Michel, 1936).
37. H. Smith, Cleansing of the Doors of Perception: The Religious
Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals (New York: Jeremy P.
Tarcher/Putnam, 2000).
38. Ibid.
39. Rig Veda 8:48.
40. Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree
of Knowledge (New York: Bantam Dell, 1992).
41. H. Smith, Cleansing of the Doors of Perception: The Religious
Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals (New York: Jeremy P.
Tarcher/Putnam, 2000).
42. Jon Hanna, personal communication, 2009.
43. R. Rodd, “Snuff Synergy: Preperation, Use, and Pharmacology of Yopo
and Banisteriopsis caapi Among the Piaroa of Southern Venezuela,”
Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 34 (3) (2002): 27379.
44. P.A.G.M. de Smet and L. Rivier, Intoxicating Snuffs of the Venezuelan
Piaroa Indians,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 17(2) (1985): 93103.
45. L. E. Luna, Vegetalismo: Shamanism Among the Mestizo Population of
the Peruvian Amazon (Stockholm, Sweden: Almqvist and Wiksell
International, 1986).
Chapter Three. The Aftermath
1. T. K. McKenna, The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic
Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism,
the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1991).
2. Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, revised and
updated (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002).
Chapter Four. Welcome to the Power Zone
1. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1954).
2. Bernard Haisch, The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and
What’s Behind It All (York Beach, Maine: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2006).
3. A. W. Watts, Psychotherapy East and West (New York: Pantheon Books,
Random House, 1961).
4. B. Haisch, The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What’s
Behind It All (York Beach, Maine: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2006).
5. A. Huxley, Heaven and Hell (New York: Harper, 1956).
6. Rumi, “I See My Beauty in You,” in The Glance: Songs of Soul Meeting
(New York: Penguin, 1999).
7. W. Davis and A. Weil, Identity of a New World Psychoactive Toad,”
Ancient Mesoamerica 3 (1) (1992): 5159.
8. A. Shulgin and A. Shulgin, TIHKAL: The Continuation (Berkeley, Calif.:
Transform Press, 1997).
Chapter Five. Into the Quantum Realm
1. Alvin Toffler, introduction to Ilya Prigogine’s Order Out of Chaos (New
York: Bantam, 1984).
2. Danah Zohar, The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness
Defined by the New Physics (New York: Quill/William Morrow, 1990).
3. E. Laszlo, The Connectivity Hypothesis: Foundations of an Integral
Science of Quantum, Cosmos, Life, and Consciousness (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2003).
4. T. Jennewein, G. Weihs, J-W. Pan, and A. Zeilinger, Experimental
Nonlocality Proof of Quantum Teleportation and Entanglement
Swapping,” Physical Review Letters 88 (2001).
5. E. Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of
Everything (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2004).
6. Lynne McTaggart, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the
Universe (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003).
7. Check the latest version of “Did You Know?” on YouTube for more
information on the exponential rate of increases that our society is
currently experiencing.
8. Lynne McTaggart, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the
Universe (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003).
9. R. Weber, ed., Dialogues with Scientists and Sages: The Search for Unity.
London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986; see Bohm.”
10. E. Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of
Everything (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2004).
Chapter Six. Enter the Zero-Point Field
1. Diane Greco, Ether and Field Theories, 2002;
www.victorianweb.org/science/ether.htm. Accessed January 28, 2009.
2. Ibid.
3. wikipedia.org; Aether theories.
4. Ibid.
5. wikipedia.org; Uncertainty principle.
6. L. McTaggart, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2003).
7. B. Haisch, The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What’s
Behind It All (York Beach, Maine: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2006).
8. L. McTaggart, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2003).
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. B. Haisch, The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What’s
Behind It All (York Beach, Maine: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2006).
16. Ibid.
Chapter Seven. Toading
1. T. Lyttle et al., “Bufo toads and Bufotenine: Fact and Fiction Surrounding
an Alleged Psychedelic,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 28 (3) (1996):
26790.
2. A. B. Kennedy, Ecce Bufo: The Toad in Nature and in Olmec
Iconography,” Current Anthropology 23 (3) (1982): 27390.
