I saw the city in the deep, deep distance,
that was dark green and all these lights flickering
and clouds flowing over it.
And this all started after tremendous geometric patterns
that are incredibly rapid that you can't describe to anybody,
they're so fast.
After those had slowed down, I saw this city in the deep distance.
So I was sort of watching that and then this ball of light
goes right past me, right in front of me, like,
"What was that?" It didn't scare me, except it was so close.
After that I started looking around, and it's like you are in this place,
and you're going, "Why am I in this place?"
Then I noticed that there was this woman off to my right,
with a real long nose, she had green skin.
She was turning this dial and I realized
she was turning the volume of lights up and down
on the city in the distance.
And as soon as I looked at her, she noticed I was watching her,
and she said, "So, what else do you want?"
And I said, "What else do you have?"
This is the story of DMT or dimethyltryptamine,
a simple compound found throughout nature,
which has profound effects on human consciousness.
One of the things, besides what it does,
one of the things about DMT that always fascinated me
was the fact that it's such a simple molecule.
DMT stands for dimethyltryptamine.
N,N-dimethyltryptamine.
If you actually look at the ring structure of DMT itself,
you only have really four positions that you can attach things to.
So you can make diethyl or dipropyl.
There are some other types of carbon chains you can attach
to that end that do give you compounds that have activity,
but very different from DMT.
Biosynthetically, it's two steps from tryptophan.
Right, two trivial enzymatic steps from tryptophan.
Well, tryptophan is an amino acid, of course, and it's everywhere,
so all organisms have tryptophan, and all organisms
have the two key enzymes that lead to the synthesis of DMT.
These enzymes are very ancient enzymes,
they're all over the place.
They're again part of basic metabolism.
So theoretically, anything could synthesize DMT.
DMT is astonishingly widely available
in plants and animals all around the world, but so far,
nobody really knows why it's there or what its function is.
That's the 64 billion-dollar question,
is, "Why is DMT in our bodies?"
"Why is it in plants and all sorts of mammals?"
And, "What is the role it plays in humans?"
The conventional wisdom 30, 40 years ago
was that these things had no real function.
They were sort of physiological noise,
but that's a very naive understanding.
And what we now understand is that these secondary compounds
are in a sense the language of plants.
These are messenger molecules.
This is what plants use to mediate their relationships
with other organisms in the environment.
Why is it that human beings' central nervous systems
are wired to receive this experience?
Must be that there's important information to be learned.
So, I don't think it's universally present in nature by accident.
It has a real function.
We have co-evolved with these plants. There's a purpose and a meaning to it.
So it really fits in with the notion that DMT may be
the common molecular language, resonate language,
among all living beings on this planet and maybe others as well.
I can't think of a more powerful tool
to explore the whole question of, "What is consciousness?"
These substances are tools that can be used
to expand awareness in all areas of life and apply that expanded awareness
for the betterment of peoples' lives
in their community, their families and our society.
The good news is that there's a growing number of westerners,
and actually intellectuals, scientists, artists,
movers and shakers, filmmakers and so on,
who realize that this stuff is all too interesting
just to go on keeping it swept under the rug.
And meanwhile, the inquisition was a long time ago,
the birth of rationalism was a long time ago.
At this point, there is no good reason, apart from bad habit,
to keep up these barriers.
With the help of two concepts that are traditionally opposed,
science and spirituality,
we humbly reintroduce psychedelics back into the cultural dialog.
DMT, the spirit molecule, it's a conundrum,
it's a paradox.
The spirit is the inner world.
The molecule is the external world.
So, the psychedelics or entheogens
take us from the science to the spirit.
I was drawn to the pineal gland,
which is a very small organ in the center of the brain,
which has always been an object of interest and even veneration
for a lot of esoteric, physiological disciplines.
I thought it wasn't totally crazy to presume a pineal site of origin
of DMT, which fit in nicely with my theory
that the pineal was somehow involved
in naturally occurring mystical states.
This hypothesis proposes that the pineal gland,
at certain times, when it's under specific stress or stimulation,
it releases a significant amount of this hormone, DMT.
And it's that hormone that facilitates the entering
and exiting of the soul in the body.
This is what the Jewish sage mystics have been describing
in a coded language for literally thousands of years.
Through meditation, through fasting,
chanting, any number of techniques,
there might be a burst of endogenous DMT
that is correlated with mystical and near-death experiences.
I had this theory that there was a big similarity
between psychedelics and experiences that were possible
with a lot of meditation.
That was one of the original findings that led me to start looking
for a spirit molecule, for a compound in the brain
that elicited mystical experience.
I think there may be a role for DMT
in explaining any number of hallucinatory phenomena
that man has experienced throughout his history.
Creativity, imagination, dream states, changes that occur due to isolation,
trauma, starvation, all of which produce hallucinatory phenomena.
These hallucinatory phenomena are explainable
by the presence of compounds known to produce hallucinations,
and the only compounds that we know of that are capable of doing this
are the class of compounds known as hallucinogens.
When thinking about spiritual states,
I think endogenous hallucinogenic compounds and molecules
that the brain can potentially release
are probably very relevant to this topic because on one hand,
they may really help us to elucidate what is the neurochemical mechanism
of these experiences.
