I haven't done DMT, because I don't smoke, but I have encountered entities while doing one of the 2/3meo-pce class of research chemicals (which can be taken orally), many years ago.
The whole notion that these are figments of someones hypothalamic overstimulation is utterly ridiculous and just shows these 'scientists' are science-nots.
The very definition of science is to be open-minded & explorative, and these close-minded twats don't qualify.
I strongly urge those who have these delusions about these creatures being delusional to read up on three things:
1) The Holographic Universe, as it explains all these types of experiences with a sound hypothetical basis done by some of the most brilliant minds of the century (David Bohm, Prbam, etc).
Basically, all of existence is folded into holography and all possible options exist all at once, and it is willpower which creates the path throughout all those infinite existences. (not just YOUR willpower, mind you, but that of all of existence)
2) Shamanism, which is pretty much universal all over the world as the first type of worldview/explanation/religion before the advent of organized religion. It is not only totally practicable, it has remarkably similar traditions all over the world, despite there sometimes being 50000 years of isolation between the peoples. Tribes of Peru, Siberia or Australia all have very similar practices, and all believe in a Dreamtime like astral travel form where many creatures are found and interacted with.
You can also learn about astral travel without any shamanic associations; people like Robert Monroe & Robert Bruce have basically put complete How-To's together in modern fashion. They also meet tons of creatures during their travels.
3) The occult and the practice of Magic.
Always having had an open mind (thus qualifying as a scientist where those who double-speak, do not) about it until the recent pandemic, when it was clear a bunch of satanic pedophiles are trying to wipe us all out, I considered it prudent to read a bit (turned out to be a lot) more into the practices of the occult, and quite a lot more of it is actually real and practical than the mass liars want you to know.
Turns out the concepts of a holographic universe, Dreamtime, Astral Travel etc, shoehorns quite nicely into the practices of the occult, where your willpower is trained to alter reality (in essence, concentrating your will to switch timelines in an infinite number of timelines in the universe, although it's probably always an oversimplification), and in so doing, performing 'magic'.
So interestingly magic can be considered an application of the Holographic universe, and they have one very important concept in Magic that is quite relevant to the use of DMT and other psychoactive substances: That of the 'Psychic Censor'.
Basically, we are all connected in the Holographic field of the universe (one of a great many terms used for it; Rupert Sheldrake for example calls it Morphogenetic Fields), and we are cut off from this in a way that can be called the Psychic Censor. It is a barrier between our will & the will of the Universe that prevents us from altering reality with every whim of the will.
With practices like meditation, group meditation (a combining of willpower is much stronger than that of an individual), recitation, chanting, and the evocation of extremes in the human experience like fatigue, pain, terror, or exultation, this Psychic Censor is finally bypassed, and the path in the universe is altered.
The use of psychoactive substances is one of these methods to bypass this Psychic Censor, and even though it's hard to find any author on the subject being anything else but rather vague about it, it is by now clear to me that it is in fact bound to our physical form, and that opens up the possibility that it is of a biochemical nature, and that psychoactives can bypass this, or at least tell us a lot more about the mechanism.
Which brings me squarely back to the mentioning of the sigma-1 receptor, since it's also involved in schizophrenia, another altered perception of reality heavily misconstrued as a disease, in which the Psychic Censor is in fact degraded.
The Psychic Censor is also there to protect the individual from the collective, and what is observable in such an altered state of consciousness is generally impossible to comprehend to an 'uninitiated' person.
This is true in both the Shamanic explanation, that of the Holographic Universe, in the occult practices, AND in the view of the average Psychonaut, and every single one of these different approaches to the same problem advise caution and guidance.
In my opinion, these creatures are real, having experienced them myself (beckoning me, in fact), but they will never be real to small-minded persons, and to paraphrase Frank Zappa, most people never open their parachute until the ground smacks them dead in the face.
You have summed up everything I have had in my mind all these years. The only question I have is why do those other realities look different (like different worlds)? Salvia world differs from DMT, Ayahuasca world differs from Psilocybin, OBE and NDE differ from psychedelics, dream states differ from all the rest?
Well, I wouldn't know about Salvia & Ayahuasca or Psilocybin, but my guess is the Psychic Censor is inherent in the complex neurotransmitter machinery of the body, and there are dozens of neurotransmitters. Each one of the psychoactives have a different effect on different neurotransmitters, and it is probable that these different impacts on the neuromachinery affect the observational part of the experience.
