Kudos to Andrew for a very rational (though very speculative) foray into the conceptual possibilities inspired by experience of the DMT state and the entities revealed therein. Certainly the truth of this matter is, as the great psychonaut J.B.S. Haldane said, not only stranger than we imagine but stranger then we *can* imagine. It may take several lifetimes (or generations) for us 21st C. humans to get even a basic understanding of what has so recently been revealed to us by the use of DMT. The uninitiated may get an idea of the DMT experience and the variety of entities encountered therein by reading "340 DMT Trip Reports" at https://www.serendipity.li/dmt/340_dmt_trip_reports.htm
If the vapor is acrid, then your wick is definitely burning. :)
Big thanks for being brave enough to put your name behind seriously entertaining the possibilities you outline. Who knows what is really going on, but even if there is a small possibility that there is actually an "other" that you contact when you take DMT, then it is worth taking extremely seriously.
Fantastic piece Andrew. I believe you are into something worth researching and going deeper. The possibility that species out there in the cosmos/parallel universes can shift their paradigm from biology to some kind of artificial intelligence is fascinating. All the points you made are about 'DMT Entities' is something that I've been thinking about a lot for the past few years and since reading your previous book 'Alien Information Theory' it sparked even more my curiosity. Keep up with the great work you are doing!
A potential solution to the Fermi Paradox is that alien intelligence decided to use some kind of nanotechnology or something in our brains that allows communication with them only when we are "ready", and that "being ready" is defined to be the kind of society that would create an "Apollo Program" to study the inner workings of the mind through the use of psychedelics. In Star Trek the Prime Directive applied to civilizations that had not yet developed warp technology. In this case it might be "self-awareness technology." DMT may be a stepping stone along the way to the right "key" molecule that unlocks the best communication protocol.
More likely is that a sleeper program in our genetic code which activates when our awareness reaches a certain degree of development/alignment with purpose
Perhaps, within the DMT Realm we interface with the Gate Keepers, the Heyoka, the Jesters of a Disembodied conscious based Kingdom that we, as corporeal beings are Psychically underdeveloped to completely see or interface with on the total scale..
When I was in college in the late 1960's I too LSD or a regular basis on weekends. I friend brought three capsules of a very pure acid back form a holiday. Three of us consumed the three caps which were, unknown to us, were three doses in each cap and we were taking 1,500 mcg each. I had a wonderful trip, one fellow had a rather bad experience (I eventually found him in the trunk (boot) of his car looking for his father). After about an hour, I peaked and all was beautiful but I remember these little critters running around the room laughing and such. Ever since getting into McKenna's lectures, I've wondered if these little guys were the entities he described. Is it possible that that realm could have occurred in an LSD trip? I'm rather old now and no longer have contacts in theee "underground" any longer but do hope to have a DMT experience before I expire. I enjoy your videos on YouTube and attempting to read your substacks. The last chemistry I studied was in high school. Thanks, Steve
An interesting piece. The alternative account of the sensations individuals reports as hyperintelligent beings is this – one's nervous system is constructing the superficial impression of an otherworldy entity. Have there been any studies, to your knowledge, that have refuted this view? I'm familiar with anectodal accounts of drug addicts receiving insight from the elves. But has anyone sent a large sample of participants to these elves with an identical set of complex mathematical problems to solve?
Most DMT smokers arent 'drug addicts' 1) because it is enlightening 2) It would be impossible to be addicted to DMT.
The fact that there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of individuals across the globe that all encounter the same entities points to it not being a personal construct.
Humans can absolutely become ‘Addicted’ or Psychologically ‘Dependent’ on DMT. There are people who’ve admitted to becoming severely obsessive or compulsive with their use of smokable DMT. Admitting to smoking gram after gram after gram by themselves in a room alone. How far removed is that from someone smoking Crack, or Methamphetamine? They seek to maintain their “connection to the infinite now”,..thats pretty much what Cocaine, Amphetamine & Opiate users seek. To be here now, completely pain free & high upon clouds of Utopiates! Just because there has not been any recorded ‘Acute Withdrawal symptoms or effects from the chronic use of DMT doesn’t mean they don’t exist. In the coming years we will likely see a portion of the Population having severe difficulty resisting Chronic Psychedelic Drug use. We’ve seen it in Ketamine users & in MDA & MDMA users.