If we can say that there is a release of endogenous opiates
or we can say that there's a release of dopamine
or something like that and we can measure that release
and we can see where in the brain those different molecules go,
what receptors they activate or deactivate,
and hence we can really learn a lot more
about what these experiences are because it really can allow us
to match up these experiences that people have with hallucinogens
as well as understanding where they are related
in the context of the brain's receptors
and the different parts of the brain that may or may not become active.
One of the other interesting things about the pharmacology of DMT
is that it's actively transported into the brain,
so you have to wonder about the role of DMT
in just every day normal perceptual activity.
Too much DMT and things become very psychedelic
or not enough DMT
in the brain can make things dull and flat and grey.
There's something that, for me, makes sense about DMT.
You called it the spirit molecule,
it might almost be called the reality molecule.
Philosophically, it makes sense
that something that would be so fundamental
to the way we perceive reality
would be imbued out there in reality.
There was a sense around it that there was something special
that it wasn't like anything else,
it wasn't like other psychedelics,
its intensity and speed
was such that it really produced a different kind of response.
I remember almost getting the sense
that it was kind of like a psychedelic bungee jump,
that there was a kind of raw leap into this rapidly changing environment
that was very different than the more gradual approaches
of other psychedelics.
To smoke DMT is sort of like the drive-by shooting of psychedelics.
You're in one place, bang, you're in another place.
And then, bang, you're back down.
so it doesn't leave a whole lot of room
for that narrative of, "Who am I, what am I doing here?
Why am I in this space, what am I learning?"
It's almost like there was too much information to process
in that few-minute span to integrate once you drop back down.
Dimethyltryptamine when it's administered
has a very rapid onset and a very short duration of action.
This is because it's very rapidly broken down
by the body so that it can be cleared.
DMT is rapidly degraded by an enzyme in the liver
called monoamine oxidase or MAO.
That's the reason it's not active when you take it by mouth.
Whereas psilocybin, when you take it by mouth,
it's not broken down by monoamine oxidase very quickly at all
so it gets through the liver and passes on into the bloodstream
and into the brain.
Yeah, I'm very interested in ayahuasca.
When I began my studies in the early 1990s,
ayahuasca was just starting to make inroads into the West,
but it's obviously become a lot more popular in the last 10, 15 years .
And the visionary ingredient in ayahuasca is DMT.
Through some amazing feat of preliterate chemistry,
the Amazonian natives stumbled upon, or combined whatever...
I don't know how they did it, but they found that one plant contains DMT
and one plant contains an enzyme inhibitor,
combine them, you can drink DMT and it's orally active.
So, it starts working in a half hour, lasts for three or four hours
and you can maneuver a lot more comfortably
within that state than you can when you're just smoking it
or injecting it.
Orally active ayahuasca tends to pick you up
and gently carry you into the space and hug you and embrace you
and clean you and show you all sorts of mystical visions
and then it very gently brings you back down
like you're floating on a feather back to the ground.
As valuable as my DMT experiences have been,
I feel that there is a lot more enduring value really
in this folk technology which stretches it out
and makes it a navigable space.
Our whole western European-derived tradition of distilling alcohols
and isolating chemicals and making everything stronger
and taking it out of nature and putting it into the biggest punch
that we can,
I don't think that generally that's the most useful way.
I think there's a reason that cultures have learned
to turn a five-minute experience into a five-hour experience.
It seems to me that ayahuasca has had a plan
and that it's reached out into the world
and brought DMT into many, many thousands of lives
and a much bigger canvas
than it had reached for the last 10,000 or however many years.
And it's done it very rapidly
and it's done it with form to go with it.
Ayahuasca is much harder for the power structures
that we have now, it's much harder for them to put down
because it has been part of a legitimate religious
and spiritual practice for thousands of years,
certainly in the Amazon. And we can't just dismiss all that
as primitive mumbo jumbo and superstition.
We have to get to grips with that on its own terms.
I think that there is a growing number of people
who feel this desire to get back in touch
with nature, with plants, with animals
and who know that through the shamanic path
there is a way of doing this and that actually these tools,
these psychoactive tools from plants like ayahuasca,
is a very direct way of doing this.
Now, it may not be everybody's cup of tea.
And I think a lot of people are actually, with reason,
afraid of it.
I think like a lot of people in my generation,
I first heard about DMT through Terence McKenna.
It was a very funny way to become aware
of such a powerful and interesting
and anthropologically rich topic as a compound like DMT
because it really became more...
It was almost more of a concept
than something that people were necessarily taking.
The DMT flash makes it clear that disembodied consciousness
is a possibility.
I think that the whole tension of history
and the tension of life
seems to be about the shedding of the body.
Terence was a very good promoter.
Basically, he said it's the ultimate metaphysical reality pill,
even though it's not a pill.
But I thought that was a pretty good characterization after I took it.
It seemed to be of a different order
than LSD and mescaline
and some of the other things that were around.
DMT really did seem to be a whole other level of experience.
I ask that you suspend any opinions, either negative or positive,
about these compounds.
Whatever you believe their value to be,
they continue to have profound effects wherever we find their use,
whether it's contemporary western culture or in the Amazon rainforest.
It was in the '50s that the ayahuasca churches
started going public.
From... there was a kind of transition from the indigenous Indians
in South America to the mestizo people in the cities.