OBE's can be trained, and NDE are much more a near-complete separation from the body (just read a book on NDE's) where strong contact is made with higher dimensions. Dream states are very complex, & often chaotic, so I don't think we have much control over those unless we become lucid during them.
To accurately be able to tell the difference, are at least attempt to try so, one would have to be very able to do OBE/Astral Travel at will and then try out the different substances in combination.
The Psychic Censor appears to monitor fluctuations in the Variable of Intention, polarizing any Injected Will with its corresponding Object of Desire. Most of our reality-bending experiments conducted during lucid visionary states indicate that only possibilities other than the attempted manifestation can occur.
Consequently, our current effort is to decipher the canonical language linking Intention and its Object of Desire by addressing it through contradictory injections.
The issue with such an approach is that the Psychic Censor triggers a maximum-security alert—the entire holographic system begins to fold and crumble. The user performing the test, now at its center, becomes the system’s core, caught in an astonishing short-circuit and white, electric collapse—something akin to a blue screen of death, or more aptly, a preamble to a black hole of void.
~ Your friends at The Riverbank Perceptionists Society
Immensely enjoyed listening to you narrate the book Andrew, ordering a physical copy now to be able to peruse and adorn the coffee table for any curious minds that may visit!
You sum up the science problem perfectly, science should by its very virtues be plumbing the depths of the phenomenology of DMT and devoting man power to ascertaining its origins and causality. Surely a mystery this big is the biggest ripest fruit science should want to tuck its teeth into…
Of course there's always the possibility that some scientists are digging into it and just not sharing what they find because of who is funding them and what their interests are. Or some already found out quite a bit and kept the results to themselves. I find it very hard to believe no one has gotten into this. It seems right up the alley of insane tech billionaire types, but then again I am not sure if they would be barred from entry. I am a little curious about this, not going to lie. I'm sure a few Burning Man devotees have stories to share.
The only trouble with making a conspiracy inside this story is we start to focus on the reality of the conspiracy and forget we’ve not even established the veracity of the original thesis. This is hypothesis at best, not even yet a theory.
Absolutely, and I am not employed as a scientist. I love the method and methodology but I place no faith in capital-S Science as it's very similar to a religion or for-profit industrial complex to me. I could go on, something something Michel Foucault, regimes of truth and so on. So, it's not really my concern. I just like bouncing ideas around. From my understanding science never proves only disproves. Anyhow, I am not sure what the original thesis is you're referring to. I was speaking more to the entire phenomenon of DMT and the experiences it engenders, not necessarily speaking to any theory on alien life. Cheers!
I gotcha. Thanks for the explanation. The book’s main thesis is that this is a way to contact actual external intelligent entities. If the CIA actually believed it was an independent intelligence then I’m sure they’d be all over it. Maybe MKULTRA never ended and they released what they did so they could keep going, unbroken research from the 50s LSD to modern DMT-X
And yeah, a tech billionaire, funded by big players, making his own explorations is a lovely short story or novel idea.
I’ve read Foucault and I hear you. And it’s good to keep our science and scientism delineated. I believe there is a baby in the bathtub though. It’s the capital S science I hold most dear. It’s the small-s where the rubber hits the roads built by capital and egos that it starts to leave the ideals. I’m not a huge dogma and ideology fan but when it comes to something inherently self-checking, parsimonious and pure I really like tbh big-S version of science.
I have the feeling the capital-S science I'm talking about might be different than what you're describing. To me the capital-S is not pure science at all. It barely resembles it. It's popsci for the marketplace. It's science as religion and force of division rather than knowledge and understanding. If you want to continue I'd like to hear your thoughts. I have the feeling we might be in some kind of agreement here. Cheers
Nice writing. I look forward to reading the book. I agree that these entities go beyond “hallucination.” It’s just hard to take it farther than that if they don’t tip their hat and tell us who or what they are, whether they have a purpose (or we for them), etc. Seems like they could have interesting things to tell us if they cared to do so.
Thank you! To be honest, even if they *did* decide to tell us exactly who they are, I'm far from convinced that we'd even be capable of understanding what they told us. I feel like we massively overestimate our intelligence and dare say we likely barely register on the scale compared to what we could be dealing with in the DMT space.
Just bought your book and am extremely excited to read it!
Your remarks brought to mind some quotes - hope you don't mind my throwing them into the mix:
"It is extremely healthy to know not only that there are monstrous beings, but that there are beings that are not purely thinkable, whose being is not directly correlated with whatever thinking is."
- Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World
"What a civilization might look like, what it might occupy itself with, what goals it might set itself, when that civilization had been prospering for billions of years... this was something no one could picture, not even in his wildest dreams. That which was beyond anyone's ability to imagine, being therefore a thing most inconvenient, was therefore conveniently ignored..."
"They are nowhere to be found? It is only that we do not perceive them, because they are already everywhere... instrumental technologies are required only... by a civilization still in the embryonic stage, like Earth's. A billion-year-old civilization employs none. Its tools are what we call the Laws of Nature. Physics itself is the "machine" of such civilizations ! And it is no "ready-made machine," nothing of the sort. That "machine" (obviously it has nothing in common with mechanical machines) is billions of years in the making, and its structure, though much advanced, has not yet been finished!"
- Stanislaw Lem, "The New Cosmogony," in A Perfect Vacuum
As Terence said, "We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something so strange that it disguises itself as an extraterrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.
I was completely fascinated by the subject of psychedelics when I first heard Graham Hancock discussing ayahuasca in late 2009. I endeavored to learn as much as possible and was determined to find a way to experience it myself as soon as I could. And so I have had a number of fascinating experiences in various venues here in the States, Costa Rica and Peru. Surprisingly to me, almost no one I knew and discussed it with had the least bit of interest. So I guess that most people are uncomfortable with the idea of altered states of consciousness. They also tend to be the sort who accept official narratives without question and obediently line up to have themselves injected with untested, experimental, "safe and effective", gene altering substances of unknown ingredients. Why am I different? I have no idea, but I'm glad I am!
I agree that most people, whether they tried psychedelics or not (even vaccinated or not), are uncomfortable to discuss altered states and even the possibility that those might be other dimensions of existence/reality. The shocking fact is that some have tried DMT and still do NOT believe in them. How much more proof do they need?
Much gratitude is due to Andrew Gallimore for this excellent (and eloquent) article, which describes the importance due to the implications of the experience (available to anyone) of the alternate reality accessible by the use of DMT. As he says, DMT has "the potential to completely transform our understanding of reality and of our place within it". The ability (for over sixty years) of scientists to ignore the implications of an experience available to them all shows how fixated they are on the synthetic "reality" provided to us in normal experience. As Andrew says, the DMT experience "must be confronted as a mystery, not as something to be explained away". Currently humans are living in a highly-complex simulation of reality, and (if they survive AI) the understanding of their true place in hyper-dimensional reality will probably be a long time coming. Use of DMT is the first step on that path.
Loved this insight into altered states of consciousness, if you have time I would appreciate your thoughts on my nature of consciousness it’s only a few minutes read if not no worries thank you for the wisdom
Thank you! Since I've had no experiences anywhere near the neighborhood of DMT, I read it with great interest and deep curiousity. It certainly sounds like the enigma goes far deeper than the narrow minds of the scientific community are able to admit, simply because they can't comprehend how alien the worlds and inhabitants of the DMT-dominion are, compared to the mundane daily human experience, where much of the information is so depleted of all novelty that the brain doesn't even register it. It's actually easy to see why some dusty old academic sleepwalking through life can't understand the miracle of feeling absolutely overwhelmed by, well: anything! To be in awe is honestly something rare for most people. I look forward to visiting the strange scary entities of Planet DMT. I hope they like me.
I experienced the Elves several years before Terrence ever wrote about them. The Great chrysanthemum., the sound of tearing cellophane, under the dome, the faberge egg made of breathe and intention they implored me to make . On a high dose of fresh P. Cyans
I had to comment again. I started down this path of inquiry in the 90's. McKenna was the first one who I saw asking the questions I was, and not taking bullshit for answers. And you, sir, are the scientist I've hoped would appear for all my life. Finally someone is saying a lot of what I've been saying (and I know I am not alone). It's vindicating. Deeply validating. And though I "shouldn't" need such validation, it's nice for a change. I am ordering your book today and greatly look forward to it. Thanks for doing and sharing this awesome work but also for your courage and ethics. That means more than anything. People need examples of others who are willing to tell the truth, dammit! Even if - especially if- that truth is "I don't know!" All my best. Very happy you exist in this world <3
One McKenna story that always sticks out to me is when he asked the DMT elves why they revealed themselves to him, and they said it was because he “doesn’t believe anything”.
I think there is a lot to be said for intellectual humility, and that we also risk losing sight of it when we attack others for lacking it. I agree that many are too confident in their explanations for psychedelic phenomena, but I think it would be hypocritical to similarly explain away their explanations.
I’ll say a little about my first person experiences and studies that keep me very open minded about “mundane” explanations for psychedelic entities.