The point we need to grok is to teach safety & harm reduction. Chronic use is what it is. Taking the punitive Judicial Law enforcement aspect out of such acts is whats deeply needed. Stop criminalizing people for doing what they want to do. Especially since its the right!
LIFE, LIBERTY, & THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS, that means the right to get HIGH!
As someone that's smoked a lot of meth and now smokes dmt every once in a while, I can tell you there is no comparison. If someone is constantly chasing a DMT high I think they would chase any high they can get their hands on to alleviate trauma. You can't blame DMT for that. Whereas Meth is insidious and weaves its addiction into you.
Also, I think you would find this would be a minuscule percentage of people if not below 1%. DMT itself has a mechanism to stop abuse. It's called a 'DMT Slap' and it happens to people who have a compulsion to go back in. It's not a pleasant experience.
We have a severely traumatized civilization and people with severe trauma will find ways to alleviate it. Much better doing that connected to the hyper grid than inflating your egoic mind to the point of psychosis in my opinion.
I agree with your first point. I should have clarified what I meant: alchoholics, cocaine addicts, etc. who use DMT then report revalatory experiences that make them quit their drug of abuse. DMT does appear to be miraculous and not something one would consider a harmful or even useless drug.
On your third point, I agree that there are many, many anecedotal reports. But there hasn't been a controlled manipulation (to my knowledge) that would let us be more certain of the elves' existence, from a scientific standpoint.
I've done close to a hundred journeys on DMT and, based upon my personal experience, the entities that one meets are most certainly real and are not of this world/dimension. DMT is a portal to what I call unfiltered reality which acts as a central nexus point for all dimensions/universes; it is the starting point for all life forms. I have had entities sing operas to be for the entire journey, one entity put on a symphony of color for me in the sky and got upset when a car honked its horn(these entities do not like being interrupted by noise from our world), and had an out of body experience where I was viewing aliens doing surgery on my etheric body. I've also met the guardians of reality who showed me how reality is woven throughout the multiverse. From all of these experiences I've come to the conclusion that these entities are absolutely real, how else could I have heard them singing operas in a language that I have never heard?
Totally, Andrew. I gave a talk on this a couple of years ago at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, citing DMTx in a ream of links to related work on epistemology and agnostic biosignature detection. You might appreciate a look at the slide deck:
It's an honor to join the board of Noonautics.org and stand alongside you in promoting awareness of these ideas and the bold research required to explore them! Can't wait to talk more with you about all of this soon, hopefully on Future Fossils Podcast — it's a "Prime Directive" for my relationship with the non-profit. Thanks for all you do!
I think a large portion of our entity encounters are in fact open communications between the program we generally consider as the ego and the consciousnesses of our own cells/dna. This would explain the near ubiquitous contact as well as the strange -I feel like i know the language their speaking but cant quite understand it- experience.
Of course, the universe is a large place, and even if that hypothesis is correct, it certainly doesnt explain all of the entity encounters.
Seems kinda silly to me that the idea of other 'dimensional' life isnt taken more seriously across the board. I mean, literally every other culture since the beginning of time has had as a central part of their cosmology the understanding of spirits.
Man, I think this perspective is a biased one that's lost its wits and proper skepticism, lending too much credibility to much too specific and personal of an idea to be realistic. Terence McKenna popularized the "machine elf" stuff, but DMT induces a broad set of general experiences that don't entail something as specific as machine elves without priming. Inducing hallucinations and various emotions associated with intense salience (familiarity, identity, presence, love, awe, etc), all being triggered in unison, could produce an absurdly impactful experience that's much more intense than a normal dream-like state is ever meant to be, and you know enough about neuroscience that you shouldn't be so skeptical or dismissive of the relatively known origins/causes/capabilities of these experiences. If you don't actually mean to focus on specifically the crusty machine elves trope that old pseudosciency shamanist wrote about, then it's even more disappointing and baseless and irrational to try to explain the complex and varied experiences of hallucination and delusion as if they could possibly all represent something meaningful or valid as evidence at all. Your brain can make anything feel real to you, especially on DMT. You talk like this is less explained than it is. This isn't the right approach to reasoning or skepticism, and I hope I never become like this from my own psychedelic experiences. No study is going to show a consistent theme of specifically machine elves or even something meaningfully similar across people with no history or awareness of the trend started by McKenna. You seem stuck in a state of incredulity and your rationalizations for it seem post-hoc and your framing of it as skepticism rather than bias is disingenuous or lacks self awareness.