And then these churches, the Santo Daime church
and the UDV church a little later, started doing ceremonies
that made the ayahuasca accessible not just to Indians
but to urban people in the big cities,
who were as far from the shamans as we are.
In the early 1990s, the UDV established a branch of their church
in the United States.
In the late '90s, the U.S. Customs Department
along with the DEA intercepted a shipment of ayahuasca.
The church protested the government action.
They contended that it violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act
and the case was heard in the U.S. Supreme Court.
And in February, 2006, their decision was announced.
And it was a unanimous decision on the side of the UDV.
Why is it that in the entire Western world
these substances that have been found to be so interesting
by hundreds of cultures for thousands of years are prohibited?
How did these cultures that consider themselves to be enlightened,
democratic and scientific, get to declaring plants illegal?
It can seem weird but there's clearly something deep
and revealing about the nature of these societies.
Our society values alert problem-solving consciousness
and it devalues all other states of consciousness.
Any kind of consciousness that is not related
to the production or consumption of material goods
is stigmatized in our society today.
Of course, we accept drunkenness.
We allow people some brief respite from the material grind.
A society that subscribes to that model is a society
that is going to condemn states of consciousness
that have nothing to do with the alert problem-solving mentality.
And if you go back to the 1960s when there was a tremendous upsurge
of exploration of psychedelics,
I would say that the huge backlash that followed that
had to do with a fear on the part of the powers that be
that if enough people went into those realms
and those experiences, the very fabric of the society we have today
would be picked apart and most importantly,
those in power at the top would not be in power at the top anymore.
There was an optimism that was ungrounded,
that the Vietnam was happening, that all this real stuff was going on
and that the psychedelic movement wasn't really addressing that
in a real way. And that Timothy and that bunch
sold us a false bill of goods that didn't really work.
We are now, whether we like it or not,
in the psycho-chemical age.
In the future it's not going to be what book you read.
It's going to be what chemicals do you use
to open or close your consciousness.
Chemicals can help us learn faster,
chemicals can help us expand or contract our consciousness.
The atmosphere in the 1960s was,
we are doing research here, we are dedicating our lives
to trying just about everything on the planet.
So we would try it, then we would talk about it,
then we would evaluate it. We regarded ourselves
more or less as spiritual pioneers.
The way I look at the '60s, you can see it as a kind of failed attempt
at a mass cultural voyage of initiation.
So people would try to go out into these other realities,
but they didn't have a basis for it.
There weren't wisdom traditions, elders,
there weren't connections of shamanic lineages.
So people would go out and kind of smash apart.
Timothy Leary really so discredited a scientific approach
to studying this. He started off doing interesting research
and then got into advocating use
in a way that was incredibly threatening.
Culturally, we reacted
and politically,
it became impossible to do this sort of research.
Funding agencies didn't make resources available,
regulatory agencies increased the practical hurdles
for initiating this kind of research
and I think people who had interest in research of this type
largely were discredited
because of their interest in the research.
Social, political, scientific issues that came together
pushed these drugs out of the scientific marketplace.
The public opinion in many cases
had become that psychedelic research was dangerous.
The lay public was uninformed about the true nature
of these compounds and what their importance may be
in the understanding of perception itself.
One of the tragedies to me
is that the clinical research on these substances
pretty much stopped around 1970,
and for me it's especially tragic
because I really believe that these substances played a major role
in the development of our philosophy and thinking throughout the world.
What a lot of people don't realize is that psychiatry up until the '50s,
the field in general had no concept
that neurochemistry played any role in emotion or behavior
which today seems really bizarre. And the discovery of LSD
and its potent effects on the human psyche
occurred almost contemporaneously with the discovery of serotonin
as a molecule in the brain.
And it was really when people looked at the structure of serotonin
and compared it with LSD that they really began to think,
"Maybe neurochemistry plays a role in brain chemistry
"and behavioral states."
If LSD had not been discovered,
I doubt we would have had any of the drugs we have,
at least not as quickly as we do for treating depression and so forth.
Once these drugs became abused and scandalized,
psychiatry had to really work hard to distance themselves
from any valid scientifically meritorious relationship
with psychedelics.
Being a psychiatrist and saying you want to learn or study
about psychedelics, it's not that well received.
And I made one mention one time
and was discouraged from really bringing it up again
for actually a number of years.
For cultural reasons, the whole class of compounds
got pulled off the clinical bench
and no research has gone on for 40 years.
So, scientifically,
I can't imagine a more exciting area to be pursuing.
How does one go about studying these plants and compounds?
Plants and compounds which produce unimaginable experiences
and appear to shed light on some of humanity's greatest mysteries.
In order to answer that question, Dr. Strassman conducted
the first human psychedelic research in a generation.
One of the things that I had established early on
was being able to discriminate
between studies in the scientific realm
and recreational use, but in the early 1980s,
I reviewed all of that literature and could pretty well establish
on that if people were really carefully screened
and supervised and then followed up, that the incidents
of adverse reactions to LSD and related psychedelics drugs
was extremely low.
The drug or the compound or the chemical that seemed
like the best candidate to sort of reopen the U.S. front
on psychedelic research would be DMT.
It was really exciting for me because this was the first study
in a generation and not only that,
despite the fact that DMT had been used safely
in earlier studies and it was this natural component of the brain,
DMT is one of the most profound and potent psychedelics known.
