Summary Review of DMT Dialogues: Encounters with the Spirit Molecule

You can also read this review on Blossom Analysis’ website.

DMT Dialogues: Encounters with the Spirit Molecule, edited by David Luke and Rory Spowers, gives the reader a peek into Tyringham Hall in England in September 2015, as ten of the world’s leading luminaries noted for exploring the mysterious compound DMT gathered with other researchers from across the globe. Over three days, experts in archaeology, anthropology, religious studies, psychology, neuroscience, chemistry, psychopharmacology, and more, explored the notion of “entheogenic plant sentience” and the role of DMT as a conduit between spirit and matter. With insights from Dennis McKenna, Rick Strassman Graham Hancock, and Robin Carhart-Harris, the book is believed to be one of the most comprehensive on the topic of DMT.

All of the talks given here were absolutely riveting. There’s so much useful information and fascinating theories regarding the DMT World and its inhabitants that I couldn’t put the book down. One unique feature of the talks was a healthy dose of wonder that can be felt which is not always readily apparent in journal articles. Each of the talks contain a good sense of the benefits and limits of reductionist science and taking the DMT experience at face value.

This might be one of the best books on DMT out there, simply because it seems like the speakers opened up and got creative in their talks, really exploring the metaphysics of the DMT World and the beings that inhabit it, rather than only making incremental claims that frequently appear in academic sources. That isn’t to say that these talks aren’t academic and rigorous–all of the speakers have the credentials and are well known for their rigour and scholarship. This is an excellent book. It raises a number of solid questions regarding how to think about the psychedelic space outside of the therapeutic context.

Introduction – Exploring Entheogenic Entity Encounters – Anton Bilton

Entities, gods, aliens, and other creatures are not new to us. Humans have been spoken to by different beings since our beginnings. Exploring these visitations is the most important work we can be doing.
Bilton describes an experience he had where he was introduced to the concept of layering: different levels of intelligent beings way more evolved than us. Gods rather than God. There are layers of gods with some more powerful than others but all are more powerful than us.
Our ancestors knew to make every effort to commune with these entities, gods, and emissaries. They knew the importance of this and because of that, we are where we are today. However, we’ve left much on the table by outlawing and ridiculing people who do explore these avenues. It was for this reason that Bilton worked to put this conference together.

Chapter 1 – The Pineal Enigma – Graham St. John

One of the key propositions from Rick Strassman‘s book DMT: The Spirit Molecule is that the pineal gland is the producer of DMT. This was something he speculated on but has been received as fact and memed into popular culture.
Strassman speculates on the function of endogenous DMT and proposes that since the effects of DMT mirror mystical and prophetic states throughout history they could be mediated by the brain by internally producing the chemical.
St. John is interested in two schools of thought regarding the pineal gland:
- New Age: the pineal gland is the key to higher consciousness and spiritual evolution.
- Gothic Horror: Via H. P. Lovecraft, the pineal gland is an antenna that detects signals from the beyond. It also functions as a doorway to let other beings in.
He then shows the audience a series of clips from From Beyond, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Banshee Chapter, The Possession of Michael King, The Lazarus Effect, and Adventure Time relating various scenes to the meme of the pineal gland in culture.
Erik Davis, commenting on St. John’s talk mentions that from Descartes on, there’s been an association of the pineal as mediating between matter and spirit. It’s taken up by Theosophy and Lovecraft was swapping the usual association.
Rupert Sheldrake and Rick Strassman talk about the idea of collecting pineal glands from animals at slaughterhouses and testing them for DMT and the difficulties of getting permits for that. Strassman also mentions that there is work testing DMT levels of living people and people near death to see if there is any change in measure.

