*McKenna first smoked DMT as an undergraduate at Berkeley in early 1967. He had experience with LSD—ingesting it "once a month or so"—and other psychedelics, but as he said in an interview in The Archaic Revival (1992):Why this is not four-inch headlines on every newspaper on the planet I cannot understand, because I don't know what news you were waiting for, but this is the news that I was waiting for.
From 1967 to 1994, McKenna smoked DMT—an orange, crystalline, earwax-y substance that "smells vaguely of mothballs"—30 to 40 times. He described composites of his DMT trips in "Rap Dancing into the Third Millennium," "DMT Revelations," and "Time and Mind." Below is my composite of McKenna's three composites, arranged chronologically, with approximate amounts of time, in minutes and seconds, elapsed since the initial toke of DMT, vaporized in a glass pipe:0:00. First toke. Colors brighten, edges sharpen, distant things gain clarity—"there is a sense as though all the air in the room has been sucked out."0:10. Second toke. You close your eyes and "colors begin racing together, and it forms this mandalic, floral, slowly rotating thing"—"usually yellow-orange"—which McKenna called "the chrysanthemum." Then "you either break through it, or you require one more toke." ("The leather-lunged hash smokers among us have a leg up in this department.")It was really the DMT that empowered my commitment to the psychedelic experience. DMT was so much more powerful, so much more alien, raising all kinds of issues about what is reality, what is language, what is the self, what is three-dimensional space and time, all the questions I became involved with over the next twenty years or so.
The place, or space, you've burst into—called "the dome" by some—seems to be underground, and is softly, indirectly lit. The walls are "crawling with geometric hallucinations, very brightly colored, very iridescent with deep sheens and very high, reflective surfaces—everything is machine-like and polished and throbbing with energy." McKenna said:The reason it's so confounding is because its impact is on the language-forming capacity itself. So the reason it's so confounding is because the thing that is trying to look at the DMT is infected by it—by the process of inspection. So DMT does not provide an experience that you analyze. Nothing so tidy goes on. The syntactical machinery of description undergoes some sort of hyper-dimensional inflation instantly, and then, you know, you cannot tell yourself what it is that you understand. In other words, what DMT does can't be downloaded into as low-dimensional a language as English.
0:50. You're "appalled." You're thinking "Jesus H. Fucking Christ, what is this? What is it?" McKenna observed:But that is not what immediately arrests my attention. What arrests my attention is the fact that this space is inhabited—that the immediate impression as you break into it is there's a cheer. […] You break into this space and are immediately swarmed by squeaking, self-transforming elf-machines…made of light and grammar and sound that come chirping and squealing and tumbling toward you. And they say, "Hooray! Welcome! You're here!" And in my case, "You send so many and you come so rarely!"
1:00. The elves, or "jeweled self-dribbling basketballs," come running forward. They're "singing, chanting, speaking in some kind of language that is very bizarre to hear, but what is far more important is that you can see it [which is] completely confounding!" And also, something is "going on" that over the years McKenna has come to call luv—"not 'light utility vehicle,' but love that is not like Eros or not like sexual attraction," something "almost like a physical thing," "a glue that pours out into this space."And the weird thing about DMT is it does not affect what we ordinarily call the mind. The part that you call you—nothing happens to it. You're just like you were before, but the world has been radically replaced—100 percent—it's all gone, and you're sitting there, and you're saying, "Jesus, a minute ago I was in a room with some people, and they were pushing some weird drug on me, and, and now, what's happened? Is this the drug? Did we do it? Is this it?"
4:10. Then—"and only 5 percent report this," McKenna noted—"everything stops and they wait, and you feel, like, a torch, a spark, lit in your belly, that begins to move up your esophagus." Then your mouth "flies open and this language-like stuff comes out." It's sound, but "what you're experiencing is a visual modality where these tones are surfaces, shading, colors, insets, jewels, and you are making something." The elves "go mad with joy."4:40. "The whole thing begins to collapse in on itself, and they literally begin to physically move away from you. And usually their final shot is they actually wave goodbye." There's "a ripple through the system, and you realize these two continua are being pulled apart." (Once, "as the pull-away maneuver began, all the elves turned simultaneously and looked at" McKenna and said "déjà vu, déjà vu.") McKenna added:Don't give way to wonder. Do not abandon yourself to amazement. Pay attention. Pay attention. Look at what we're doing. Look at what we're doing, and then do it. Do it!
5:00. "You're raving about it."7:00. "You can't remember it." You say "this is the most amazing thing, this is the most amazing thing, this is—what am I talking about?" McKenna thought DMT "might have a role in dreaming," in part because "the way a dream melts away is the way a DMT trip melts away—at the same speed." McKenna discussed this in an interview:And often it's very erotic, although I'm not sure if that's the word. But it's almost like sex is the surface of which this is the volume. And I'm a great fan of sex; I don't mean to denigrate it. I mean to raise DMT to a very high status.
*The experience of DMT was, to McKenna, "of a fundamentally different order than any other experience this side of the yawning grave." He said it was not a drug, but "something masquerading as a drug." The experience of it, he said, would be different for everyone, but "in some form at least what will be similar to my description is how dramatic it will be." He provisionally concluded:There is a self-erasing mechanism in it. I have the feeling that you find out something there that is so contra-intuitive that you literally cannot think of it sitting here. So as you go from there to here, there comes a moment where it slips below the surface of rational apprehensibility.