1) After 30 minutes of meditation in a dark closet, I turned on the closet light, and my vision went completely white, and then was filled with highly complex fractalizing patterns of color and geometry. This astounding and beautiful experience was completely “on the natch” as McKenna would say. So, I know my brain to be able to produce imagery that seems completely alien and orthogonal to normal reality.
2) We understand our human tendency toward pareidolia and apophenia, to see faces and figures in noise and randomness, and to see patterns of meaning in randomness.
3) Every night our mind can generate entire narratives, sometimes quite strange or spiritual in nature.
4) Our subconscious processing is *extremely* powerful, allowing us to do wildly impressive things, often simultaneously, while navigating an incredibly complex world.
5) Systems theory and mathematics show how even the slightest tweaking of a system at its fundamental operating levels can have totally unpredictable and transformative system effects.
I’ll stop there, because that, for me, is sufficient to find it plausible that “mere” tweaking of brain activity could yield the kinds of experience we have with DMT and other compounds. I think it can also explain why we would have a tendency to interpret those experiences as encounters with “real” entities rather than as “hallucinations.”
But what this line of thinking could not even begin to explain is why we have conscious experiences in the first place. Where do qualia come from? We may agree that the experience of greenness is real, but does it “exist”? What is the nature of the conscious observer? Are we, as the idealist would have it, fragments of the awareness of God? The fact of consciousness is already astounding and, imo, fundamentally mysterious, just as the fact that something is happening at all is fundamentally mysterious.
Matter, consciousness, information, all transcend explanation in principle. And I think our culture loses sight of that. Our education system, especially, conditions us to see mystery as an adversary, a problem to deal with. It can make us anxious rather than awestruck. And I think a common response is to retreat into what Erik Davis calls “high weirdness”. We want to say “ok, but this was very here is TRULY WEIRD and resists the monotony of institutional reductive explanation.” High weirdness rescues for us a sense that life is full of untold possibility and wonder.
But, maybe we become overly dependent on weirdness as a source of wonder. Maybe this boring “base reality” is already mind-blowing, astonishing, wonderful, beautiful, and brimming with potential, when we slow down and still our minds, such that we actually confront it.
I make the point not be contrary, but because I think our culture is suffering the consequences of not having a sense of wonder about life. And it can be dangerous to manipulate our thinking, to rely on metaphysical narratives, to produce that sense of wonder. I think we’re already seeing those dangers bubble up into our politics. We may need to focus on the difficult trick of how to keep ourselves grounded, humble, and open to mystery, all at the same time.
All that said, I’m looking forward to reading your book, as a fan :)
Great read. When I first read Strassman's magnum opus, I had an initial reaction that made me lose respect for him upon consulting a theoretical physicist to inquire about the reality of DMT experiences. Now I see it as intellectually honest and responsible science. Though I remain unconvinced. I am so curious to know how you would design an experiment to evaluate the veridicality of DMT experiences?
Scientists already know that hallucinations can feel more real than reality. Your beliefs are the predictable outcome of using felt intensity to determine what's true.
Been trying to get this sort of thing on the radar of my algorithm for awhile.
I’ve only done ayahuasca once, back in 2006, before it was mainstream or well known. I was dating a Peruvian whose dad was a shaman. She invited me to a familial ceremony in a cave above Cusco. I figured it was a once in a lifetime opportunity. I had only done mushrooms a handful of times and was scared of plunging into the deep end of the psychedelic pool with ayahuasca. So I held back on my experience. But I did see machine elves, without even knowing they’re a thing. It was a very faint hallucination, they were around a pole, like a May Day pole or barber pole. Maybe dna? They were mildly sinister, sexual in nature, if that makes sense. I told my gf about them and she said yeah that’s common. I had absolutely no way of knowing that. The only other non-physical experience aspect of the trip was the noise, it was similar to the static of a tv, I call it the background noise of the universe. Apparently this is a thing as well. Anyway, this is my one and only experience thus far, just thought I’d share.
Thanks for your contribution in making this more accepted in science.
I loved the book and the history of the whole space was fascinating. I've never taken it but am so intrigued. I feel like this and the kind of discoveries like the Telepathy Tapes need a lot more attention. Are these not the most intriguing discoveries of our time?
I haven't done DMT, because I don't smoke, but I have encountered entities while doing one of the 2/3meo-pce class of research chemicals (which can be taken orally), many years ago.
The whole notion that these are figments of someones hypothalamic overstimulation is utterly ridiculous and just shows these 'scientists' are science-nots.
The very definition of science is to be open-minded & explorative, and these close-minded twats don't qualify.
