(The difficulty of returning to normal reality after direct experience)
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.
“Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.”2
(Dissolution into oneness: the 5-MeO-DMT journey described step by step)
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.”
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.
- 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 all-encompassing, 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.”
“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.
“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.
- 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 on-going humor we call life and the unbelievable joke that I have been let in on.
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
(DMT, the pineal gland, and the chemistry of mystical states)
- 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 near-death 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!)
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).
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.
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).
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
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 ego-mind 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.
(After-effects: radical honesty, responsibility, and inner peace)
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.
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
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.
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.
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-MeO-DMT 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(The terror and responsibility that come with ultimate knowledge)
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.”
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.
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.
(Consciousness as a filter of universal mind; creation by subtraction)
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.
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.
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
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.
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 piggy-backing 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.
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.
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.
They can be summed up as: What is the source of the brilliant laser-like light that I encounter? How can I feel as if I am occupying a reality outside of time? How can this dimension outside of time seem to contain all possible permutations and information? How can I exist as consciousness without ego or identity, and yet clearly still be me? 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?
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).
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.
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.
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.