Chapter 2 – Is DMT a Chemical Messenger from an Extraterrestrial Civilization – Dennis McKenna

DMT was first synthesized by Richard Manske in 1931 who was working on strawberry roots. He needed a standard for chromatography so he synthesized DMT without knowing it was a natural or a psychoactive compound.
McKenna picked this topic intending to make the case that DMT might have an extraterrestrial origin and seeded into our biosphere by a super biotechnologically sophisticated civilization but realized he couldn’t make that case. The TRP operon (gene cluster that is responsible for tryptophan biosynthesis) is phylogenetically extremely ancient. It’s found in the oldest phylum of organisms, the Archaea.
The environment, the entire biosphere, is in some sense a chemical ecology. A lot of the secondary compounds outside of photosynthesis can be thought of as neurotransmitters for the Gaian mind. The entire earth, Gaia, is an organism that is self-regulating using these global feedback mechanisms.
We suffer from brain chauvinism, requiring a complex nervous system for intelligence. The brain isn’t necessary though, what is necessary is neural networks and networks of connections and exchanges. These exist everywhere in the forest and atmosphere. Almost like intelligent design. Except nature is the designer. Nature itself is intelligent, self-organizing, and self-regulating.
DMT is much more common in nature than we think. In Australia, there are maybe 100 Acacias that we know contain DMT, but there are 1200 species of Acacias. Chances are at least half, maybe 75% of them contain DMT. And that’s just one species.
McKenna postulates (and challenges someone to give him a grant to study it) that every plant contains at least some amount of DMT, many with extremely low levels.
Looking at endogenous DMT chemistry, the same compounds you find in plants can also be found in the mammalian nervous system: serotonin, DMT and DMT derivatives, B-carbolines, and melatonin for example.
Now, if DMT was seeded into the biosphere, it was at the very beginning and then you might as well say they seeded life on this planet. This is possible given the number of comets that have impacted earth. But we don’t need to evoke this idea because the earth has plenty of organic complexity and can invent its own life.
What if, instead, we are the aliens? Built into our architecture, our nervous system, are receptors sensitive to DMT that open the door to a universe full of nonhuman life and intelligence. DMT is a messenger molecule. It works in the biosphere on the ecological level. It’s not an extraterrestrial messenger, it’s a terrestrial messenger: Gaia opening our eyes.
DMT, psilocybin, and other compounds are catalysts for cognitive evolution. They aren’t put there by aliens, but by the biosphere itself. It is Gaia trying to get this problematic species to the next level of evolutionary development.
They teach us symbiosis. They teach us interconnectedness. We are part of the process of nature, not separate from it. They teach us biophilia and animism.
Current science supports that plants are intelligent and that a biosphere as a whole acts intelligently. There’s no room for arrogance in human evolution. We should be humbled by the intelligence of nature.

Chapter 3 – Amazonian Perspectives on Invisible Entities – Jeremy Narby

Narby was in the Peruvian Amazon in 1984 to do fieldwork with the Ashaninka people. He wanted to show that indigenous people used the resources and land rationally and deserved the right to own the land. So it was politically-oriented research rather than mystical-oriented.
The Ashaninka said that plants and animals were animated by entities called mothers or fathers that were normally invisible unless you took ayahuasca or a tobacco paste. These entities were called maninkari, “those who are hidden.” The maninkari were a part of the Ashaninka tribe as were the birds and plants. Maninkari are the difference between living flesh and meat, it is gone when the organism dies.
They aren’t exactly spirits nor are they deities. All Amazonian cultures have concepts to describe these types of beings. They all refer to mothers who animate plants and animals. While invisible entities they can refer to a specific plant or to a species as a whole.
Narby is trying to argue that there is knowledge already established in these cultures. It isn’t speculation. It’s known by anthropologists who have been around these people for decades and brought back their words.
Narby then provides three examples:
- The Yanomami people, who live in Brazil and Venezuela, call invisible creatures xapiri spirits which also must be encountered through plants. They are the core of living beings and animate plants and animals. They are humanoid, or at least have tiny bodies like humans. The xapiri spirits arrive dancing and singing and teach you the melodies of healing. They are also incredibly luminous beings but are adamant that they are not spirits. They are other.
- The Piro people in the Peruvian Amazon drink ayahuasca to see kayiglu beings. They say that when we see a strangler vine we think it’s a tree, but that’s not accurate. It’s a person. These kayiglu beings sing and the shaman learns the songs so they can learn to see like the other beings do. The word kayiglu means “one who generates visions.” The kayiglu generate these visions and these songs, which are the essence of their knowledge. However, they view humans as game animals. Shamans must resist the temptation to identify with these beings and see other humans as animals to harm. An ethical frame is essential to going into this realm because it’s easier to learn to harm people than it is to heal people.
- The Yaminahua people drink ayahuasca to communicate with yoshi beings. These beings similarly invisible and animate plants and animals. The yoshi sing melodic songs and the shamans learn them and sing them back to the yoshi using words. However, the language they use is “twisted” and symbolic so as to be able to get close to the yoshi without “crashing into them.”
Our culture hasn’t been using DMT-containing plants for long, so we don’t know how to use them or understand them. The Amazonians do. And if we take what they are saying about these entities seriously then we need to figure out what these entities correspond to biologically since they are the difference between life and death.