So, it wasn't just an initiation of clinical research,
it was a reinitiation of clinic research
with an extremely potent drug.
I was of the strong opinion that you could do these studies
and Rick agreed.
So, we had a number of discussions and at some point,
the discussion came up, "Dave, what if I do all this paperwork
and spend all this time and get to the end of things
and I'm ready to go and I can't get the DMT?"
And that was a real possibility because clinical grade DMT
wasn't a chemical you could just buy off-the-shelf somewhere.
And I told Rick, "If you get to that point and no one will make it, then I'll do it."
And ultimately, Rick got to that point and I made it.
The design of the study was fairly straightforward.
Give people DMT and measure as many variables as possible.
I had to sort of anticipate a lot of objections
that would come my way from the regulatory agencies
that oversee this kind of research.
So, that point began a two-year process
of dealing with not that many regulatory agencies,
but fairly monolithic ones.
One sort of sidelight of the protocol
was the involvement of a psychiatrist from UCLA named Daniel Freedman.
He was kind of one of the grand old men
of American psychiatry. And actually, he was one of the people
who in the '50s and '60s got their start with psychedelic research.
And the main thing that Danny Freedman told Rick,
told us was, "Don't even get close to psychotherapy.
"Forget about treating mental illness or alcoholism or anything.
Forget that. That's where all the hysteria is,
that's where all the fears get up.
"You're a scientist, Rick, approach it as a scientist.
"Do basic simple measurements, look at heart rate,
cardiovascular parameters, you won't get in trouble doing that.
You can get it funded and it's solid science."
Rick did what he said. But then he still was able
to get these accounts of what happened,
and that wasn't in the plan.
That wasn't really what was proposed in the studies that were funded
and that wasn't what Danny talked about.
But those were the spin-off that really made it interesting.
Rick Strassman was advertising in some magazine somewhere
about wanting volunteers for a particular study
in a psychotropic, and I didn't really know what...
I didn't know DMT from STP at that time.
I remember reading that and thinking, "Oh, my God, this is bad.
I'd better get involved in this
and make sure that somebody doesn't get hurt
and that at least there be some sensitivity
towards what this stuff is really about."
I met Rick's research nurse at a party
and she heard me talking about...
that I had used peyote ceremonially.
And she took me aside and said,
"There's something that you might be interested in.
We're looking for volunteer subjects,
for some unusual research."
I was a little concerned that the study participants
might be a little obnoxious. Maybe that's not the right word,
but people that were just seeking to do a lot of drugs,
and they were very professional people.
There were varying degrees
as to how much hallucinogen use they had been through.
It seemed like there were some people that it felt like
they had made it their life mission
to experience every kind of substance out there.
And then other people who I think were just interested
for their own personal growth and... or curiosity.
Once we actually got into the preparation for the actual trips,
Rick asked me about roller coasters.
"Do you like roller coasters, the sensation of going up really high
and then slamming back down towards Earth?"
And I said, "No, I hate them, they're horrible."
And he said, "Not good."
I just wanted to go with the experience,
learn as much as I could, absorb as much as I could
and be humble to it.
The idea of legally sanctioned psychedelics
was just very compelling.
Plus, you're in a hospital,
so should you get that uncomfortable experience that you're dying,
you're with doctors
in a very safe environment, from that point of view.
I mean, this is really very cutting edge,
very out there, it was high risk
and people knew what they were getting into
and they wanted to have the extra reassurance
and I was glad, actually, to have a crash cart in the room
and a team in the hospital to respond to any emergencies.
You're in this hospital room and there's all the sounds
and the smells, and just the prior experiences
of being in the hospital. All these negative things come back,
so there was the whole environment to be overcome.
Because little did I know that it didn't matter where I was,
I wasn't going to be in my body.
I was going to be out in the universe and it didn't matter
where you launched from. It could be a hospital room,
it could be the jungle in the Amazon, it didn't matter where you were
because you weren't gonna stay there.
Set and setting is so important, it's even more important
than the substance, more important than the substance.
Set and setting is everything.
Now, what is the set and setting when you are blindfolded?
The set and setting is not what you're seeing,
you're not seeing anything.
The set and setting is your internal self.
The things that you have learned,
the capacities that you have achieved,
the conditions of your own psyche and psychology,
these are your set and setting.
It's the medicine combined with or interacting with
the set and setting that creates an effect of safety,
of trust, of comfort, and of resourcefulness.
That makes it possible for you to take some big leaps
and receive some big gifts
and if that's not there, you just get terrified.
So, I didn't really have physical fears
so much that they would die or have a stroke.
I did have some fears about people's mental health,
especially with some of the higher doses.
We gave one gentlemen who had a lot of experience with the drug
one dose, and he didn't think it took him far enough.
So then we gave him a higher dose and he was gone, he was really gone.
It reminded me of something from The Exorcist.
He just sat bolt up in the bed and his eyes opened up
and they were completely dilated and black and I almost thought
he was going to turn his head completely around
and I remember looking at Rick and Rick looking at me
and I thought, "Oh, my God, he's gone, I hope he comes back,"
and he did.
The countdown was like counting down,
preparing for your death, like waiting to surrender.
And you'd feel the coldness,
and the coldness just going through your veins.
And it's really indescribable, it's hard to...
It's like ice going through your veins.
