Introduction
DMT, whose full names are N,N-dimethyltryptamine, Nigerine, desoxybufotenine, 3-(2-dimethylaminoethyl)-indole is a white crystalline solid whose melting point is around 50 degrees Celsius. It’s cousin, 5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine is legally available to purchase in most countries. Psilocin, the active molecule in certain entheogenic mushrooms, contains dimethyltryptamine. DMT is derived from the naturally occurring amino acid tryptophan and is structurally related to the neurotransmitter serotonin. DMT is found in trace amounts in the brain, urine, spinal fluid and blood.
The pineal gland, which is also known as the 3rd eye, is the location of the creation of DMT. Its existence and purpose has yet to be properly explained. DMT exists in every person’s body and is even seen throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. All organisms have the two key enzymes necessary for the production of DMT which indicates that theoretically anything in nature can synthesize DMT. A certain psychedelic alchemist by the name of Alexander Shulgin reported that, [It] is simply, almost everywhere you look. Many individuals who experience the effects of DMT afterwards feel, with absolute certainty, that consciousness continues after death. They return with the idea of consciousness existing beyond the body, somehow woven into the fabric of the universe.
Basics
It is synthesized in the brain by the mysterious pineal gland, which is a small gland in the exact center of the human brain. DMT plays significant roles in birth, REM sleep, psychosis, death, near-death and mystical experiences and astral projection. Since there is almost nothing known about this mysterious molecule that is produced naturally by every human, it should not be put under the same category as LSD or made illegal, as it is currently.
DMT should not be treated as a drug in the traditional sense. DMT is present not only in the human brain, but also in several plants such as acacia, anadenanthera, mimos, piptadenia and virola. Obviously these plants have been around for perhaps longer than humans have, and yet, it was not until 1931 that DMT was first synthesized. It took scientists another 25 years to realize that it has hallucinogenic properties. The brain is a highly sensitive organ that does not like receiving toxins. The blood-brain barrier helps keep toxins and drugs out of the brain. The barrier is basically impenetrable. However, the brain seems to hunger for DMT as if it were brain food. It actively transports it across the blood-brain barrier right into its tissues. It is almost as if our brain needs DMT, like glucose, in order to function properly. There is no known drug that the brain takes into itself as with DMT. This is a great difference between DMT and any other psychedelic chemical.
There has long been an established agreement about a person having a subconscious 3rd eye for millenia. This 3rd eye is known as the pineal gland. It lies right in the center of the brain. It, however, was not always in the middle of the brain, or part of it. Forty-nine days after conception, the pineal gland becomes visible in the roof of the fetus mouth. This is also when a person’s gender becomes established. From there, it moves out of the mouth roof and into the direct center of the brain. Its positioning is strategic, to say the least, because of its close proximity to crucial emotional and sensory brain centers.
DMT Experiences
There are a few times in a person’s life when they have a psychedelic experience without the use of psychedelic drugs. From the evidence available from the latest research, these include: when a person is born, when a person is in REM sleep, during astral projections, during near-death experiences, during psychosis, and when a person dies. Of course, there is something that triggers these experiences. It is believed now that DMT causes a person to have psychedelic experiences during these times in a person’s life. Given that DMT is found readily in the mammalian brains such as those of human beings, this is a strong suggestion of such a reality.
Types of Experiences
Level I: Pre-visual experience
This stage is characterized by an interior flowing of energy/consciousness. It may be extremely intense. It may have a positive feeling content.
Level II: Vivid, brilliantly colored, geometric visuals
Here one is observing a patterned field, basically two-dimensional, although it may have a pulsating quality. One may remember having seen this before.
Transitional Phase: tunnel or breakthrough experience
One may see or fly through a tunnel (a passage to the next level), feeling as if one is going through a so-called hyperspace. A veil may part, a membrane may be rent. There is a breakthrough to another world (or perhaps even a series of breakthroughs). Alternatively, it may also happen that the transition from Level II to Level III is abrupt, almost instantaneous, with no experience of transition.
Level III: Three-or higher-dimensional space, possible contact with entities
This stage is characterized by the experience of being in an “objective” space, that is, a space of at least three dimensions in which objects or entities may be encountered. Sometimes the entities appear to be intelligent and communicating beings. This stage may be extremely energetic with an experience of everything happening incomprehensibly fast. Alternatively it may be relatively coherent. Travel is possible at Level III. One may, for example, assume the form and consciousness of a bird, and fly as a bird does. The limits of this stage, if any, are unknown. There may be transitions to further stages.
Effects
The psychedelic effects of DMT are mind-blowing, to say the least. As Strassman put it, It opens the door to worlds beyond our imagination. Shamans in the Amazon region of South America have had experiences with DMT since the 8th century B.C. They take in DMT usually by drinking an Ayahuasca or Yage brew in order to have intense spiritual experiences. It can produce powerful entheogenic experiences including true hallucinations, meaning visual experiences that are indistinguishable from Reality.
From the little amount of research that has been done, there are some amazing conclusions that have been found about its effects on the brain. Induced dimethyltryptamine experiences can include profound time-dilation, time travel, journeys to paranormal realms, and encounters with spiritual beings or other mystical/trans-dimensional modalities that, by most first hand accounts, defy verbal or visual description.