I strongly urge those who have these delusions about these creatures being delusional to read up on three things:
1) The Holographic Universe, as it explains all these types of experiences with a sound hypothetical basis done by some of the most brilliant minds of the century (David Bohm, Prbam, etc).
Basically, all of existence is folded into holography and all possible options exist all at once, and it is willpower which creates the path throughout all those infinite existences. (not just YOUR willpower, mind you, but that of all of existence)
2) Shamanism, which is pretty much universal all over the world as the first type of worldview/explanation/religion before the advent of organized religion. It is not only totally practicable, it has remarkably similar traditions all over the world, despite there sometimes being 50000 years of isolation between the peoples. Tribes of Peru, Siberia or Australia all have very similar practices, and all believe in a Dreamtime like astral travel form where many creatures are found and interacted with.
You can also learn about astral travel without any shamanic associations; people like Robert Monroe & Robert Bruce have basically put complete How-To's together in modern fashion. They also meet tons of creatures during their travels.
3) The occult and the practice of Magic.
Always having had an open mind (thus qualifying as a scientist where those who double-speak, do not) about it until the recent pandemic, when it was clear a bunch of satanic pedophiles are trying to wipe us all out, I considered it prudent to read a bit (turned out to be a lot) more into the practices of the occult, and quite a lot more of it is actually real and practical than the mass liars want you to know.
Turns out the concepts of a holographic universe, Dreamtime, Astral Travel etc, shoehorns quite nicely into the practices of the occult, where your willpower is trained to alter reality (in essence, concentrating your will to switch timelines in an infinite number of timelines in the universe, although it's probably always an oversimplification), and in so doing, performing 'magic'.
So interestingly magic can be considered an application of the Holographic universe, and they have one very important concept in Magic that is quite relevant to the use of DMT and other psychoactive substances: That of the 'Psychic Censor'.
Basically, we are all connected in the Holographic field of the universe (one of a great many terms used for it; Rupert Sheldrake for example calls it Morphogenetic Fields), and we are cut off from this in a way that can be called the Psychic Censor. It is a barrier between our will & the will of the Universe that prevents us from altering reality with every whim of the will.
With practices like meditation, group meditation (a combining of willpower is much stronger than that of an individual), recitation, chanting, and the evocation of extremes in the human experience like fatigue, pain, terror, or exultation, this Psychic Censor is finally bypassed, and the path in the universe is altered.
The use of psychoactive substances is one of these methods to bypass this Psychic Censor, and even though it's hard to find any author on the subject being anything else but rather vague about it, it is by now clear to me that it is in fact bound to our physical form, and that opens up the possibility that it is of a biochemical nature, and that psychoactives can bypass this, or at least tell us a lot more about the mechanism.
Which brings me squarely back to the mentioning of the sigma-1 receptor, since it's also involved in schizophrenia, another altered perception of reality heavily misconstrued as a disease, in which the Psychic Censor is in fact degraded.
The Psychic Censor is also there to protect the individual from the collective, and what is observable in such an altered state of consciousness is generally impossible to comprehend to an 'uninitiated' person.
This is true in both the Shamanic explanation, that of the Holographic Universe, in the occult practices, AND in the view of the average Psychonaut, and every single one of these different approaches to the same problem advise caution and guidance.
In my opinion, these creatures are real, having experienced them myself (beckoning me, in fact), but they will never be real to small-minded persons, and to paraphrase Frank Zappa, most people never open their parachute until the ground smacks them dead in the face.
You have summed up everything I have had in my mind all these years. The only question I have is why do those other realities look different (like different worlds)? Salvia world differs from DMT, Ayahuasca world differs from Psilocybin, OBE and NDE differ from psychedelics, dream states differ from all the rest?
Well, I wouldn't know about Salvia & Ayahuasca or Psilocybin, but my guess is the Psychic Censor is inherent in the complex neurotransmitter machinery of the body, and there are dozens of neurotransmitters. Each one of the psychoactives have a different effect on different neurotransmitters, and it is probable that these different impacts on the neuromachinery affect the observational part of the experience.
OBE's can be trained, and NDE are much more a near-complete separation from the body (just read a book on NDE's) where strong contact is made with higher dimensions. Dream states are very complex, & often chaotic, so I don't think we have much control over those unless we become lucid during them.
To accurately be able to tell the difference, are at least attempt to try so, one would have to be very able to do OBE/Astral Travel at will and then try out the different substances in combination.
I feel you on not smoking but hey you can always ingest DMT orally (ayahuasca).