3. W. Davis and A. Weil, Identity of a New World Psychoactive Toad,”
Ancient Mesoamerica 3 (1) (1992): 5159, citing Wasson, S. H. 1934.
4. T. Lyttle et al., “Bufo toads and Bufotenine: Fact and Fiction Surrounding
an Alleged Psychedelic,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 28 (3) (1996):
26790.
5. W. Davis and A. Weil, Identity of a New World Psychoactive Toad,”
Ancient Mesoamerica 3 (1) (1992): 5159.
6. T. Lyttle et al., “Bufo toads and Bufotenine: Fact and Fiction Surrounding
an Alleged Psychedelic,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 28 (3) (1996):
26790.
7. V. Deulofeu and E. A. Rúveda, “The Basic Constituents of Toad
Venoms,” in Venomous Animals and Their Venoms 2, W. Bücherl and E.
Buckley, eds. (New York: Academic Press, 1971).
8. T. Lyttle et al., “Bufo toads and Bufotenine: Fact and Fiction Surrounding
an Alleged Psychedelic,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 28 (3) (1996):
26790.
9. A. B. Kennedy, Ecce Bufo: The Toad in Nature and in Olmec
Iconography,” Current Anthropology 23 (3) (1982): 27390.
10. N. L. Hamblin, The Magic Toads of Cozumel,” Mexicon 3 (1) (1979):
1014.
11. W. Davis and A. Weil, Identity of a New World Psychoactive Toad,”
Ancient Mesoamerica 3 (1) (1992): 5159.
12. A. B. Kennedy, Ecce Bufo: The Toad in Nature and in Olmec
Iconography,” Current Anthropology 23 (3) (1982): 27390.
13. Märki, F. et al., “Dehydrobufotenine, a Novel Type of Tricyclic
Serotonin Metabolite from Bufo marinus,” Journal of the American
Chemical Society 83 (15) (1961): 3341.
14. J. Daly and B. Witkop, “Chemistry and Pharmacology of Frog Venoms,”
in Venomous Animals and Their Venoms 2, W. Bücherl and E. Buckley,
eds. (New York: Academic Press, 1971).
15. Ibid.
16. K. Trout, Some Simple Tryptamines, second edition (Austin, Tex.:
Mydriatic Productions, 2007).
17. A. Shulgin and A. Shulgin, TIHKAL: The Continuation (Berkeley, Calif.:
Transform Press, 1997).
18. W. Davis and A. Weil, Identity of a New World Psychoactive Toad,”
Ancient Mesoamerica 3 (1) (1992): 5159.
19. Ibid.
20. A. Most, Bufo alvarius: The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert
(Denton, Tex.: Venom Press, 1983).
21. Ibid.
22. V. Erspamer et al., “5-Methoxy- and 5-hydroxyindoles in the Skin of
Bufo alvarius,” Biochemical Pharmacology 16 (7) (1967): 114964, as
cited in W. Davis and A. Weil, Identity of a New World Psychoactive
Toad,” Ancient Mesoamerica 3 (1) (1992): 5159.
23. A. Most, Bufo alvarius: The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert
(Denton, Tex.: Venom Press, 1983).
24. W. Davis and A. Weil, Identity of a New World Psychoactive Toad,”
Ancient Mesoamerica 3 (1) (1992): 5159.
25. Ibid.
26. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohokam.
27. W. Davis and A. Weil, Identity of a New World Psychoactive Toad,”
Ancient Mesoamerica 3 (1) (1992): 5159.
28. P. Furst, Hallucinogens and Culture (Novato, Calif.: Chandler & Sharp
Publishers, 1976).
29. Quote taken from T. Lyttle et al., “Bufo toads and Bufotenine: Fact and
Fiction Surrounding an Alleged Psychedelic,” Journal of Psychoactive
Drugs 28 (3) (1996): 26790.
Chapter Nine. India
1. From A. W. Watts, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry
of Consciousness (New York: Pantheon Books, 1962/1965/1970); the
quote is new to the 1965/1970 edition (page 26) and is not found in the
original 1962 edition.
2. C. Calvo, The Three Halves of Ino Moxo: Teachings of the Wizard of the
Upper Amazon (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1995).