Chapter 4 – Concerning the Nature of the DMT Entities and Their Relation to Us – Peter Meyer

Meyer calls the space that contains the DMT entities the “DMT World.”
The criterion of the real is intersubjective verifiability. One or two reports can be considered hallucinations. But once hundreds of people are similar, then we can’t dismiss them so easily.
While Meyer has previously used DMT World to refer to a phenomenological sense, in this talk he will be laying out an ontological sense for the term.
In the Western philosophical tradition there are three classical questions of “who are we?” “where did we come from?” and “why are we here?” and Mayer is going to provide alternative answers to these questions.
The fundamental reality is a primordial Awareness which Plotinus called “the One.” In order to enhance its possible experience, it created individual intelligences, some of which are known as archangels and angels. From these and from the Primordial mind exist other minds which Origin speaks of. Origin says that only the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are incorporeal, so all other souls have bodies. So DMT entities, like angels and humans, have bodies and can be seen by those who enter the DMT World.
The answer to “who are we?” is that we and the DMT entities are among the souls that exist in Origin’s cosmology.
In an earlier article, Meyer asked if humans are personalities who have their origins in the development of our bodies or are we hyperspatial entities who became associated with bodies so we could act in what seems to be “the ordinary world.”
Expanding on the latter, he suggests that before we were incarnate in this world we were entities in the DMT world and in the womb transitioned from the DMT world to this world.
Building off Andrew Gallimore and Thomas Metzinger’s work, Meyer defines what the “world” is by utilizing the neuroscientific concept of how the brain builds our world as “the totality of the appearances of a world to a community of conscious beings (or souls).” So, the world we believe we live in is the totality of all appearances to humans of a world. The DMT World then is the totality of all appearances to DMT entities of a world.
Gallimore argues that the ability of a brain to build our consensus world and the DMT world developed at the same time. Meyer claims this is incorrect as there is little-to-no survival value for our ancestors of having a brain capable of building the DMT World.
Meyer suggests that an intelligent being in the DMT World can be born into a human body. As a fetus and for some time after birth, one can remember the DMT World. The question is how one transitions from a DMT World to this one. DMT entities have bodies that are different from ours. The brain of the DMT entity builds the DMT World it experiences just like the brain of the fetus after birth builds the consensus reality it experiences. So the consciousness of the DMT entity becomes the consciousness of the fetus and eventual human. So the ability of the fetal brain to build the DMT World occurs before the ability to build the consensus world.
This is contrary to the physicalist philosophers’ claims. They can’t explain how neural activity can bring about a conscious experience though.
The answer to the third question, “why are we here” is that there is a hierarchy of worlds emanating from the Primordial Mind with some beings in the various worlds aspiring to higher spiritual awareness. This takes effort and awareness, something that we can be working towards in this world. After we die and become a DMT entity again, we retain some from this world and can add to it.