Very interesting, Mr. Blaat.
The Psychic Censor appears to monitor fluctuations in the Variable of Intention, polarizing any Injected Will with its corresponding Object of Desire. Most of our reality-bending experiments conducted during lucid visionary states indicate that only possibilities other than the attempted manifestation can occur.
Consequently, our current effort is to decipher the canonical language linking Intention and its Object of Desire by addressing it through contradictory injections.
The issue with such an approach is that the Psychic Censor triggers a maximum-security alert—the entire holographic system begins to fold and crumble. The user performing the test, now at its center, becomes the system’s core, caught in an astonishing short-circuit and white, electric collapse—something akin to a blue screen of death, or more aptly, a preamble to a black hole of void.
~ Your friends at The Riverbank Perceptionists Society
Immensely enjoyed listening to you narrate the book Andrew, ordering a physical copy now to be able to peruse and adorn the coffee table for any curious minds that may visit!
You sum up the science problem perfectly, science should by its very virtues be plumbing the depths of the phenomenology of DMT and devoting man power to ascertaining its origins and causality. Surely a mystery this big is the biggest ripest fruit science should want to tuck its teeth into…
As Terence put it:
Not only is it stranger than we suppose,
“It is stranger than we CAN suppose”
Echoing JBS Haldine:
“The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
J B S Haldane, Possible Worlds (1927).
Yes 👏 i couldn’t think of the original author. Thanks
Of course there's always the possibility that some scientists are digging into it and just not sharing what they find because of who is funding them and what their interests are. Or some already found out quite a bit and kept the results to themselves. I find it very hard to believe no one has gotten into this. It seems right up the alley of insane tech billionaire types, but then again I am not sure if they would be barred from entry. I am a little curious about this, not going to lie. I'm sure a few Burning Man devotees have stories to share.
The only trouble with making a conspiracy inside this story is we start to focus on the reality of the conspiracy and forget we’ve not even established the veracity of the original thesis. This is hypothesis at best, not even yet a theory.
Absolutely, and I am not employed as a scientist. I love the method and methodology but I place no faith in capital-S Science as it's very similar to a religion or for-profit industrial complex to me. I could go on, something something Michel Foucault, regimes of truth and so on. So, it's not really my concern. I just like bouncing ideas around. From my understanding science never proves only disproves. Anyhow, I am not sure what the original thesis is you're referring to. I was speaking more to the entire phenomenon of DMT and the experiences it engenders, not necessarily speaking to any theory on alien life. Cheers!
I gotcha. Thanks for the explanation. The book’s main thesis is that this is a way to contact actual external intelligent entities. If the CIA actually believed it was an independent intelligence then I’m sure they’d be all over it. Maybe MKULTRA never ended and they released what they did so they could keep going, unbroken research from the 50s LSD to modern DMT-X
And yeah, a tech billionaire, funded by big players, making his own explorations is a lovely short story or novel idea.
I’ve read Foucault and I hear you. And it’s good to keep our science and scientism delineated. I believe there is a baby in the bathtub though. It’s the capital S science I hold most dear. It’s the small-s where the rubber hits the roads built by capital and egos that it starts to leave the ideals. I’m not a huge dogma and ideology fan but when it comes to something inherently self-checking, parsimonious and pure I really like tbh big-S version of science.
I have the feeling the capital-S science I'm talking about might be different than what you're describing. To me the capital-S is not pure science at all. It barely resembles it. It's popsci for the marketplace. It's science as religion and force of division rather than knowledge and understanding. If you want to continue I'd like to hear your thoughts. I have the feeling we might be in some kind of agreement here. Cheers
Nice writing. I look forward to reading the book. I agree that these entities go beyond “hallucination.” It’s just hard to take it farther than that if they don’t tip their hat and tell us who or what they are, whether they have a purpose (or we for them), etc. Seems like they could have interesting things to tell us if they cared to do so.
Thank you! To be honest, even if they *did* decide to tell us exactly who they are, I'm far from convinced that we'd even be capable of understanding what they told us. I feel like we massively overestimate our intelligence and dare say we likely barely register on the scale compared to what we could be dealing with in the DMT space.
Just bought your book and am extremely excited to read it!
Your remarks brought to mind some quotes - hope you don't mind my throwing them into the mix:
"It is extremely healthy to know not only that there are monstrous beings, but that there are beings that are not purely thinkable, whose being is not directly correlated with whatever thinking is."
- Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World
"What a civilization might look like, what it might occupy itself with, what goals it might set itself, when that civilization had been prospering for billions of years... this was something no one could picture, not even in his wildest dreams. That which was beyond anyone's ability to imagine, being therefore a thing most inconvenient, was therefore conveniently ignored..."
"They are nowhere to be found? It is only that we do not perceive them, because they are already everywhere... instrumental technologies are required only... by a civilization still in the embryonic stage, like Earth's. A billion-year-old civilization employs none. Its tools are what we call the Laws of Nature. Physics itself is the "machine" of such civilizations ! And it is no "ready-made machine," nothing of the sort. That "machine" (obviously it has nothing in common with mechanical machines) is billions of years in the making, and its structure, though much advanced, has not yet been finished!"
- Stanislaw Lem, "The New Cosmogony," in A Perfect Vacuum
As Terence said, "We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something so strange that it disguises itself as an extraterrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us.
Maybe like us trying to tell a worm something of significance…
I was completely fascinated by the subject of psychedelics when I first heard Graham Hancock discussing ayahuasca in late 2009. I endeavored to learn as much as possible and was determined to find a way to experience it myself as soon as I could. And so I have had a number of fascinating experiences in various venues here in the States, Costa Rica and Peru. Surprisingly to me, almost no one I knew and discussed it with had the least bit of interest. So I guess that most people are uncomfortable with the idea of altered states of consciousness. They also tend to be the sort who accept official narratives without question and obediently line up to have themselves injected with untested, experimental, "safe and effective", gene altering substances of unknown ingredients. Why am I different? I have no idea, but I'm glad I am!
I agree that most people, whether they tried psychedelics or not (even vaccinated or not), are uncomfortable to discuss altered states and even the possibility that those might be other dimensions of existence/reality. The shocking fact is that some have tried DMT and still do NOT believe in them. How much more proof do they need?
Much gratitude is due to Andrew Gallimore for this excellent (and eloquent) article, which describes the importance due to the implications of the experience (available to anyone) of the alternate reality accessible by the use of DMT. As he says, DMT has "the potential to completely transform our understanding of reality and of our place within it". The ability (for over sixty years) of scientists to ignore the implications of an experience available to them all shows how fixated they are on the synthetic "reality" provided to us in normal experience. As Andrew says, the DMT experience "must be confronted as a mystery, not as something to be explained away". Currently humans are living in a highly-complex simulation of reality, and (if they survive AI) the understanding of their true place in hyper-dimensional reality will probably be a long time coming. Use of DMT is the first step on that path.
Loved this insight into altered states of consciousness, if you have time I would appreciate your thoughts on my nature of consciousness it’s only a few minutes read if not no worries thank you for the wisdom
Thank you! Since I've had no experiences anywhere near the neighborhood of DMT, I read it with great interest and deep curiousity. It certainly sounds like the enigma goes far deeper than the narrow minds of the scientific community are able to admit, simply because they can't comprehend how alien the worlds and inhabitants of the DMT-dominion are, compared to the mundane daily human experience, where much of the information is so depleted of all novelty that the brain doesn't even register it. It's actually easy to see why some dusty old academic sleepwalking through life can't understand the miracle of feeling absolutely overwhelmed by, well: anything! To be in awe is honestly something rare for most people. I look forward to visiting the strange scary entities of Planet DMT. I hope they like me.
Hi Andrew, loved this book. Absolutely brilliant. On a related note, I was wondering if you had any plans to release RST as a hardcover edition?
Thanks! No plans at the moment, but it's possible in the future!
I experienced the Elves several years before Terrence ever wrote about them. The Great chrysanthemum., the sound of tearing cellophane, under the dome, the faberge egg made of breathe and intention they implored me to make . On a high dose of fresh P. Cyans
great piece! am including your book in a course this semester for undergrads.
I had to comment again. I started down this path of inquiry in the 90's. McKenna was the first one who I saw asking the questions I was, and not taking bullshit for answers. And you, sir, are the scientist I've hoped would appear for all my life. Finally someone is saying a lot of what I've been saying (and I know I am not alone). It's vindicating. Deeply validating. And though I "shouldn't" need such validation, it's nice for a change. I am ordering your book today and greatly look forward to it. Thanks for doing and sharing this awesome work but also for your courage and ethics. That means more than anything. People need examples of others who are willing to tell the truth, dammit! Even if - especially if- that truth is "I don't know!" All my best. Very happy you exist in this world <3
One McKenna story that always sticks out to me is when he asked the DMT elves why they revealed themselves to him, and they said it was because he “doesn’t believe anything”.