Chapter Ten. The High Priest: Leary and the Legacies of the
Psychedelic Age
1. A. Huxley, Huxley and God: Essays on Religious Experience, J. H.
Bridgeman, ed. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).
2. Huston Clark, 1969; Taken from Rick Doblin, Pahnkes Good Friday
Follow-Up and Methodological Critique,” The Journal of Transpersonal
Psychology 23 (1) (1991). As seen in: Psychoactive Sacramentals:
Essays on Entheogens and Religion, T. B. Roberts, ed. (San Francisco,
Calif.: Council on Spiritual Practices, 2001).
3. Read Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion by Martin A.
Lee and Bruce Shlain (New York: Grove Press, 1985) for a
comprehensive history of the CIA’s interest and involvement in the
American drug culture.
4. M. Riebling, “Was Timothy Leary a CIA Agent?” at
http://home.dti.net/lawserv/leary.html. Accessed January 28, 2009.
5. “Timothy Leary on Nick Sand,” www.serendipity.li/dmt/nsand/leary.htm.
Accessed January 28, 2009.
6. Peter Stafford, Psychedelic Encyclopedia, third revised edition (Ronin
Publishing, 1993).
7. Taken from the Journal of Personality Assessment 66 (2) (1996): 3017.
8. “Was Timothy Leary a CIA Agent?” at
http://home.dti.net/lawserv/leary.html. Accessed January 28, 2009.
9. J. Hanna, 2009, personal correspondence.
10. “Timothy Leary’s Experiential Typewriter,”
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1399688. Accessed January
28, 2009.
11. For an evaluation of the role of psychedelics in the creation of Silicon
Valley, see Ralph Abraham’s introduction to chapter two: “Psychedelics,
Computers, and Mathematics,” in The Evolutionary Mind: Trialogues at
the Edge of the Unthinkable (with Rupert Sheldrake and Terence
McKenna (Rhinebeck, N.Y.: Monkfish Book Publishing, 1998); also see
John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture
Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking Adult,
2005).
12. E. Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of
Everything (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2004).
Chapter Eleven. The Zero-Point Field and the 5MDE: A Quantum
Explanation
1. S. Grof, The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human
Consciousness (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).
2. L. McTaggart, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2003).
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. E. Laszlo, The Connectivity Hypothesis: Foundations of an Integral
Science of Quantum, Cosmos, Life, and Consciousness (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2003).
6. Ibid.
7. E. Laszlo, Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos: The Rise of the
Integral Vision of Reality (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2006).
8. Ibid.
9. D. Zohar, The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined
by the New Physics (New York: Quill/William Morrow, 1990).
10. E. Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of
Everything (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2004).
11. D. Zohar, The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined
by the New Physics (New York: Quill/William Morrow, 1990).
12. Ibid.
13. Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, revised and
updated (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002).
14. L. McTaggart, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2003).
15. E. Laszlo, Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos: The Rise of the
Integral Vision of Reality (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2006).
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. L. McTaggart, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2003).
19. D. Zohar, The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined
by the New Physics (New York: Quill/William Morrow, 1990).
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
Chapter Twelve. A Quantum God
1. Sir J. Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (New York: Macmillan Co., 1930).
2. D. Zohar, The Quantum Self: Human Nature and Consciousness Defined
by the New Physics (New York: Quill/William Morrow, 1990).
3. Ibid.
4. T. S. Elliot, The Waste Land (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922).
5. E. Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of
Everything (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2004).
6. E. Laszlo, The Connectivity Hypothesis: Foundations of an Integral
Science of Quantum, Cosmos, Life, and Consciousness (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2003).
7. Puthoff, 2001, as quoted in E. Laszlo, The Connectivity Hypothesis:
Foundations of an Integral Science of Quantum, Cosmos, Life, and
Consciousness (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. E. Laszlo, 3rd Millennium: The Challenge and the Vision (London: Gaia
Books Limited, 1997).
11. E. Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of
Everything (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2004).
12. E. Laszlo, The Connectivity Hypothesis: Foundations of an Integral
Science of Quantum, Cosmos, Life, and Consciousness (Albany, N.Y.:
State University of New York Press, 2003).
13. E. Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of
Everything (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2004).
14. B. Haisch, The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What’s
Behind It All (York Beach, Maine: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2006).