Chapter 5 – How to Think about Weird Beings – Erik Davis

Eben Alexander is a good example of someone who can switch between talking about weird things and going into scientific mode. This is an important zone and psychedelic researchers need to operate in the gap as a cross-pollinator.
Religion is a very broad concept meant to generalize about a lot of different things: central to which are otherworldly beings, non-corporeal beings, nonhuman beings and many more. There are similarities between the beings religion and psychedelics talk about: elves, goddesses, tricksters, human-animal hybrids, etc.
One important moment in comparative religion that’s had a huge impact on psychedelics is the work of Mircea Eliade who emphasized the similarities between different religious traditions and gave rise to the near-universal use of the term “shaman”.
Prior to the Second World War people using psychedelics never invoked religious language. But after the war, when people began reading Eliade and Carl Jung, they begin utilizing the religious language as descriptive of the psychedelic states. Contemporary scholars are critical of these comparisons for various reasons and think that the difference is what really matters.
In these experiences, people see something similar and there appears to be a consistency to entities that people experience under the various psychedelics. What exactly these entities are getting organized in very different ways.
Rational scepticism is also important. Davis notes that as many leave the world of disenchantment and plunge back into radical enchantment many people lose their rational edge and release scepticism. Even in indigenous situations, there’s an element of scepticism, of making sure entities are who they say they are.
Even among perennialism, differences between cultures show. One thing to do, to make sense of these differences, is to acknowledge how much people, their culture, and models set up and shake the kinds of experiences they have. You’re more likely to see things that fit with your current culture. Despite the constructed aspects, these encounters seem to be more than just our own construction.
One problem with bringing our science-shaped minds to the “spiritual world” is that there are certain patterns and styles of thought we bring unconsciously when we go to another domain–such as a tendency toward literalism and a drive to find a singular explanatory key. This is grounded in our dualist mindsets.
Davis wants to present an alternative perspective rooted in an existential or ontological pluralism. There are different modes of being. Laws, for example, are more real than fiction but less real than molecules.
Regarding weird beings, if we are already assuming they must be real in a metaphysical sense, a psychological projection, or a social construction we have already lost our way. All our moves have already been made. But how do we move in a different way? Davis likes to think these visionary entities flicker. They’re here and then they aren’t. They are veiled. They’re here for a time and then they are not. Their emergences appear within a metabolic envelope.
We can refer to the question of psychedelic entities being bound up with biological processes as a metabolic ontology. Davis is seeking a balance between scepticism and looking for what’s just over the horizon.
In the discussion Davis, Rick Strassman, and Dennis McKenna discuss how science fits into this and how most contemporary science is a caricature of science. McKenna says true science should be about the search for truth and that everything, including electrons, have a spiritual dimension. Davis mentions that there’s a key aspect to psychedelic culture in Eliade’s discussion of the sacred and profane together being a driver of the spiritual path.
Davis also mentions that a good approach is a naturalist one like Terence McKenna takes: approaching the realms as other places that we can explore. And, while most were turning to yoga and Vedanta, Terence was more interested in magic and alchemy which are more like naturalism.

Chapter 6 – Why May DMT Occasion Veridical Hallucinations and Informative Experiences? – Ede Frecska