And the next thing that would happen, besides my racing heart,
is this burning sensation would happen on the back of my neck.
This was reliable, this was like clockwork.
This happened every time that you shot me up with DMT.
And then there would be a hum and the hum would get louder
and louder, and to the point where it broke apart everything
that I was or knew. it was just this...
It just got louder and louder until you just had to surrender
to the sound.
And then you were there.
I would get a warm, full feeling, a golden feeling in my chest
before it went to my head.
I'd feel this warm rod about an inch and a half in diameter
start growing up inside my central channel.
It'd come up slow, warm up my chest, go up through my head
and slow down and put tremendous pressure
in my sinuses behind my eyes and slow down and start to grow
and extend the skin behind my forehead
about one inch behind my hairline.
I was afraid it was going to pop my skin a few times
'cause it was a very physical feeling.
About an inch and a half, two inches above my skull,
when it popped through there, then the psychedelic trip would start.
I thought I died.
I saw the white clouds,
the renaissance white fluffy clouds
with the gods and the angels and all that stuff is what I saw.
I thought I was dying and going out but I did take a quick look
at Cynthia and a quick look at Rick because I had my eyes open
and they were both there watching, looking very calm.
I go, "That's really good news, my body looks fine."
So, I didn't know whether it was my birth I was re-experiencing,
my death which was yet to come because I know that time crumbles,
the linearity of time is totally meaningless in these states.
You are at the God head,
the point where all time folds in on itself.
More and more layers of my humanity start peeling off.
Finally, almost the last layer
and I can't even describe what it is.
But at some reaches way in there,
there is the last layer of that which defines you
as a human being and it goes click.
You are no longer a human being.
In fact you are no longer anything you can identify.
There was no concept of time, it was so disorienting.
I was so terrified, I have never in my entire life
been so terrified to be blasted out of my body,
to leave my body behind,
to be going at warp speed backwards through my own DNA
out the other end into the universe.
And so I went right into this white light.
As soon as I went into it, I lost any sense of being different,
any sense of what I was doing, past, any sense of future.
It was absolutely blissful and euphoric
and I just felt like it wasn't I.
I was everything, I was the light.
There was no sense of separation, no shadows,
no differences, no past, no future.
It was all present and white yellow light.
Then I felt myself falling out of this light and as I fell out of it,
I could feel the light was like a glow like the sun, with flames coming out
and lapping out and I could already start to feel
this tremendous separation.
I reached across and suddenly I'm in the universe
in this huge void with these beings on the other side.
And I put out my hands and this incredible rainbow of pink light
went between me and these entities
and I was trying to make it be like a white light
but it was this incredible pink light,
this energy of love,
this capacity of love that we as human beings have
that I was trying to just send to them.
This meteor-like trip through the infinite space
of the interior consciousness is,
up pops the picture puzzle pattern door
and I'm now whizzing through this sucker
like if it was nothing, I'm flying through it,
but now I know what the picture puzzle pattern door is.
The picture puzzle pattern door is the farthest reaches
of your humanity.
This is the doorway into what defines you
as a human being.
When you go past that, you stop being human to a degree
and the further you get past this point,
the further away you go from being a human being.
But right here, this picture puzzle pattern door is everything.
It's everything, it's what defines you as a human being.
This is your... This picture puzzle pattern door is you.
This is like the actual core
of where all of reality is emanating from.
This is where meaning comes from.
Symbols were pouring out, they were intertwined.
Every symbol and letter and in every language
was pouring out of this point.
And I looked around at my environment and I was trying to absorb everything,
to understand, but there were all of these machines or structures
or things that I had never seen before,
that I had no idea what they were. And I was like a caveman
in a computer lab.
I didn't have any idea but I knew in my intellectual awareness
that this was a very advanced civilization or life forms,
or whatever they were, they were so far advanced
from what we know here on Earth.
There's one state in it, I call it "the hobby horses."
And they're interlocking, reticulating,
vibrating hobby horses.
And I use that, that's what they seem like to me.
They interlock and they form a visual pattern
that seems infinite in scape. And then you're on the inside,
outside, inside, every side.
And so it's less possible to use...
Words start to escape you.
The texture of the space was very much like an animated Mexican tile.
It seemed to be hyper vivid in color in a Technicolor sense
but also very clay-like and earthen, like with an earthen...
Pointing towards Earth but not really being of Earth.
There was no "I."
There was just a sense of a witness being suspended
in this incredible vaulted space, like a cathedral
made out of a stained glass of all imaginable colors.
Unbelievable brilliance and saturation of color,
just this amazing pattern in this gigantic dome.
It felt like the size of a small planet.
And there were these winged beings.
I don't remember exactly what they looked...
but they were like angels, something like angels,
that were majestically flying through the space.
But there was something about the quality of how they were flying
that was unique. I had never seen anything like it.
It was like... I don't know, the sense of another realm that was there.
At some point, there was this implicit sense,
"This is the divine realm, this is the divine realm."
And it was not like a thought,
but it was like this implicit kind of grokking recognition.
It was all very, very impersonal until I got to the space
where I realized that I was in the area where souls await rebirth.
And I was there and I had been there so many times before.
I recognized it and this incredible transcendent peace came over me.
I have never in my life ever felt such peace.
Everything was stripped away, every hope, every fear,
every attachment to the material world was completely stripped out of me.