15. Ibid.
16. E. Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of
Everything (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2004).
17. J. Campbell, Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal, D.
Kudler, ed. (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2003).
18. Ibid.
Chapter Thirteen. The Role of Light in Eastern Philosophy
1. J. Campbell, Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal, D. Kudler,
ed. (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2003).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Drawn from the beginning of a lecture entitled “Transformation of Myth
Through Time,” delivered in Santa Fe, New Mexico on November 9,
1982.
5. J. Campbell, Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal, D. Kudler,
ed. (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2003).
6. A. Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the
Material World (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1993).
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, revised and
updated (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002).
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., D. Bohm, as quoted in Dialogues with Scientists and Sages: The
Search for Unity, R. Weber, ed. (London and New York: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1986).
15. S. Grof, The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human
Consciousness (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).
16. J. Campbell, Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal, D.
Kudler, ed. (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2003).
17. Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, revised and
updated (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2002).
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Personal correspondence between Chris Bache and Ervin Laszlo, July
2005, cited in E. Laszlo, Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos:
The Rise of the Integral Vision of Reality (Rochester, Vt.: Inner
Traditions International, 2006).
21. Ibid.
Chapter Fourteen. A Transcendent Future for Humanity?
1. A. Shulgin and A. Shulgin, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (Berkeley,
Calif.: Transform Press, 1991).
2. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006).
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. E. Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of
Everything (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2004).
8. R. Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Press, 2006).
9. J. Campbell, Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal, D. Kudler,
ed. (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2003).
10. Paul Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). Taken from Bernard Haisch,
The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What’s Behind It All
(York Beach, Maine: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2006).
11. B. Haisch, The God Theory (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2006).
12. J. Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and
as Religion (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2002 [Original edition
1986]).
13. E. Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of
Everything (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2004).
14. J. Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and
as Religion (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2002 [Original edition
1986]).
15. A. Huxley, The Doors of Perception (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1954).
16. L. A. Huxley, “O Nobly Born!” in Moksha: Aldous Huxley’s Classic
Writing on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience, M. Horowitz and
C. Palmer, eds. (Rochester, Vt.: Park Street Press, 1977, 1999).
17. Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos: The Rise of
the Integral Vision of Reality (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2006).
18. The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, translated by Swami Nikhilananda;
taken from Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space:
Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (Novato, Calif.: New World Library,
2002 [Original edition 1986]).
19. Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? is the text of Heidegger’s
inaugural lecture at the University of Freiburg in 1929. An Afterword
and Introduction were later added. The final line of this work concludes
with the question, “Why are there beings at all, why not rather nothing?”
(Published 1934).
20. B. Haisch, The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What’s
Behind It All (York Beach, Maine: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2006).
21. Richard Conn Henry, “Review of The God Theory,”
http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/haisch.html. Accessed January 28, 2009.
22. Ibid.
23. G. F. Cairns, “A Theology of Human Liberation and Entheogens:
Reflections of a Contemplative Activist,” in Psychoactive Sacramentals:
Essays on Entheogens and Religion, T. B. Roberts, ed. (San Francisco,
Calif.: Council on Spiritual Practices, 2001).
24. Ibid.
25. C. Wilson, A Criminal History of Mankind (London: Granada, 1984).
26. B. J. Lee and M. A. Cowan, Dangerous Memories: House Churches and
our American Story (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1986). Taken from G. F.
Cairns, “A Theology of Human Liberation and Entheogens: Reflections
of a Contemplative Activist,” In: Psychoactive Sacramentals: Essays on
Entheogens and Religion, T. B. Roberts, ed. (San Francisco, Calif.:
Council on Spiritual Practices, 2001).
27. G. F. Cairns, “A Theology of Human Liberation and Entheogens:
Reflections of a Contemplative Activist,” in Psychoactive Sacramentals:
Essays on Entheogens and Religion, T. B. Roberts, ed. (San Francisco,
Calif.: Council on Spiritual Practices, 2001).
28. Victims of Fog Creep: Whats With the Newspapers?” Plain Language at
Work Newsletter (May 2, 2005). Online at www.impactinformation.com/impactinfo/newsletter/plwork15.htm. Accessed January
28, 2009.