I'm sure this probably won't change your mind, and I appreciate a lot of your writing on here nonetheless,
Of course it's a biased article. It's not meant to be a thorough "case for DMT entities" -- it's merely intended to get people thinking beyond the idea of hallucinations and, yes, into highly speculative territory. It's supposed to be a relatively lightweight fun article with some interesting ideas -- not everything is a serious piece of academic rhetoric.
And, yes, I do know enough about neuroscience (and specifically the neuroscience of psychedelics, esp. DMT) to know that the DMT state is *not* as well explained as you seem to think it is -- I mean, I've been thinking, researching, and writing about this very subject for more than a decade. I'm very much aware of what is and isn't well explained -- and I can assure you there are a *lot* of aspects of the DMT state that are not well explained. That doesn't mean, of course, that DMT entities are aliens from another dimension. But, it at least means that we might need to think beyond our assumptions and explore alternative explanations for these experiences, even if they turn out to be completely wrong.
I think one can make a strong abductive argument for the independent existence for entities for a couple good reasons. 1. entities are sui generis, and profoundly non-chimerical, they resemble nothing in nature, nor are they constituents of natural things, and yet they have independent and perpetual identities. This uniqueness makes them impossible to describe, even TM's machine elves, when seen, you think, I totally get that name, but still no, it doesn't signify. They are repeatedly recognizable though immediately forgotten at peak experience in almost a laughable way. 'Hallucination' doesn't do a whole lot of work seeing as our conventional reality is arguably hallucinated anyway, and the incredible commonality between individual experiences and similarity of world really demands explanation.
Kudos to Andrew for a very rational (though very speculative) foray into the conceptual possibilities inspired by experience of the DMT state and the entities revealed therein. Certainly the truth of this matter is, as the great psychonaut J.B.S. Haldane said, not only stranger than we imagine but stranger then we *can* imagine. It may take several lifetimes (or generations) for us 21st C. humans to get even a basic understanding of what has so recently been revealed to us by the use of DMT. The uninitiated may get an idea of the DMT experience and the variety of entities encountered therein by reading "340 DMT Trip Reports" at https://www.serendipity.li/dmt/340_dmt_trip_reports.htm
thanks for that reading recommendation :)
If the vapor is acrid, then your wick is definitely burning. :)
Big thanks for being brave enough to put your name behind seriously entertaining the possibilities you outline. Who knows what is really going on, but even if there is a small possibility that there is actually an "other" that you contact when you take DMT, then it is worth taking extremely seriously.
Fantastic piece Andrew. I believe you are into something worth researching and going deeper. The possibility that species out there in the cosmos/parallel universes can shift their paradigm from biology to some kind of artificial intelligence is fascinating. All the points you made are about 'DMT Entities' is something that I've been thinking about a lot for the past few years and since reading your previous book 'Alien Information Theory' it sparked even more my curiosity. Keep up with the great work you are doing!
Well-said!
A potential solution to the Fermi Paradox is that alien intelligence decided to use some kind of nanotechnology or something in our brains that allows communication with them only when we are "ready", and that "being ready" is defined to be the kind of society that would create an "Apollo Program" to study the inner workings of the mind through the use of psychedelics. In Star Trek the Prime Directive applied to civilizations that had not yet developed warp technology. In this case it might be "self-awareness technology." DMT may be a stepping stone along the way to the right "key" molecule that unlocks the best communication protocol.
More likely is that a sleeper program in our genetic code which activates when our awareness reaches a certain degree of development/alignment with purpose
Perhaps, within the DMT Realm we interface with the Gate Keepers, the Heyoka, the Jesters of a Disembodied conscious based Kingdom that we, as corporeal beings are Psychically underdeveloped to completely see or interface with on the total scale..
Preaching ti the choir...