I was free to just be the essence of a soul.
After the medicine wore off, there is that familiar sensation
of coming back into the body.
I do remember that was part of almost all of those experiences,
of coalescing back into sensory awareness
and a sense of having a body
and of that becoming a little more substantial
and then I say, "Yeah, here I am and I live in a body and I'm okay."
So, Laura removes the eyeshades,
and not really with my eyes open quite yet,
I ask, "How long was I gone?"
'Cause I needed to know.
And Rick chimes in, "15 minutes."
For a moment I'm shocked, I'm like...
My mind has to try to catch up because now the whole cognitive dissonance
of the experience has to catch up.
I was gone for 15 minutes.
1,000 years of experience
in 15 minutes.
Well, to say the least, it was profound.
It was profound.
It's amazing. It's amazing what a human being can experience
in a hospital bed.
I mean, they can experience almost the whole universe;
life, death, everything in between.
This is not some recreational thing,
and I don't believe anybody should enter this lightly.
It is life transformative.
It will perhaps shake you enough to realize that you need to be awake
to the fact that you don't know.
And that is the beginning of starting to know.
What we see here is such a tiny part of what is real.
I get really frustrated because of course there is no way
to prove that where I went was deep space,
that I encountered other entities,
other life forms that exist in this universe.
At some point maybe our civilization will become advanced enough
and we will throw off these anchors of impossible thought,
that these things are impossible,
that everything that exists, exists where we can see it.
I wrapped up the studies in '95
and really just had to take a break for a couple of years.
I was aware of a growing sense of discomfort with what I was doing
because I just couldn't explain it.
And it seemed to me if I couldn't model and explain what was going on
that I was doing, and just bringing people to the edge
of these kinds of experiences, it seemed like I ought to,
that it was a little irresponsible to be pushing people off the cliff
like that, without really knowing exactly what it was
and accepting and understanding
and feeling comfortable with that model.
And I think what began dawning on me
after awhile once I stopped the study
was that I was really dealing with a spiritual phenomenon.
What do these experiences say about the nature of reality,
the nature of our minds or the function of our brain
that we can so quickly shift into these alternate realities?
Let's take a step back and consider how these experiences
inform us about ourselves, our consciousness
and the symbiosis of the two.
It started seeming to me that what was happening with DMT,
particularly with respect to some of these reports
of entering parallel or alternate or free-standing parallel realms
of existences,
that that indeed was what their consciousness was doing.
The chemistry of their brain, which is the organ of consciousness,
was being changed by DMT in such a way
that they could then receive information
that we weren't able to receive normally.
Yes, there's the experiences from DMT and ayahuasca
and they have their function.
But if we also look at what it enables us to see...
It just rips that filtering mechanism away for a few minutes.
And for a few minutes you're immersed
in this raw data sphere of input,
of sensory input, of memories, of associations.
It seems like the brain builds reality out of these things,
what you're experiencing, what you have experienced
and how you associate and synthesize these things together
to tell yourself a story essentially about what's going on,
where you are in space and time.
It's the brain that helps us to process all this information
and to create for us a rendition of what our world is all about,
but we're trapped within that brain.
However, in spiritual experiences
where people feel that they get beyond the self
and certain types of psychedelic experiences
where you have incredible sensory and other types of phenomenon,
people really feel like they are able to kind of get outside of their brain.
We have to take a very big look at what is going on within them
when they have the experience and try to understand
how it happens physiologically and try to make sense of it
from the subjective perspective
as well as from the objective perspective.
I don't think you can just say, "Let's just explain it away"
on the basis of science.
What I was doing early on when I was hearing these reports
was interpreting them, calling them psychological
or brain chemistry aberrations or whatever,
that there was a part of the brain that was being dinged
that was responsible for the alien appearance phenomenon.
This is not a new phenomenon. Entities in altered states
have been recognized for an extremely long time
in many cultures over the millennia.
Helpers, spirit assistants, angels, all of these different entities
have been fairly common throughout man's experience
of altered states and through much of man's mythology.
I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility
that people are in some way interacting with some intelligence
or sentient being or something that exists at some level
that's not in this three dimensional physical plane.
I'm looking at it from a sense of, "Okay, is the drug healing you?
Is it helping you and is it giving you the tools?
"What are you bringing back?"
What you bring back, I think, has to be something more than,
"There are these entities out there."
The best psychedelic explorers are people who realize
that even the truths they see on a trip are not truths,
but new models, new what-ifs, alternative frames.
Unless there is a map and a clear methodology,
then one will just have a variety of different experiences.
All these various experiences that have been reported from NDEs,
near-death experiences, alien abductions,
alien encounters, sexual ecstasy,
I believe all of these experiences in fact are fractals.
If we understand the concept of fractal geometry,
no matter how small it is,
it contains everything that is in the larger picture.
And thus, that validates profoundly all these various experiences.
To discount the phenomenon as hallucinatory or imaginary,
I think it's maybe more useful to look at a mechanism of action.
If it is real then perhaps how does it work?
Look, there's extraordinarily regular phenomenon
that come up with these things, that are clearly linked in many ways
to these larger human issues around mysticism
or religious experience or encounters with other entities.
And here we have it, and if you can't go in there
and really go in there and account for this material
inside your neuroscientific framework, you're leaving a huge gap.