The subjective effects of smoked DMT are usually very intense, with consciousness usually overwhelmed by visual imagery. With eyes closed this may take the form of extremely complex, dynamic, geometric patterns, changing rapidly. Such a dose of DMT may produce a visual pattern consisting of overlapping annular patterns of small rhomboid elements all in saturated hues of red, yellow, green and blue. Gracie & Zarkov refer to this, or something similar, as “the chrysanthemum pattern.” The pattern itself seems to be charged with a portentous energy.
The state of consciousness characterized by amazing visual patterns seems to be a prelude to a more profound state, which subjects report as contact with entities described as discarnate, nonhuman or alien. There is often loss of body awareness. It is usually possible to think under the influence of DMT, but with larger doses it may become difficult to hold a thought, and sometimes confusion will occur. With a fully effective dose (e.g., 25 mg), the experience is usually so bizarre that an inexperienced person may believe that he or she has died, or is dying, especially if body awareness is lost. If this belief arises then it is important to remember that one will survive and return to ordinary consciousness.
In general, yielding to the temptation to believe that one has died is not helpful when navigating psychedelic states since the resultant anxiety will usually distract one from a scientific observation of what is going on. More experienced users, knowing that hitherto they have always survived, however weird the experience, can learn not to succumb to this anxiety.
DMT does an enormous amount to our consciousness. There are three types of experiences a person can have after taking DMT. The three categories are: personal, invisible, and transpersonal. Personal experiences stay within a person’s body and mind. These experiences include body-based feelings and mind-based thoughts. In this category, a person can resolve difficult personal problems. It can be thought of as a state in dealing with personal growth and understanding, just as dreams are. The invisible category is an encounter with seemingly solid and freestanding realities coexisting with this one. The happenings in this category are both unusual and difficult to understand.
Basically, in this category, a person makes contact with beings from a different dimension or parallel world-anywhere but earth, that is. The things experienced in this category shake the very foundations of Freudian psychology and many other platforms. However, test subjects, as a whole, report the same scenarios. The interesting thing to note is that only with DMT do people have contact with beings from a nonmaterial world. Finally, there are interpersonal experiences. These are perhaps the most bizarre experiences. These involved near-death and spiritual-mystical experiences.
A near death experience includes the sensation of rapid travel through a tunnel, sometimes called Hyperspace. Sometimes, a person is accompanied by music, voices songs. There is also the presence of other being, such as relatives, friends and spirits, such as angels. Feelings of great peace and clam are usually associated with this experience. These experiences presumably take place in the fifth dimension which is the lowest of the non-physical dimensions since Time, the fourth dimension, resides in Space, the third dimension. However, it may be soon discovered that these experiences actually occur in a dimension higher than the fifth, such as perhaps the dimensions experienced during a Salvia Divinorum experience.
The realization that a person is not ready to die comes upon them and they feel commanded to return to life. During the spiritual-mystical experiences, a person feels a greater appreciation for life and less fear of death. A person usually goes on more spiritual pursuits after such an experience. In this third category, people feel as if they have a contact with an unchanging, unborn, undying, and uncreated reality.
Theories on DMT
Given the fantastic nature of the DMT experience, there are several theories and ideas concerning what it may mean and how it relates to the reality that we perceive as being objective. The following list is a compilation, as it appears on the Lycaeum.
- There are no alien entities at all; it’s merely subjective hallucination. The DMT state may be interesting, even extremely interesting, but really there are no independently-existing alien entities to be found.
- DMT provides access to a parallel or higher dimension, a truly alternate reality which is, in fact, inhabited by independently-existing intelligent entities forming (in the words of Terence McKenna) “an ecology of souls.”
- DMT allows awareness of processes at a cellular or even atomic level. DMT smokers are tapping into the network of cells in the brain or even into communication among molecules themselves. It might even be an awareness of quantum mechanical processes at the atomic or subatomic level.
- DMT is, perhaps, a neurotransmitter in reptilian brains and in the older, reptilian parts of mammalian brains, Flooding the human brain with DMT causes the older reptilian parts of the brain to dominate consciousness, resulting in a state of awareness which appears totally alien (and sometimes very frightening) to the everyday mind.
- A non-human intelligent species created humans by genetic modification of existing primate stock then retreated, leaving behind biochemical methods for contacting them. The psychedelic tryptamines are chemical keys that activate certain programs in the human brain that were placed there intentionally by this alien species.
- The realm to which DMT provides access is the world of the dead. The entities experienced are the souls, or personalities, of the departed, which retain some kind of life and ability to communicate. The realm of dead souls, commonly accepted by cultures and societies other than that of the modern West, is now accessible using DMT.
- The entities experienced are beings from another time who have succeeded in mastering the art of time travel, not in a way which allows materialization but in a way which allows them to communicate with conscious beings such as ourselves.
- The entities are probes from an extraterrestrial or an extradimensional species, sent out to make contact with organisms such as ourselves who are able to manipulate their nervous systems in a way which allows communication to take place.
