CHRISTIAN MEULI: I saw this 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 cannot 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're 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.
DR. MCKENNA: 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.
GRAHAM HANCOCK: 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 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?
DR. MCKENNA: The conventional wisdom 30, 40 years ago was
that these things had no real function,
they were just sort of physiological noise,
but that's a very naive understanding.
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 system
are wired to receive this experience?
Must be that, you know,
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.
LEANNA STANDISH: 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?
RALPH METZNER: 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 people's lives
in their communities, their families and our society.
JEREMY NARBY: 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 dialogue.
DMT, the Spirit Molecule,
you know, 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.
RICK STRASSMAN: 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.
JOEL BASKT: 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 was correlated with mystical
and near-death experiences.
I had this theory that there is a big similarity between
psychedelics and experiences that were possible
with a lot of mediation. Um...
and 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.
STEVEN BARKER: I think there may be a role for DMT in
explaining any number of hallucinatory phenomena
that man has experienced though out 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.
ANDREW NEWBERG: 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.
I mean, 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.
DR. STRASSMAN: 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 everyday normal perceptual activity.
Too much DMT and things become very psychedelic,
or not enough DMT and 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,
and 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 mean, 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.
JAMES KENT: 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.
DR. BARKER: 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.
DR. NICHOLS: 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.
DR. STRASSMAN: Yeah, I'm very interested in Ayahuasca.
When I began my studies in the early 1990's 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 pre-literate 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 and you can drink DMT and it's orally active,
so it starts working in a half hour and 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.
KENT: 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.
KAT HARRISON: 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 into the biggest punch
that we can, I don't think that generally
that 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 that 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.
HANCOCK: 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, 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.
DAVIS: 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.
TERENCE MCKENNA: 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 very-- he was a 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 whereever we find their use, whether it's
contemporary Western culture or in the Amazon rain forest.
It was in the 50's that the Ayahuasca churches
started going public,
that 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 then 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 in Brazil
who are as far from the shamans as we are.
In the early 1990's the UDV established a branch
of their church in the United States.
In the late 90's 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.
NARBY: 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.
HANCOCK: 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 1960's 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.
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: There was an optimism that was ungrounded,
you know, that 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.
TIMOTHY LEARY: 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.
RALPH ABRAHAM: The atmosphere in the 1960's 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.
DANIEL PINCHBECK: The way I look at the 60's, 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, some people would
go out and kind of smash apart.
Timothy Leary really so discredited
a scientific approach to studying this
because 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.
DR. BARKER: 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 50's, 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, you know, 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.
DR. STRASSMAN: Once these drugs became abused and scandalized,
psychiatry had to really work hard to distance themselves
from any valid scientific, 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.
DR. STRASSMAN: 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 1980's 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 psychedelic 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.
DR. NICHOLS: It was really, it was 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, you know,
"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, you know, 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 50's and 60's 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 had 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 subjects, 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, you know 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 kind of 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; you know 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 was 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.
SUSAN: Your in this hospital room and there's all the sounds
and the smells and just the prior experiences of being in
the hospital you know, 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 going to 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.
ROBERT WEISZ: 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, I mean 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, you know, counting down for your--
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,
I mean, 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...(hums loudly)
And it just got louder and louder
until you just had to surrender to the sound,
and then you were there.
DR. MEULI: I would get a warm full feeling, a golden feeling
in my chest before it went to my head.
I would feel this warm rod about an inch and a half in diameter
start growing up inside my central channel.
It would come up, and sort of 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 because 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, you know,
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 Cindy and a quick look at Rick because I had my eyes open,
and they were both there watching, looking very calm.
And I go, "That's really good news.
My body looks fine."
STONE: 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 godhead,
the point where all time folds in on itself.
More and more layers of my humanity start peeling off.
Finally, the last,
you know, almost the last layer,
and I can't even describe what it is,
but you have, at some reaches way in there
there is like 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.
DR. MEULI: 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 it was 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 that we-- this capacity of love that
we as human beings have that I was trying to just send to them.
PATRICIO: 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, it just, 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.
STONE: This is like
the actual core of where all of reality is
emanating from.
This is where meaning comes from.
Symbols where pouring out, they were intertwined,
every symbol or...
and letter and in every language
was pouring out of this point.
SUSAN: 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,
I was like a cave man 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.
STONE: 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--
um, you know, words start to escape you.
SPIROS: 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, you know,
like with an earthen...
pointing towards Earth but not really being of Earth.
WEISZ: 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 stained glass
of all imaginable colors,
unbelievable brilliance and saturation of color,
just this amazing pattern in this dome,
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 like,
but they were like angels, something like angels,
that were majestically kind of
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.
My sense was, 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.
WEISZ: After the medicine wore off,
there is that familiar sensation
of kind of coming back into the body.
And I do remember that, that was part of
almost all of those experiences,
of kind of coalescing back into sensory awareness
and a sense of having a body and of that becoming
a little more substantial, and then saying, "Oh yeah,
here I am and, I live in a body and I'm okay."
So Laura removes the eyeshades, and I ask,
not really with my eyes open quite yet,
I ask, "How long was I gone?" Because I needed to know.
And Rick chimes in, "Like 15 minutes".
For a moment I'm shocked, I'm like, you know,
my mind has to try to catch up because now the whole
cognitive dissonance of the experience has to--
has to catch up.
I was gone for 15 minutes.
A thousand years of experience
in 15 minutes.
Well, to say the least, it was profound.
It was, it was profound.
I mean, 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, you know,
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 it's--it's not, you know, that there--
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.
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 sort of
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, you know,
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 sorts of 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
sort of 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.
DR. NEWBERG: 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 were 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.
DR. NICHOLS: But I don't think it's out of the realm of
possibility that people are in some way interacting with some
sort of an 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
phenomena 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 gotta 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 sort of reality, it's handy.
DR. ABRAHAM: 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.
DR. NEWBERG: Using psychedelics 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, you know,
that is actually a doorway to another reality.
DR. NEWBERG: So what is the nature of reality and what is
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?
You know, 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 gravitational 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.
DR. NEWBERG: 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, 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.
DR. ABRAHAM: 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 forum
for psychedelics in the future?
Assuming 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 that the name of the game
is to show science
the pertinence of this somewhat outlandish realm,
and it's not just crazy stuff,
it 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 bath water 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.
DR. SLANDISH: 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.
So 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 post-modernism 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 that we need
the help of the plants in order to do that.
HARRISON: 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 a 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-dimethyltryptamin
so obviously from a chemical structure point of view,
you know, 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. ( laughs )
And now with this tool of having crossed over already,
some of the fear around that will disappear.
DR. SLANDISH: 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 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.
DR. NICHOLS: 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.
DR. ABRAHAM: 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 from 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, will 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.
I mean, 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 its beautiful, but...
okay, now come back.
You know? Now come back.
DR. STRASSMAN: 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 it's this kind of two-edged sword
of 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 kind of
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.
And 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, 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.
♪ ( female vocalist )