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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Acacia nilotica as the ancient Egyptian Tree of Life is intriguing, it’s really intriguing, because that’s a DMT-bearing tree.
Psilocybin is an orally active form of DMT
“there’s a world out there and we’re projecting onto it” as opposed to “a world that’s always in cultural relation.”
340 reports, most of which were collected in 2005, exactly two-thirds of them, 226, include references to apparently independently existing entities; that is, beings of some kind existing independently of the observer, just as we assume that material objects and other people exist independently of our observation of them.
Arguably the most remarkable property of the human brain is its ability to construct the world that appears to consciousness. The brain is capable of building worlds during waking life, but also [of doing so] in the complete absence of extrinsic sensory data, entirely from intrinsic thalamocortical activity, as during dreaming. . . . [By] regarding this unique molecule [DMT] as equivalent to serotonin . . . DMT’s effects may be explained. Serotonin has evolved to hold the brain’s thalamocortical system in a state in which the consensus world is built. When serotonin is replaced by DMT, the
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everybody loves the story about the scientist who finds religion or finds spirituality again. It’s always got to be the scientist, of course. With the religious-studies guy or the artist it’s like, “Yeah, yeah, come on, whatever, you guys, you’re not very rigorous.” But if it’s a scientist, now we’re going to pay attention, even though scientists historically have often been quite religious and quite weird as well.
Essentially Harris’s skeptical argument is, “DMT is this molecule that floods the brain at the moment of death and produces these extraordinary hallucinations, and therefore we can ignore this claim of consciousness existing outside of matter.”
With the help of the subcellular quantum array antenna, our body is in contact with the whole Universe. I say body because probably it’s not only our brain.
I was reading Graham [Hancock’s] book Supernatural, and in the early parts of the book he’s talking about these caves, and inside them is Upper Paleolithic cave art depicting these strange creatures from beyond, and I think that Graham and others have suggested that this is because these individuals were having visions—they were shamans. It has always been assumed that they were ingesting some sort of drug.
as Dennis [McKenna] showed in his talk on Tuesday, when you drink ayahuasca, for a start the DMT levels never reach the same kind of concentrations as they do when you inject it or smoke it; it may be that you need to have a much higher level in the brain in order to completely flick the channel.