I think there is a lot to be said for intellectual humility, and that we also risk losing sight of it when we attack others for lacking it. I agree that many are too confident in their explanations for psychedelic phenomena, but I think it would be hypocritical to similarly explain away their explanations.
I’ll say a little about my first person experiences and studies that keep me very open minded about “mundane” explanations for psychedelic entities.
1) After 30 minutes of meditation in a dark closet, I turned on the closet light, and my vision went completely white, and then was filled with highly complex fractalizing patterns of color and geometry. This astounding and beautiful experience was completely “on the natch” as McKenna would say. So, I know my brain to be able to produce imagery that seems completely alien and orthogonal to normal reality.
2) We understand our human tendency toward pareidolia and apophenia, to see faces and figures in noise and randomness, and to see patterns of meaning in randomness.
3) Every night our mind can generate entire narratives, sometimes quite strange or spiritual in nature.
4) Our subconscious processing is *extremely* powerful, allowing us to do wildly impressive things, often simultaneously, while navigating an incredibly complex world.
5) Systems theory and mathematics show how even the slightest tweaking of a system at its fundamental operating levels can have totally unpredictable and transformative system effects.
I’ll stop there, because that, for me, is sufficient to find it plausible that “mere” tweaking of brain activity could yield the kinds of experience we have with DMT and other compounds. I think it can also explain why we would have a tendency to interpret those experiences as encounters with “real” entities rather than as “hallucinations.”
But what this line of thinking could not even begin to explain is why we have conscious experiences in the first place. Where do qualia come from? We may agree that the experience of greenness is real, but does it “exist”? What is the nature of the conscious observer? Are we, as the idealist would have it, fragments of the awareness of God? The fact of consciousness is already astounding and, imo, fundamentally mysterious, just as the fact that something is happening at all is fundamentally mysterious.
Matter, consciousness, information, all transcend explanation in principle. And I think our culture loses sight of that. Our education system, especially, conditions us to see mystery as an adversary, a problem to deal with. It can make us anxious rather than awestruck. And I think a common response is to retreat into what Erik Davis calls “high weirdness”. We want to say “ok, but this was very here is TRULY WEIRD and resists the monotony of institutional reductive explanation.” High weirdness rescues for us a sense that life is full of untold possibility and wonder.
But, maybe we become overly dependent on weirdness as a source of wonder. Maybe this boring “base reality” is already mind-blowing, astonishing, wonderful, beautiful, and brimming with potential, when we slow down and still our minds, such that we actually confront it.
I make the point not be contrary, but because I think our culture is suffering the consequences of not having a sense of wonder about life. And it can be dangerous to manipulate our thinking, to rely on metaphysical narratives, to produce that sense of wonder. I think we’re already seeing those dangers bubble up into our politics. We may need to focus on the difficult trick of how to keep ourselves grounded, humble, and open to mystery, all at the same time.
All that said, I’m looking forward to reading your book, as a fan :)
Great read. When I first read Strassman's magnum opus, I had an initial reaction that made me lose respect for him upon consulting a theoretical physicist to inquire about the reality of DMT experiences. Now I see it as intellectually honest and responsible science. Though I remain unconvinced. I am so curious to know how you would design an experiment to evaluate the veridicality of DMT experiences?
Scientists already know that hallucinations can feel more real than reality. Your beliefs are the predictable outcome of using felt intensity to determine what's true.
Been trying to get this sort of thing on the radar of my algorithm for awhile.
I’ve only done ayahuasca once, back in 2006, before it was mainstream or well known. I was dating a Peruvian whose dad was a shaman. She invited me to a familial ceremony in a cave above Cusco. I figured it was a once in a lifetime opportunity. I had only done mushrooms a handful of times and was scared of plunging into the deep end of the psychedelic pool with ayahuasca. So I held back on my experience. But I did see machine elves, without even knowing they’re a thing. It was a very faint hallucination, they were around a pole, like a May Day pole or barber pole. Maybe dna? They were mildly sinister, sexual in nature, if that makes sense. I told my gf about them and she said yeah that’s common. I had absolutely no way of knowing that. The only other non-physical experience aspect of the trip was the noise, it was similar to the static of a tv, I call it the background noise of the universe. Apparently this is a thing as well. Anyway, this is my one and only experience thus far, just thought I’d share.
Thanks for your contribution in making this more accepted in science.
I loved the book and the history of the whole space was fascinating. I've never taken it but am so intrigued. I feel like this and the kind of discoveries like the Telepathy Tapes need a lot more attention. Are these not the most intriguing discoveries of our time?