Frecska wants to figure out how we can sometimes get reliable information from anomalous sources in anomalous ways, a foundation of knowledge for interpreting anomalous phenomena.
We can get a representation of the outside environment in two different ways: locality and non-locality. Locality means energy exchange when the info is coming from a space-time constraint: e.g. through our senses, empirically.
Information processing may bypass the senses, but Frecska argues, that it doesn’t bypass the body. The body serves as a type of quantum array antenna by getting nonlocal information from quantum correlations in the environment. He’ll discuss how quantum effects may reach the brain. He’s going to do so by pointing out inconsistencies in the Western approaches and following the rules of four C. The theory that is better is more comprehensive, congruent, compact, or better connected to other fields of knowledge.
At the bottom or the top, there is a nonbiological web embedding our existence and consciousness nonlocally in the universe.
Frecska adds another foundation of knowledge based on nonlocality. Our body is in contact with the whole Universe utilizing the subcellular quantum array antenna. It is nonlocal by turning inside. In the Nested Network model of human experience, the brain’s sensory inputs are local effects and involve energy exchange. And so life is about continuous energy exchange.
In the Nested Network model, the neuroaxonal brain is how we respond to environmental challenges quickly and efficiently. It assumes that there is a second network that serves as a representation of the outside world, providing different knowledge. In ordinary states of consciousness, it is the brain that dominates. In altered states of consciousness, it no longer is the dominant player.
DMT might shift information processing from the neuroaxonal toward the subcellular level.
If you go far enough inside, you begin to get access to information about what is in the outside world as well.
This second way of knowledge opens space for shared visions, shared consciousness, and having the same vision. He suggests that shared consciousness and inner experiences are testable, but are extremely difficult to replicate. Western civilization is in dire need of using both ways of knowing together.
Plants might be a creature that uses only direct-intuitive ways of knowing. It’s possible that they have enormous information processing power outside of the neuroaxonal and electronic but through some nonlocal type.
Commenting on the talk Bernard Carr mentions that what is particularly interesting in psychedelic experiences is that they involve some form of space. Even out-of-body experiences, dreams, and other psychic phenomena involve some type of space. Standard physics tells us that space is more than just three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. There are many other extra dimensions taken for granted. These other dimensions he thinks can be key to accommodating these different forms of reality. Materialistic and reductionist views of physics say that there’s only one form of reality and that’s what we need to move away from.

Chapter 7 – The Neurobiology of Conscious Interaction with Alternate Realities and Their Inhabitants – Andrew Gallimore

Gallimore explores the question “is it really possible to explain the DMT state as a hallucination?” His answer is no. He thinks that the idea that the brain is a kind of receiver that can be tuned is probably correct and wants to understand how that works neurologically.
The model of reality we are all familiar with is called the consensus model and is usually the standard by which we judge reality.
One of Gallimore’s axioms is that if a world appears to the consciousness, it must have an informational representation in the brain, meaning that everything around us that appears to us in the world is information.
To model representation in the brain, he uses a 4×4 grid of circles where each circle is a column. We can label the functionally distinct areas (one devoted to motion, colour, texture, etc.). We have billions of these and they form patterns of activation that determine the structure of the world and how it is represented. The world around us seems unified because the columns are connected, this connection determines the intrinsic activity that we normally adopt.
In dreaming our world is built entirely from intrinsic activity, which is the same as our waking state. Our waking state just has extrinsic information as well.
The ability of the brain to represent any world must be learned, and it must be evolved. A specific pattern represents the normal consensus reality state. Psilocybin or LSD allows the brain to adopt a larger repertoire of states. However, when you introduce DMT an entirely different state occurs. The channel switches and it adopts a different connectivity pattern. Your world is replaced.
The question is whether or not the brain is receiving data at all from another reality and it seems like DMT requires the brain to acquire the ability to receive and then render data from another reality. When serotonin is present the brain has a particular pattern of activation that lets the information from this world be represented which is not the case with DMT.
Because the brain must learn to build or evolve to build worlds DMT must have been present in the brain for a long time. Gallimore suggests it might be what he calls an ancestral neuromodulator. DMT is an extremely simple molecule, metabolized faster than other psychedelics, and doesn’t have a tolerance.
In the past, we might have interacted with our consensus world because serotonin peaked during daylight hours. At night we might have interacted with the DMT world. (Note that he isn’t arguing DMT creates dreams, they are quite different.) The pineal gland secretes melatonin and darkness triggers it. Perhaps it also triggered DMT production as well.
In the past, people went deep into the caves to draw creatures from the beyond on walls. The darkness might have induced the endogenous production of DMT without the need to ingest it. But somehow in our history, we lost the ability to secrete DMT, but our brain remembers how to build the DMT world.
So the brain appears to be able to switch states and can build the DMT world. But how does this information get to the brain? It doesn’t come through the five senses. This is the real problem, not the reality of the world.
Understanding this requires that we change the way we normally view reality. The neural field model suggests that the brain is an extremely complex vibrational structure that has many different vibrational modes but is a unified structure. If we think of the vibrational modes of a circular disk, the structure of the disk determines the modes of vibration it can adopt. Just like the brain patterns.
We can think of the brain like a bell. It’s tuned to a specific frequency of consensus reality that, even when switched off, can continue to ring (hence our dreams). This means that any info that doesn’t resonate with the ongoing activity, from the perspective of the brain, doesn’t exist! If you change the vibration, the consensus world disappears and something new takes its place.
The biggest mistake of philosophy has been breaking things into subjective and objective. We decided that the objective world, which we can never reach, is the ground of reality and gives rise to the subjective.
Consciousness is fundamental, but it also has structure. The brain is a structure formed from a consciousness that has a drive to self-complexify and self-organize which creates the structure that is the brain.
We are a group of self-reflective complexes that live in a collective reality because we all have brains and consciousnesses of basically the same type of structure. But if we think of the larger structure of consciousness which is an infinite matrix, we just occupy a very small piece of this giant matrix of consciousness.
There could be other “elf” realities that exist, structured similarly to ours, but our collective reality doesn’t acknowledge the existence of the elf reality because of how our brains resonate. But if we change the structure, we change the reality.