You gotta account for this stuff the way you gotta account
for dreams, the way you have to account
for all sorts of psychoactive responses.
Using DMT as an explanatory model,
as kind of the mediator between our consciousness
and the consciousness of a non-corporeal reality, it's handy.
With DMT there are no words. I would try
to wrap a mathematical vocabulary around the experience afterwards.
I specialized in the metaphor of vibration
and how vibrations in fluids created form in fluid.
And that would be the key
to the relationship between the spiritual realm
and the ordinary realm.
This was the window that was opened by DMT.
Using psychedelic drugs or other types of pharmacological substances
can help to induce a state where people feel
that they touch a deeper sense of reality
where they understand reality on a more fundamental level
and they gain a great deal of insight and knowledge into the ways
in which the world works
and how they are as a human being supposed to relate to that world.
DMT is somehow, it seems to me in my experience,
more of a breakthrough than LSD, mushrooms, peyote and so on.
It's instructive, it's more supportive of future evolution
and the creation of the future. And it is, in itself, more of a mystery.
How could this little stuff produce something that has intelligence?
It is actually a doorway into another reality.
So, what is the nature of reality
and the nature of how we as human beings experience it?
Can we understand it better?
Are we capable of understanding reality
on some very fundamental levels,
and what do we need to do in order to prepare for that?
There are parallel universes, it seems,
at least that's a theory in modern physics.
There is dark matter, which is a huge amount of the matter
of the universe, maybe 95% or more.
As radical an idea, it's just a logical extension in some ways
of instead of using a machine to see more
than we can normally can see, we're using the brain.
There are fields which are undiscovered so far
which have nothing to do with anything that is discovered so far.
The gravitation field was unknown before the year 1604.
The electromagnetic fields unknown before the year 1830
or something. All of these, what we call fundamental fields
of mathematical physics, are new discoveries.
Dark energy is of even newer discovery and beyond that
are maybe more discoveries yet coming beyond our cosmos itself
and higher dimensions as they say.
I still don't have very much use for the concept of God,
but I do believe that there are higher levels,
transcendent levels of reality. And I'm actually now starting
to really believe that the brain is not the source of consciousness,
is not really who we are but is more like a radio tuner
for something way bigger.
Are these experiences spiritual experiences or otherwise,
are they created by physiological processes
or is the brain itself responding to something that's going on?
And the fact that somebody may actually find
a way of turning on their brain to spiritual experiences,
again, I'm not sure that necessarily diminishes
the reality or the realness of what those experiences are about.
If the pharmacology or the psychopharmacology
of psychedelic experiences turned out to be essentially the same
as religious or spiritual experiences,
it would help us to understand where these experiences are occurring
within the human brain.
I'm actually quite convinced
that we're probing the biological basis
of moral and ethical behavior.
I think these primary religious experiences
really are at the bedrock of the world's religions.
The research and knowledge and speculation
about the pineal body and DMT
is in fact the hand of God
that is interacting with our natural evolution
to stimulate and accelerate
the process of redemption of individual
and of collective global enlightenment.
Because of my ayahuasca experiences,
I consider myself a spiritual person.
I know things now that I could never have known otherwise.
This experience is so familiar for a lot of different people
and is so easily acquired and so much information comes
with so little effort that it is a kind of a miracle.
It's a miraculous way for us to transcend ordinary reality
and obtain maybe an intimation of what's necessary for survival.
Ranging from new forms of medical treatment
to a better understanding of the universe
to life-changing spiritual revelations,
these natural tools offer us the ability to seek greater knowledge.
Tools that could positively affect life on our planet.
Let's answer Dr. Strassman's question, "If so, so what?"
Because of the collapse of consciousness,
spiritual and scientific knowledge split apart.
Both these modes of knowing have to come together.
In other words, science and technology
from a traditional religious perspective is not an extra.
It is part of the process
by which humanity is going to evolve into its next stage.
How do we find the right form for psychedelics in the future?
Assuming that psychedelics are part of the human future.
At the moment they're still generally repressed
and suppressed and illegal,
if that were to change, how would we begin to construct
a kind of system that would allow
for a rational, mature exploration of psychedelics?
I think the name of the game is to show science
the pertinence of this somewhat outlandish realm,
and it's not just crazy stuff that shouldn't be considered as,
let's say, not even worthy of interest or illegitimate.
I actually think because it's declared off bounds,
it just makes it interesting to start with.
But one doesn't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater
and I think it's really important to stay faithful to science.
What does it mean?
Why is there a part of the brain that seems to be,
for lack of a better word, a God detector?
What's the evolutionary advantage to having some part of the brain
that seems to trigger and mediate experiences
of the transcendent?
The kabbalah is revealing to us that the pineal body
is actually the very edge of the higher dimension
that is penetrating into our lower dimension
and it is located precisely in the middle of the brain.
I can remember reading about Descartes, thinking that it was
actually the interface between the spiritual dimension
and the dimension of matter. And I remember studying that
as a foolish idea from our history.
And now it seems actually like a very interesting idea.
What we are looking for out there is really in here.
It is the doorway, it is the gate.
We focus on the transformative effect of the psychedelics,
but it's also true that the reverse is true
that it requires transformation in order to embrace psychedelics.
It's one of the tricky paradoxes of postmodernism,
that psychedelics both require and produce a transformative effect.