When I was in college in the late 1960's I too LSD or a regular basis on weekends. I friend brought three capsules of a very pure acid back form a holiday. Three of us consumed the three caps which were, unknown to us, were three doses in each cap and we were taking 1,500 mcg each. I had a wonderful trip, one fellow had a rather bad experience (I eventually found him in the trunk (boot) of his car looking for his father). After about an hour, I peaked and all was beautiful but I remember these little critters running around the room laughing and such. Ever since getting into McKenna's lectures, I've wondered if these little guys were the entities he described. Is it possible that that realm could have occurred in an LSD trip? I'm rather old now and no longer have contacts in theee "underground" any longer but do hope to have a DMT experience before I expire. I enjoy your videos on YouTube and attempting to read your substacks. The last chemistry I studied was in high school. Thanks, Steve
An interesting piece. The alternative account of the sensations individuals reports as hyperintelligent beings is this – one's nervous system is constructing the superficial impression of an otherworldy entity. Have there been any studies, to your knowledge, that have refuted this view? I'm familiar with anectodal accounts of drug addicts receiving insight from the elves. But has anyone sent a large sample of participants to these elves with an identical set of complex mathematical problems to solve?
They'd probably send you on your way, telling you not to bother them with such trivial shit 😂
Most DMT smokers arent 'drug addicts' 1) because it is enlightening 2) It would be impossible to be addicted to DMT.
The fact that there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of individuals across the globe that all encounter the same entities points to it not being a personal construct.
Humans can absolutely become ‘Addicted’ or Psychologically ‘Dependent’ on DMT. There are people who’ve admitted to becoming severely obsessive or compulsive with their use of smokable DMT. Admitting to smoking gram after gram after gram by themselves in a room alone. How far removed is that from someone smoking Crack, or Methamphetamine? They seek to maintain their “connection to the infinite now”,..thats pretty much what Cocaine, Amphetamine & Opiate users seek. To be here now, completely pain free & high upon clouds of Utopiates! Just because there has not been any recorded ‘Acute Withdrawal symptoms or effects from the chronic use of DMT doesn’t mean they don’t exist. In the coming years we will likely see a portion of the Population having severe difficulty resisting Chronic Psychedelic Drug use. We’ve seen it in Ketamine users & in MDA & MDMA users.
The point we need to grok is to teach safety & harm reduction. Chronic use is what it is. Taking the punitive Judicial Law enforcement aspect out of such acts is whats deeply needed. Stop criminalizing people for doing what they want to do. Especially since its the right!
LIFE, LIBERTY, & THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS, that means the right to get HIGH!
As someone that's smoked a lot of meth and now smokes dmt every once in a while, I can tell you there is no comparison. If someone is constantly chasing a DMT high I think they would chase any high they can get their hands on to alleviate trauma. You can't blame DMT for that. Whereas Meth is insidious and weaves its addiction into you.
Also, I think you would find this would be a minuscule percentage of people if not below 1%. DMT itself has a mechanism to stop abuse. It's called a 'DMT Slap' and it happens to people who have a compulsion to go back in. It's not a pleasant experience.
We have a severely traumatized civilization and people with severe trauma will find ways to alleviate it. Much better doing that connected to the hyper grid than inflating your egoic mind to the point of psychosis in my opinion.
I agree with your first point. I should have clarified what I meant: alchoholics, cocaine addicts, etc. who use DMT then report revalatory experiences that make them quit their drug of abuse. DMT does appear to be miraculous and not something one would consider a harmful or even useless drug.
On your third point, I agree that there are many, many anecedotal reports. But there hasn't been a controlled manipulation (to my knowledge) that would let us be more certain of the elves' existence, from a scientific standpoint.
I've done close to a hundred journeys on DMT and, based upon my personal experience, the entities that one meets are most certainly real and are not of this world/dimension. DMT is a portal to what I call unfiltered reality which acts as a central nexus point for all dimensions/universes; it is the starting point for all life forms. I have had entities sing operas to be for the entire journey, one entity put on a symphony of color for me in the sky and got upset when a car honked its horn(these entities do not like being interrupted by noise from our world), and had an out of body experience where I was viewing aliens doing surgery on my etheric body. I've also met the guardians of reality who showed me how reality is woven throughout the multiverse. From all of these experiences I've come to the conclusion that these entities are absolutely real, how else could I have heard them singing operas in a language that I have never heard?
Great article, well done, restacked!
https://alieninsect.substack.com/p/the-case-for-dmt-entities
Can't help thinking this is a graduate-centric world view.
Here on Earth birds and electric eels were doing their thing millions of years before humans developed aerospace and electrical engineering.
What if aliens didn't use any symbolic intelligence (which is what the university system regards as intelligence) or engineering at all?