Chapter 8 – Morphic Resonance, Psychedelic Experience, and Collective Memory – Rupert Sheldrake

There seems to be a bit of a transition from materialism to a view that is rediscovering the idea of a living world, a living organic cosmos.
Morphic resonance is the idea that there’s a memory inherent in nature and the “laws” of nature are more like habits. Essentially, similar self-organizing patterns of activity resonate with previous similar patterns of activity across space and time.
The first time something is crystallized or a rat has to learn a new trick, it takes time and you have to wait. It gets easier for the entire species or class of molecules to do so each time it has been done.
Morphic resonance, if true, leads to a new view of inheritance. Things are more likely to be inherited via morphic resonance, not by genes. Genes rarely do what we’ve thought them to do.
There’s currently a “missing heritability problem.” We know more about genes than ever before. Yet we can only show genes accounting for 5-10% of the predictive power of something that has an 80% inheritance rate. The other 70-75% is missing.
Sheldrake is suggesting that perhaps our memories aren’t stored in the brain, but depend more so on morphic resonance. Our brain is like a tuning device or a receiver. It’s more like a TV though than a recorder. Memories depend on brain activity then. But the brain is a resonating system that can tune into them (similar to what Andrew Gallimore was talking about).
Psychedelics work in a similar way. He talked about this with Sasha Shulgin and Terence McKenna at Esalen. Shulgin tested the drugs he created first, then had a panel of twelve people who took them after he confirmed their safety. They’d compare notes and a consensus would emerge regarding what the drug did. Sheldrake suggested an experiment with two different settings. Roll the dice to see which one the first users would trip in and then see if the second round of people tripping had visions of the first place. This would likely confirm the morphic resonance theory.
Morphic resonance also lets us see rituals in a new way. They usually have very precise ways of doing things and do things in the old language in religious liturgies. If things are done in a similar way across generations then there’s a resonance between the people doing it now and the people who have done it in the past. They are reconnecting through the generations.
Some rites of passage involve death and rebirth. Some do it symbolically and some do it literally. (e.g. baptism by immersion: if you hold the person under the water for a few minutes they might have an out-of-body experience and come back saying they’ve been reborn, similar to near-death experiences).
All theories of survival require memory. Theories of reincarnation require both habits and dispositions, sometimes even explicit memories, to survive from one life to the next. There has to be some kind of transfer of memory. When Sheldrake was an atheist he liked to point out to Christians after they said that memory was stored in the brain, that the brain breaks down when they die, so how could they explain keeping their memories after they die? This is only a problem if memories are inside the brain though.
Sheldrake’s own view is that when we die we enter a dream-like state. We all have dream bodies, we know of them when we are asleep. It contains the dream bodies of other people and creatures, living or dead. This is similar to some things Rick Strassman proposed in his book DMT: The Soul of Prophecy.
Current work in theology has been returning to the pre-1700s/pre-mechanistic worldview ideas in theology that are significantly more interesting than the universe as a machine with God running it and engaging with more traditions than orthodox Christianity.
Normally most people don’t feel much motivation to go on a quest for truth, but psychedelics can inspire such a quest, as was the case for Sheldrake after taking LSD.
In the discussion Sheldrake and Carhart-Harris debate whether or not science has dogma within it.
Sheldrake mentions that he avoids Neoplatonism because it’s not evolutionary. The Platonic world of ideals and the Pythagorean world of mathematical forms is eternal and beyond space and time. IT doesn’t evolve or change.