We have severed our connection to spirit.
That's what our society has done.
It has sought to persuade us that the material realm is the only realm.
And the only way we're going to recover
is to reconnect with spirit. And I truly believe
we need the help of the plants in order to do that.
Part of our work is to respect these medicines
and then to change the culture enough that people doing them
can be respected and held. And not everybody needs to do them,
not everyone should or wants to, but that it isn't pushed to the side.
And so part of that does involve then, research,
because that's how in our reductionist society, we validate things.
With the passing of the years and the opportunity for sober reflection,
I think that there is growing appreciation
that there may be something to gain from studying these compounds,
that there's a lot that we can learn and there may very well may be
treatment models, particularly for patient populations
for whom conventional treatments are ineffective,
for whom the psychedelic model, when utilized optimally,
may provide great benefit.
I think the most important thing that we could do right now
that would be fairly straightforward to do
is to ask and answer the question of whether ayahuasca could help people
who have drug and alcohol abuse.
Given that we know that DMT
and similar alkaloids
have a very strong effect on the same receptor sites
that are involved in depression
and the notion that most people,
in my experience, who use drugs and alcohol,
are self medicating a deep depression or an anxiety.
I've had permission now, over the last few years
to utilize psilocybin, which is the active alkaloid
in hallucinogenic mushrooms, in the treatment of patients
with advanced stage cancer who have anxiety.
We're treating the anxiety, not the cancer.
Now, psilocybin is
4-phosphoryloxy- N,N-dimethyltryptamine,
so obviously from a chemical structure point of view, very similar to DMT.
Ultimately what I want to do is see these things used
in the way that they were used traditionally,
to heal people, help people
and right now helping people come to terms with dying.
It changes your whole relationship to your death,
your impending death.
Believe it or not you're going to die.
And now with this tool of having crossed over already,
some of the fear around that will disappear.
Now I'm beginning to wonder whether consciousness
may actually survive biological death, that maybe the model
that we've been working under in psychiatry
and the behavioral pharmacology model is just wrong.
It's backwards, actually, that consciousness is primary
in the universe and matter is a result of.
Utilizing substances like DMT or 5-methoxy-DMT,
may really help us prepare
by practicing a transient dying experience.
Thus far we're observing very positive effects
in regards to the nature of the experience during the session
and then subsequent effects on mood regulation and anxiety control,
pain perception and overall quality of life
for cancer patients.
By and large, our subjects do quite well
in the time they have remaining.
For those people who do come to terms with it,
part of it is a recognition that these psychedelics open up a space
that they weren't aware existed and sort of give them a vision
of what could be past death as well as a better perspective
on the accomplishments they've made in life,
a better feeling about what they've done in their own lives.
I think all people who have psychedelic trips
and meditations and so on are poking more or less
into the same higher realm and receiving some information there.
If we can develop this into... This could be absorbed into ordinary science
that we could approach with the scientific method and so on,
then our intelligence, our capability of survival
on planet Earth would be increased.
We're a dying species, we live on a dying planet,
we're killing the planet. So our disease is extremely serious.
Therefore, we're desperate to find new information,
ideas and so on that can transcend. We have to evolve
and I think our intellectual evolution
may be predicated upon the psychedelic pioneers.
It's so easy to change the world.
That's the kind of thing that you can see on psychedelics
if you don't get trapped
in the beauty and awe
of the psychedelic experience itself.
It's like looking through the chandelier of reality
from a different vantage point.
You can now project through those crystals in another way
and it's beautiful. But okay...
now come back, now come back.
I think if I ever were to resume giving people psychedelics,
particularly DMT, it wouldn't be just to kind of tinker
with brain chemistry and just see what's happening.
I think one of the things I also learned in the research
is that you just don't wanna give drugs and see what happens.
that's a little... I don't know if "callous" is the word,
but that's the first word that comes to mind.
I think if you're really gonna open people up like that,
you need to do it for a purpose, not just for scientific curiosity.
and I'd like to be helpful rather than just sort of smart or clever.
To my mind there is this kind of two-edged sword
simultaneously opening up to the numinous world,
to the world of messages, the world of spirits,
the world of entities, and at the same time,
rigorously taking that material into the acid bath of neurology
into sociology, into the ongoing construction of reality.
And that the wisdom that these things bring
is this very tricky mixture of authentic religious experience
with gods and messages and clear signs
and a sort of remarkable mirror of the mind.
The curiosity, perhaps the uniqueness of the human creature
is that we live in both realms.
We have the ability for spiritual experience
and we have the ability for physical experience.
The agenda of the spirit world, if there is an agenda,
is to allow us to experience our full potential
and to deliver our full potential,
and maybe the choices that we are making right now
as a civilization and a society rebound far beyond ourselves.
I think DMT is a forcible reminder that there's a lot more about reality,
the universe, ourselves,
the biosphere, whatever, that there's a lot more to it
than we imagine.
It seems our reality is not the only reality.
Occasionally, the cracks reveal themselves
and may even want to be discovered.
As humans, we are creatures that thirst for knowledge.
We spend time, money, and infinite energy
searching for it in schools, churches, in business, and in technology.
Knowledge is power, and thus our greatest quest.
Dimethyltryptamine, a molecule with a complex name
and the simplest ability to unlock the door to another dimension
and perhaps, just perhaps, our future evolution.