This has to be taken seriously. In other words, the "it's only a hallucination" thing—that horseshit is just passé. I mean, reality is only a hallucination for crying out loud, haven't you heard? So that takes care of that—it's only a hallucination. What we've got here, folks, is an intelligent entelechy of some sort that is frantic to communicate with human beings for some reason.
2. Entities in a parallel continuumAnother possibility, which "is maybe closer to, friendlier to pagan notions," is that "there is a parallel continuum nearby, essentially right here." McKenna elaborated:If an extraterrestrial wanted to interact with a human society, and it had ethics that forbade it from landing trillion-ton berrelium ships on the United Nations plaza—in other words if it were subtle—I can see hiding yourself inside a shamanic intoxication. You would say, "Let's analyze these people. OK—they're kind of hard-headed rationalists, except they have this phenomenon called "getting loaded" and when they get loaded they accept whatever happens to them, so let's hide inside the load and we'll talk to them from there, and they'll never realize that we're of a different status than pink elephants.
3. Dead peopleA third possibility is that "what you penetrate on DMT is an ecology of human souls in another dimension of some sort." This was "hair-raising" to McKenna, who reached this speculation "reluctantly." Some of his evidence for it:Call it fairyland, call it the Western Realm—whatever you like—but you don't go there in starships. You go there through magical doorways which are opened via ritual and things like that. That is a possibility as well. Certainly human folklore in all times and places—except Western Europe for the last 300 years—has insisted that these parallel domains of intelligence and organization exist.
4. Humans from the futureA fourth possibility is the entities are "humans from some extraordinarily advanced future world where human beings are now made of language and are only two-and-a-half feet tall, so I would put it rather far in the future."These things… have a very weird relationship to human beings. First of all, they love us! They care for some reason. Whoever and whatever they are, they're far more aware of us than we are aware of them. Witness the fact that they welcome me. So is it possible that at the end of the 20th century, at the end of 500 years of materialism, reductionism, positivism, what we're about to discover is probably the least likely denouement any of us expected out of our dilemma—what we're about to discover is that death has no sting.
Ken's experience was anomalous in terms of what he said occurred, if not in shock-factor, despite—as you read above—the "rectal probe" that was amazingly and actually necessarily, it seemed, used on volunteers during the study and that only one person, named Nils in the book, refused: "The probe was about an eighth of an inch in diameter; it was made out of rubber-coated wire and was quite flexible. It went in about four to six inches and rarely caused any discomfort, except in those with hemorrhoids."Strassman attempted psychological models of explanation—Freud, Jung—but those didn't fit. His research, which eventually included psilocybin, ended in 1995 after, among other difficulties, his former-wife was diagnosed with cancer, his "Buddhist monastic community" began criticizing his research and "withdrawing their personal support," and he was denied permission to relocate the research setting to somewhere less harsh than the inside of a loud, unpredictable hospital, which in an interview he called "the most distasteful, in some ways, possible place for people to have huge trips." In 2007, Strassman was asked in an IRC chat discussion: "What is the purpose of DMT in the brain? Why do we have it naturally in the first place?" He answered:[Ken] settled down at about the 5-minute point, but grimaced and shook his head. Within a couple more minutes he took off his eyeshades and stared straight ahead. His pupils remained large, so Laura and I sat quietly, waiting for him to come down further. At 14 minutes, looking shaken but keeping some composure, he started [talking],
There were two crocodiles. On my chest. Crushing me, raping me anally. I didn't know if I would survive. At first I thought I was dreaming, having a nightmare. Then I realized it was really happening.
I was glad he didn't have the rectal probe in place, this being a screening day.
Tears formed in his eyes, but stayed there.
"It sounds awful."
It was awful. It's the most scared I've ever been in my life. I wanted to ask to hold your hands, but I was pinned so firmly I couldn't move, and I couldn't speak. Jesus!
*Terence McKenna said in a 1989 interview in The Archaic Revival: "One of the things that interests me about dreams is this: I have dreams in which I smoke DMT, and it works. To me that's extremely interesting, because it seems to imply that one does not have to smoke DMT to have the experience. You only have to convince your brain that you have done this, and it then delivers this staggering altered state."And in "DMT, Mathematical Dimensions, Syntax and Death," he said:I think we need something in the brain that does what seems to happen to us at various times in our lives. Like silicon in computer chips, DMT is the best material for the purpose of seemingly providing access to free-standing non-corporeal realms. On the other hand, since we are all making DMT all of the time, it may also mediate our perception of everyday reality.
*As profound, extreme, confounding, and astonishing as DMT was to McKenna, it arguably wasn't the compound he aligned himself with, advocated, or talked about most. In my view, this would be psilocybin—the topic of next week's post—which is found in ~200 types of mushroom and, when inside the human body, breaks down into psilocin, which differs from DMT by the addition of one atom of oxygen.Follow Tao on Twitter.I once had a fortunate opportunity of being able to turn a very prominent Tibetan lama onto DMT—a name that you would recognize, although not one of the top five, but a more wizened, older, stranger character. And I, you know, he did it, and I said, "So what about it?" You know, these people, these Tibetan Buddhists, have a pretty good map of the territory. He said it's the lesser lights. He said you can't go further than that without breaking the thread of return. He said beyond this, there's no returning. And so, in a very real sense, it's a look over the edge. But then even that doesn't solve all the mysteries. I mean, what is it about this wish to convey a language that is seen? What's that all about? Is it that perhaps language has always been a gift from the other?