Chapter 9 – Psychedelics, Entities, Dark Matter, and Parallel Dimensions – Graham Hancock

Many of the experiences that shamans report about spirits are phenomenologically similar to the reports of people who have encountered aliens and these two domains seem to have a lot in common.
Shamans frequently encounter spirits that appear as animals, birds, fish, or therianthropes which is also the case in many UFO abductees. Shamans float to the sky or are abducted by the sky and sometimes abducted underwater or into caves. They also experience surgeries by spirits and get things implanted into them. They report having sex with spirits and having hybrid offspring in the spiritual realm. All of these can be found in reports of people having been abducted by aliens.
Strange imagery can be found throughout history (some of which include things like UFOs prior to the era of technology). Hancock spends time comparing and analysing different cave paintings and other artwork.
Hancock notes that many UFO abductees tend to be more materialistic than most, having a strictly reductionist view of the physical beings that abducted them. If you so much as mention that it might have something to do with consciousness you get kicked out.
Perhaps UFO abductees might spontaneously overproduce endogenous DMT to explain the experiences they’ve had. If we consider the idea that our brain is a receiver, perhaps we have a secret doorway inside our minds that can project our consciousness to other dimensions where we can make contact with other beings. He thinks it’s compelling that when our ancestors began to show that they were cultivating and inducing altered states there was also a transformation in our behaviour. Hunting practices, tools and technology, and spirituality make massive leaps forward. Even Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak have said we wouldn’t be holding Apple devices without the aid of LSD.
Francis Crick suggested he might have been using LSD when he thought of the double-helix shape for our DNA. He was also an advocate of directed panspermia. Eugene Stanley found a structure in noncoding DNA that was identical to the structure in all human languages. He suggested that there’s a message written in our DNA.
If our DNA originated from somewhere else from genetic engineering, why couldn’t that hypothetical civilization encode our DNA with information? Perhaps we are accessing a hidden archive within our own bodies that contain all the knowledge and information of an ancient, alien civilization.

Chapter 10 – The Nature of DMT Beings: Perspectives and Prospects – Rick Strassman

