The Case for DMT Entities

Don’t Throw the Machine Elf Out With the Bong Water.

“This thing IS what it seems to be, it’s a galactic intelligence, it’s a billion years old, it’s touched ten million worlds, it knows the history of 150,000 civilisations, it’s beyond the possibility of your conceiving it…” Terence McKenna

Terence McKenna’s mushroom-inspired vision of an ancient, almost god-like, super-intelligence is both awe-inspiring and terrifying. However, whilst there is no reason to assume that such an unimaginably powerful alien intelligence couldn’t exist somewhere within this Universe or, perhaps, in some hidden dimensions beyond it, few fear having to confront such a creature: these frightening dimensions can be safely tucked away amongst the more exotic branches of modern mathematical physics and their occupants relegated to the pages of pulp sci-fi novels. At least that’s the case until one encounters DMT.

DMT — N,N-dimethyltryptamine — is the strangest and most ubiquitous of all naturally-occurring psychedelic molecules, and presents something of a problem for those who would have us — like Carl Sagan — comfortably alone in our orbit around a “humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of the Universe”: within seconds of ingestion, either by inhalation of its acrid vapour or by intravenous injection, DMT hurls the user with a frightening ferocity into a bizarre hyperdimensional world replete with a diverse panoply of extremely intelligent entities, some of which bear an uncanny resemblance to McKenna’s ancient galactic intelligence. It’s reassuringly easy — some might say facile — to simply dismiss these experiences as mere hallucination, but it really isn’t that simple. From an orthodox neuroscience standpoint, it’s actually pretty tricky to explain why ingestion of the world’s simplest psychedelic molecule ought to reliably manifest hypertechnological worlds teeming with bizarre alien intelligences.

So, what’s to be done with the machine elves, the insectoid aliens, and their ilk?

Can they be filed away alongside the other psychological case studies marked “hallucinatory phenomena”?

Or could something far far stranger be going on?

In the modern era, it’s pretty easy to find a cosmologist, astronomer, or any other rational individual who will happily contemplate the extremely high probability of us living within a Universe teeming with intelligent life, but many will toss their head back derisively should you suggest there might be ways of establishing direct two-way communication with them: monumental intergalactic separation and light-speed limitations are the standard weapons of choice wielded to keep such life at a reassuringly safe distance. They are there, but they will never be here. Naturally, there are honourable exceptions keen to point out that we can’t be sure that an intelligent civilisation a million or so years more advanced than us couldn’t have worked out how to manipulate the structure of space-time itself to generate shortcuts for interstellar travel. Indeed, such space-time wormholes — known technically as Einstein–Rosen bridges — fall naturally out of Einstein’s field equations. As such, we shouldn’t be too surprised if tales of UFOs hovering over rural outhouses and nocturnal alien abductions turn out to have some basis in truth.

Of course, it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, for us to imagine what an intelligent creature a thousand, let alone a few million, years more advanced than us might look like, and it would be unwise to assume that the majority of such aliens would occupy any kind of recognisably biological form. Amongst intelligent beings that evolve within the Universe, it’s likely that the biological-technological phase — the phase we’re in — is transient: estimates for the lifetime of a technological civilisation range from as low as a few thousand years to as high as a million or more. But, even at our own extremely young technological age — 100 years or so — cultural and technological evolution is already proceeding at a vastly greater pace than its biological Darwinian counterpart. According to cognitive scientist Susan Schneider, once a civilisation creates the technology that could put them in touch with the cosmos, they are probably only a few hundred years from shifting their paradigm from biology to some kind of artificial intelligence, at which point they might well be transparent to any of our standard attempts at communication: As McKenna liked to quip:

“To search expectantly for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture-bound a presumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant.”

All things considered, the balance of probabilities suggests we most likely live in a largely post-biological Universe, “one in which the majority of intelligent life has evolved beyond flesh and blood intelligence” (Dick, 2003), and it’s a challenge to even imagine what that might look like, let alone work out how we might find and communicate with it.

Although it’s certainly something of a humbling experience to realise that the majority of intelligent life within our own Universe is likely to be beyond our comprehension, there’s little to bolster our meat-embedded egos in considering other universes: there’s no reason why our Universe couldn’t be one amongst countless others and we have no way of knowing the types of intelligences that might, or might not, emerge within them. In fact, not only do we not know anything of their nature, but it seems we also have no means of learning anything of their nature and, as such, they must surely remain squarely within the realms of wild speculation. But perhaps we shouldn’t dismiss them so hastily in this way.

MIT computer scientist Ed Fredkin, one of the fathers of digital physics, cautions us against assuming that the restrictions imposed by the Laws of Physics that reign in this Universe have any bearing on events, processes, or emergent living intelligences in places outside of it, which he simply calls Other (Fredkin, 2003). Of course, it’s a huge leap from such level-headed agnosticism to any kind of assertion regarding the nature — or even the existence — of intelligence beyond our little slice of reality. But, the crucial point is that the physical laws as they manifest in our Universe might be wholly irrelevant when considering the Other. As such, it would be extremely naive and “Universe-centric” to assume that interdimensional intelligences would be unable to somehow access or provide a gateway into their reality, whether they be post-biological beings that have left our material Universe or intelligences that emerged entirely outside of it. We can’t assume, for example, that an extremely advanced post-biological civilisation couldn’t have discovered a means of exiting our Universe entirely to a realm where the physics are incomparable. Or, it’s also conceivable that there might be life extant in other parallel realities (alternate universes) that are entirely unimaginable in their form to us, but which, for reasons yet to be understood, can be accessed using certain technologies (such as DMT). Which is more likely is difficult to say but, according to astrobiologist Stephen J. Dick, “the maintenance, improvement, and perpetuation of knowledge and intelligence is the central driving force of cultural evolution, and to the extent that intelligence can be improved, it will be improved”(Dick, 2003). In other words, knowledge is power, and if we meet post-biological beings that seem to have transcended the material realm we currently occupy, we might expect them to be extraordinarily intelligent. In fact, one could argue that the immense levels of intelligence manifested by beings so often met in the DMT space, together with the curiously hypertechnological environments they tend to inhabit, is evidence of a vast period of technological evolution and perhaps indicative of beings that were once part of our Universe but have long since made their escape into the Other. And, perhaps, DMT is an embedded technology that might allow us, one day, to follow. Since we currently have no understanding of the physics of the “DMT world”, nor of its relationship to our reality — Fredkin’s Agnostic Principle — any objection by appealing to the Laws of Physics in this Universe might well be moot.

Of course, all of this is highly speculative stuff, but there is a serious point to be made here: when you come face-to-face with astonishingly powerful and intelligent alien entities that seem — or claim — to hail from normally-hidden dimensions of reality, you must be very careful. Whether or not we can currently explain why DMT is able to grant an audience with such beings, it might be a good idea to shut up, to watch, and to listen. Because there’s a small, but very real, possibility that they’re exactly who they say they are.