29. C. George Boeree, “Abraham Maslow,” at
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/maslow.html. Accessed January 28,
2009.
30. See www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/p/peak_experiences.html.
Accessed January 28, 2009.
31. See the Population Reference Bureau’s web page at www.prb.org.
Accessed January 28, 2009.
32. J. Vidal, The End of Oil Is Closer Than You Think,” The Guardian,
April 21, 2005.
33. Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth
in Bush’s America (New York: Penguin, 2007).
34. T. Engelhardt, A Global Arms Race Hidden in Plain Sight,” The Nation,
Blog: The Notion (2008),
www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/284571/a_global_arms_race_hidden_in_plain_sightAccessed Nov 19, 2008.
35. See www.starvation.net. Accessed January 28, 2009.
36. Some of Laszlo’s titles in this arena include Macroshift: Navigating the
Transformation to a Sustainable World, with Arthur C. Clarke and Kay
Mikel (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2001); You Can Change the
World: The Global Citizen’s Handbook for Living on Planet Earth (New
York: Select Books, 2003); and Global Survival: The Challenge and Its
Implications for Thinking and Acting, with Peter Seidel (New York:
Select Books, 2005).
37. E. Laszlo, The Chaos Point: The World at the Crossroads
(Charlottesville, Va.: Hampton Roads Publishing, 2006).
38. Lady Montagu of Beaulieu, First Ambassador of the Club of Budapest.
39. See www.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/index.html. Accessed
January 28, 2009.
40. James Shreeve, The Greatest Journey Ever Told,” National Geographic,
March 2006; http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2006/03/humanjourney/shreevetext.html. Accessed January 28, 2009.
41. A. Shulgin and A. Shulgin, PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (Berkeley,
Calif.: Transform Press, 1991).
42. J. Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and
as Religion (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2002 [Original edition
1986]).
Chapter Fifteen. So Begin the Days of Strangeness
1. G. E. Rice, Leapin Lizards! The Things People Will Do to Get High,” The
Kansas City Star, 2 Dec. 2007, sec. B1.
2. Hunter S. Thompson, The Hashbury Is the Capital of the Hippies.” The
New York Times Magazine (1967). Taken from The Proud Highway:
Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman. 19551967. The Fear and
Loathing Letters, Vol. One. Douglas Brinkley, ed. (New York: Ballantine
Books, 1997).
3. B. Haisch, The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What’s
Behind It All (York Beach, Maine: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2006).
4. Alex Grey, Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey (Rochester,
Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1990).
Appendix 3. Serotonin, Melatonin, 5-MeO-DMT, and the Pineal Gland
1. Jace C. Callaway, “Phytochemistry and Neuropharmacology of
Ayahuasca,” in Ayahuasca: Hallucinogens, Consciousness, and the Spirit
of Nature, Ralph Metzner, ed. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press,
1999).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Karkkainen and Raisanen, 1992, found within J. C. Callaway,
Phytochemistry and Neuropharmacology of Ayahuasca. Taken from
Ayahuasca: Hallucinogens, Consciousness, and the Spirit of Nature,
Ralph Metzner, ed. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999).
5. J. C. Callaway et al., 1995, found within J. C. Callaway, “Phytochemistry
and Neuropharmacology of Ayahuasca.” Taken from Ayahuasca:
Hallucinogens, Consciousness, and the Spirit of Nature, Ralph Metzner,
ed. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999).
6. J. C. Callaway, “Phytochemistry and Neuropharmacology of Ayahuasca,”
1999, found within Ayahuasca: Hallucinogens, Consciousness, and the
Spirit of Nature, Ralph Metzner, ed. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press,
1999.)
7. R. Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary
Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences
(Rochester, Vt.: Park Street Press, 2001).
8. R. A. Masters, Darkness Shining Wild: An Odyssey to the Heart of Hell &
Beyond (Tehmenos Press, 2005).
9. SoulLab, personal correspondence, 2007. See www.universaltao.com/dark_room/index.html. Accessed January 28, 2009.
10. J. Hanna, 2007, personal correspondence with Keeper of the Trout.
11. J. Hanna, 2008, personal correspondence with Keeper of the Trout.
12. W. M. McIsaac et al., 10-Methoxyharmalan, a Potent Serotonin
Antagonist which Affects Conditioned Behavior,” Science 134 (1961):
67475.