Strassman wants to talk about the strengths and weaknesses that Eastern religions, especially Buddhism, and the Hebrew bible have in addressing the psychedelic state.
In his studies, over half of the participants described the DMT world as inhabited. Only rarely was the experience unitive or where their self dissolved into a timeless space.
There are two questions to address when discussing the DMT world and its contents.
- What is the nature of the DMT world; is it real or unreal?
- If so, so what? What is it good for?
The caveat of the real/unreal debate is the idea of DMT as the endomatrix (an endogenous substance or process that creates our apprehension of everyday reality).
Two pieces of data confuse the distinction between real and unreal. One is data generated from a Japanese group a few decades ago, and the other from a more recent Brazilian study that shows that DMT is transported into the brain across the blood-brain barrier using an energy-dependent process.
Why is that important? Because this treatment by the brain is characteristic of that substance being an essential brain nutrient. Glucose and some amino acids that the brain can’t synthesize on its own are treated the same way. This suggests that DMT is required for brain function.
Nick Cozzi demonstrated that the genetic machinery for DMT synthesis is active in the retina suggesting that it is possible that DMT regulates our perception of the visual world.
When thinking of mechanisms there are bottom-up and top-down categories.
One bottom-up model is the brain biology or neurotheology model. It suggests that the DMT world is generated by the brain. The other is the psychological model. The DMT world is your mind on drugs and is a product of your mind, things are symbolic of the unconscious. The Zen model is a similar “mind-only” model.
A top-down model posits that the DMT world is real and objective. DMT allows us to peer into “invisible” worlds.
The Hebrew Bible’s model is also top-down. Spiritual experiences are real apprehensions of externally existent levels.
A problem with Zen and shamanic models is that they are foreign and don’t resonate with the Western mind as much. Any model that wants to gain traction in the west has to be familiar since the psychedelic worlds are already strange to all.
The nature of the DMT world requires that the model be interactive and relational because the DMT state is just that. It also has to posit the DMT world as real–a near-universal description by DMT users. The model must also address ethical, moral, and theological concerns. These criteria are all encapsulated by a model utilizing the Hebrew Bible.
The paradigmatic experience in the Hebrew Bible is prophecy (prophecy as future-telling is an artefact of Greek translations, so he refers to prophesy as any spiritual experience).
Strassman discusses a vision in Ezekiel to exemplify “the equivalence of imagery.” We use the available repertoire of mental imagery to clothe the information contained in visions. It suggests that the same information is/can be contained in different images and can be extracted if interpreted properly.
He calls a key component “relatedness.” It’s the nature of the interactions between the beings and those perceiving them. Interactions are primarily verbal but also work through the body, emotions, visual imagery, and sound. Relatedness’ primary function is to communicate information.
Generally, there is higher relatedness in the Bible’s case than in the DMT participants’. The level of interaction and depth of information in the prophetic literature is much higher than in what people bring back in DMT experiences. So, perhaps the Hebrew Bible can help us extract information from the DMT state.
Strassman, based on his research, developed a new top-down model: theoneurological. It brings God into the discussion and lays out a higher level of abstraction regarding why things are the way they are. It provides better explanations than the neurotheological answer to things. Theoneurology suggests that God created the brain in a specific way so he could communicate with us rather than suggesting that the brain creates the impression of God communicating with us.
So how does one go about experiencing prophecy? The first one has to be qualified: capable of understanding what is apprehended in the prophetic state.
What is the prophetic message? Ethical monotheism. There’s one God who revealed through prophecy the Golden Rule: love your fellow as yourself. So the goal is world peace. Not individual enlightenment.
Perhaps the biology of the rapture, of the world to come, is simultaneous activation of the genetic apparatus for DMT synthesis in all organisms.
Regarding the Eastern unitive-mystical state, have we really been able to determine that this state is better, more helpful, or therapeutic than the biblical interactive-relational one? Studies have been designed with the goal of reaching the mystical state and participants have been guided to that state. Nothing points to this in the biblical text.

Chapter 11 – What We Think We Know about DMT Entities – David Luke

Luke summarizes and ties all of the previous talks together and then mentions the idea that DMT could be the neuromodulating chemical presiding over life and death, both a midwife and psychopomp of consciousness.
This would fit with the data that the DMT space seems familiar and contains other beings. Andrew Lang studied elven encounters in the Celtic nations of Britain and Ireland. After Lang died Walter Evans-Wentz picked up where he left off and ended up concluding that elves were probably fourth-dimensional beings existing in hyperspace. He also thought that this was connected to the realm of the dead. Evans-Wentz suggested that this fairyland exists as a supernormal state of consciousness that we can temporarily enter through dreams, trances, ecstatic conditions, or death.
Luke compares this to the DMT state and says that those who do DMT and ask “Am I dead?” when they first enter the DMT world are on to something.