What of that's simply our local game?
A parrot sounds like it has language, but it's just mimicry.
A UFO looks like an engineered thing - what if that's just mimicry too?
Totally, Andrew. I gave a talk on this a couple of years ago at the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, citing DMTx in a ream of links to related work on epistemology and agnostic biosignature detection. You might appreciate a look at the slide deck:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/slideshow-aliens-65981453
It's an honor to join the board of Noonautics.org and stand alongside you in promoting awareness of these ideas and the bold research required to explore them! Can't wait to talk more with you about all of this soon, hopefully on Future Fossils Podcast — it's a "Prime Directive" for my relationship with the non-profit. Thanks for all you do!
I think a large portion of our entity encounters are in fact open communications between the program we generally consider as the ego and the consciousnesses of our own cells/dna. This would explain the near ubiquitous contact as well as the strange -I feel like i know the language their speaking but cant quite understand it- experience.
Of course, the universe is a large place, and even if that hypothesis is correct, it certainly doesnt explain all of the entity encounters.
Seems kinda silly to me that the idea of other 'dimensional' life isnt taken more seriously across the board. I mean, literally every other culture since the beginning of time has had as a central part of their cosmology the understanding of spirits.
Amazing article. Can I translate it into Spanish and post it in my web, www.elcorreodelsol.com?
Yes, no problem.
Thank you so much!
Man, I think this perspective is a biased one that's lost its wits and proper skepticism, lending too much credibility to much too specific and personal of an idea to be realistic. Terence McKenna popularized the "machine elf" stuff, but DMT induces a broad set of general experiences that don't entail something as specific as machine elves without priming. Inducing hallucinations and various emotions associated with intense salience (familiarity, identity, presence, love, awe, etc), all being triggered in unison, could produce an absurdly impactful experience that's much more intense than a normal dream-like state is ever meant to be, and you know enough about neuroscience that you shouldn't be so skeptical or dismissive of the relatively known origins/causes/capabilities of these experiences. If you don't actually mean to focus on specifically the crusty machine elves trope that old pseudosciency shamanist wrote about, then it's even more disappointing and baseless and irrational to try to explain the complex and varied experiences of hallucination and delusion as if they could possibly all represent something meaningful or valid as evidence at all. Your brain can make anything feel real to you, especially on DMT. You talk like this is less explained than it is. This isn't the right approach to reasoning or skepticism, and I hope I never become like this from my own psychedelic experiences. No study is going to show a consistent theme of specifically machine elves or even something meaningfully similar across people with no history or awareness of the trend started by McKenna. You seem stuck in a state of incredulity and your rationalizations for it seem post-hoc and your framing of it as skepticism rather than bias is disingenuous or lacks self awareness.
I'm sure this probably won't change your mind, and I appreciate a lot of your writing on here nonetheless,
Of course it's a biased article. It's not meant to be a thorough "case for DMT entities" -- it's merely intended to get people thinking beyond the idea of hallucinations and, yes, into highly speculative territory. It's supposed to be a relatively lightweight fun article with some interesting ideas -- not everything is a serious piece of academic rhetoric.
And, yes, I do know enough about neuroscience (and specifically the neuroscience of psychedelics, esp. DMT) to know that the DMT state is *not* as well explained as you seem to think it is -- I mean, I've been thinking, researching, and writing about this very subject for more than a decade. I'm very much aware of what is and isn't well explained -- and I can assure you there are a *lot* of aspects of the DMT state that are not well explained. That doesn't mean, of course, that DMT entities are aliens from another dimension. But, it at least means that we might need to think beyond our assumptions and explore alternative explanations for these experiences, even if they turn out to be completely wrong.
I think one can make a strong abductive argument for the independent existence for entities for a couple good reasons. 1. entities are sui generis, and profoundly non-chimerical, they resemble nothing in nature, nor are they constituents of natural things, and yet they have independent and perpetual identities. This uniqueness makes them impossible to describe, even TM's machine elves, when seen, you think, I totally get that name, but still no, it doesn't signify. They are repeatedly recognizable though immediately forgotten at peak experience in almost a laughable way. 'Hallucination' doesn't do a whole lot of work seeing as our conventional reality is arguably hallucinated anyway, and the incredible commonality between individual experiences and similarity of world really demands explanation.