13. A. Shulgin and A. Shulgin, TIHKAL: The Continuation (Berkeley, Calif.:
Transform Press, 1997).
14. C. Naranjo, “Psychotropic Properties of the Harmala Alkaloids,” in
Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs, D. H. Efron, ed.
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967).
15. A. Shulgin and A. Shulgin, TIHKAL: The Continuation (Berkeley, Calif.:
Transform Press, 1997).
16. J. Hanna, 2008.
17. Ibid.
18. R. Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary
Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences
(Rochester, Vt.: Park Street Press, 2001).
Appendix 4. Is 5-MeO-DMT the Most Potent Entheogen Known to
Humanity?
1. R. A. Masters, Darkness Shining Wild: An Odyssey to the Heart of Hell &
Beyond (Tehmenos Press, 2005).
2. Martin Ball, The Entheogenic Evolution: Psychedelics, Consciousness,
and Awakening the Human Spirit (Kyandara Publishing, 2008).
3. Ibid.
4. S. Grof, When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-ordinary
Realities (Boulder, Colo.: Sounds True, Inc., 2006).
5. S. Grof, The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human
Consciousness (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).
6. S. Grof, When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-ordinary
Realities (Boulder, Colo.: Sounds True, Inc., 2006).
Appendix 5. William S. Burroughs, the Godfather of DMT
1. W. S. Burroughs, Ghost of a Chance (London: Serpent’s Tail Books,
1995).
2. W. S. Burroughs, Ah Pook Is Here (New York.: Calder Press, 1979).
3. From “23 Stitches Taken” by Grard-Georges Lemaire, a foreword to
Gysin’s and Burroughs’ The Third Mind (Viking Press, 1978).
4. See www.socialfiction.org/?tag=burroughs. Accessed January 28, 2009.
5. Michael Stevens, The Road to Interzone, http://home.swbell.net/felix23/.
Accessed January 28, 2009.
Appendix 6. Heaven and Hell: Potential Negative Effects of 5-MeODMT
1. Tripping: An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures, Charles
Hayes, ed. (New York: Penguin, 2000).
2. 5-MeO-DMT Warning,” The Entheogen Review 8 (4) (1999): 13637.
3. Ibid.
4. A. Shulgin and A. Shulgin, TIHKAL: The Continuation (Berkeley, Calif.:
Transform Press, 1997).
5. R. A. Masters, Darkness Shining Wild: An Odyssey to the Heart of Hell
and Beyond (Tehmenos Press, 2005).
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. A. Huxley, Heaven and Hell (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955).
9. Ibid.
10. Colin Wilson, Beyond the Outsider (London: A Barker, 1965).
11. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (New York: New Directions, 1959).
12. Colin Wilson, Beyond the Outsider (London: A Barker, 1965).
13. R. A. Masters, Darkness Shining Wild: An Odyssey to the Heart of Hell
& Beyond (Tenemos Press, 2005).
14. Ibid.
15. J. Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and
as Religion (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2002 [Original edition
1986]).
16. S. Grof, The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human
Consciousness (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).
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About the Author
Journalist, photographer, and artist JAMES OROC was born in the small South
Pacific nation of Aotearoa. Since 1998 he has been pursuing and reporting on the
cutting edge of extreme sports in more than 40 countries around the globe, his
work appearing in magazines, films, and on MTV Sports. He has been a member
of the Burning Man community since 1999, and he is also involved in the
documentation and advancement of “Alternative Culture.” Oroc resides in the
Dominican Republic.
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Copyright © 2009 by James Oroc
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Oroc, James.
Tryptamine palace : 5-MeO-DMT and the Sonoran Desert Toad / James Oroc.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
Summary: “A journey from Burning Man to the Akashic Field that suggests
how 5-MeO-DMT triggers the human capacity for higher knowledge through
direct contact with the zero-point field”—Provided by publisher.
eISBN-13: 978-1-59477-992-3
1. Hallucinogenic drugs and religious experience. I. Title.
BL65.D7O76 2009
154.4092—dc22
[B]
2009007864
The author can be contacted at TryptaminePalace@hotmail.com.
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