DMT Research
One doctor, by the name of Rick Strassman who wrote DMT: The Spirit Molecule has done extensive research on DMT. His research in 1990 was the first allowed study in 25 years on what was considered a psychedelic drug. With the help of his research and experiments, he came to amazing conclusions and results about DMT’s effects on the brain and its purposes. First of all, the pineal gland produces psychedelic amounts of DMT at extraordinary times in a person’s life. Birth is the first great event where this takes place.
When our consciousness, enters a fetus, it passes through the pineal gland and triggers the first primordial flood of DMT. Once we are born, the gland releases more DMT. For people who experience deep meditation, psychosis or near-death experiences, pineal DMT mediates these pivotal events. Finally, when we die, when our life force-our soul energy leaves the body again through the pineal gland, more DMT is released. A direct effect of the last release of DMT can be seen when examining near-death experiences, where an amazing amount of people that have had this experience, notice a tunnel of light.
DMT can cause one to start thinking about extremely complex scenarios and thoughts that may or may not be true, perhaps we may think of them as untrue because we have absolutely no knowledge about them. For example, DMT can provide regular, repeated, and reliable access to other planes of existence. Ordinarily, these planes cannot be perceived by the conscious mind because it is not designed to do so, initially. There are, theoretically, a significant amount of parallel universes. DMT may allow our receiver brain to see into those universes.
Perhaps, the strangest realms that DMT may lead a person into are those of so-called dark matter. Dark matter makes up at least 95% of the universe’s mass. This means that nearly all the matter in the universe is ‘invisible’. When one acknowledges this fact, they may then understand that what a person experiences with DMT is not some side effect of a drug, but most probably the actual opening of a gate into the unknown.
Very recent research has discovered that DMT activates the sigma-1 opioid receptor. Scientists have been searching for years for naturally occurring compounds that trigger activity in this receptor and have finally found it. What is particularly exciting is that a unique receptor for DMT, has never been identified before. According to Wikipedia, the sigma-1 receptor is a transmembrane protein expressed in many different tissue types. It is particularly concentrated in certain regions of the central nervous system. It has been implicated in myriad phenomena, including cardiovascular function, schizophrenia, clinical depression, the effects of cocaine abuse, and cancer. Scientists still have no idea why DMT would activate this protein, but this is the first exciting step in the direction of discovering yet one more aspect of DMT that has been known for ages by those who have used it.
The research that Dr. Strassman, as well as the countless responses by experiencers of DMT report that subjectively, the most interesting results were that high doses of DMT seemed to allow the consciousness of individuals to enter into non-corporeal, free-standing, independent realms of existence inhabited by beings of light who oftentimes were expecting the individuals, and with whom they interacted. Beings that have been interacted with have also been seen as mechanical elves. Since these supposed beings exist in a higher dimension than the one in which humans reside in, the projection by them as mechanical elves suggests that their true form or formlessness is quite different.
DMT’s Influence on Religion
It’s through astral projection and DMT release that the ancient prophets, mystics, and seers were able to see the visions that they saw. There have been many such experiences in many ancient belief systems, from Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita to Christianity’s New Testament. To give one well-known example of DMT’s role in advancing religious beliefs, the apocalypse account that John of Patmos had, which he wrote down in the Apocalypse/Revelation of John was an astral projection he had, induced after very intense meditation and the DMT became released that way, without having to take DMT from another source such as acacia bark that was very plentiful in his area. Thanks to DMT and the pineal gland, it’s how we’re able to communicate with the non-physical and higher dimensions naturally.
In the 8th chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, it demonstrates how to create the process of DMT release, which provides the human being to experience higher dimensions of existential reality, when it says “Close down the doors of the senses and place the mind in the heart. Then, while absorbed in meditation, focus all energy upwards to the head. Repeating in this state the divine name, the syllable OM, that represents the changeless Brahman, you will go forth from the body and attain the supreme goal.”
In the christian text of Matthew, Jesus is mentioned as saying that, The light of the body is the eye; if therefore your eye be single, your whole body shall be full of light..” Since the creator is referred to in the bible as being light, that statement suggests (at least in the Judeo-Christian belief system) an interdimensional contact with a higher being through the pineal gland. The single eye or pineal has always held a place of supreme importance in the religions of the East and mystical entities. This is why statues of Buddha always show him as if he was adorning a pine cone atop his head, why the world’s largest man-made pine cone is in the Vatican’s Court of the Pine Cone, why followers of Hinduism have a mark on their foreheads above and between their eyes, and why the word ‘pine’ is in the name pineal gland.
Even to this day, shamanic cultures (such as those in the Amazon) have had their entire worldviews shaped by their ritualistic consumption of the Ayahuasca brew that contains DMT. It’s quite possible that many of the magical-sounding and fantasy-like stories written about in religious and sacred texts were actually experiences that came from traveling through DMT hyperspace. Now as we find ourselves in the 21st century the journey continues and is being joined by more and more seekers of Truth and the wider horizon of Reality.
References
- Erowid. Edowid DMT Vault
- Lycaeum. Apparent Communication with Discarnate Entities Induced by Dimethyltryptamine
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