DMT Dialogues: Encounters with the Spirit Molecule

by David Luke

RUPERT SHELDRAKE: Well, yes, in 1984 I was in Esalen with Rick Strassman and Terence McKenna etcetera, and both Rick and I took DMT for the first time, with Terence, and it then led to a series of conversations. I started my career as a tryptophan biochemist; my Ph.D. thesis was on the breakdown of the amino acid tryptophan, and I discovered that in plants when tryptophan breaks down as part of a dying process, it releases indole acetic acid, known as auxin, which is the main plant hormone. Auxin is a breakdown product of tryptophan. Another breakdown product is tryptamine and its derivatives, like DMT. So we were discussing the breakdown of tryptophan in dying cells, and the idea was that in the pineal there’d be these tryptophan precursors, and the pineal, at the moment of death, could flood the brain with DMT. This is a speculation Rick and I came up with in a conversation. I was amazed to see how far it’s gone!

JILL PURCE: I’d just like to say, Rupert’s being very modest. I was there at the time, and actually it was Rupert who suggested it.

It was actually first synthesized by a Canadian chemist, Richard H. Manske, in 1931, who was working on of all things the constituents of strawberry roots. He needed some standards for chromatography, so he synthesized dimethyltryptamine.

So a lot of these compounds you can think of as the neurotransmitters for the Gaian mind, for the Gaian brain.

We suffer from a kind of brain chauvinism. We say, “Well, if it doesn’t have a complex nervous system, if it doesn’t have a brain, it can’t possibly be intelligent, it can’t possibly plan and have foresight and act like we do, behave like we do.” That picture is totally changing now, because we’re beginning to understand that the brain is not necessary to have intelligence; what’s necessary is to have neural networks and to have networks of connections and exchanges. You see these everywhere in nature: the rhizosphere of plants, the mycelial networks with which it interacts, the chemical processes that are going on in the canopy of the forest and in the atmosphere, these are all networks of connection. And what arises out of that is something that amounts to intelligence in the sense that it optimizes conditions for the organism. Without using some kind of awkward terminology to avoid using the word intelligence, you can’t really adequately describe it; so why don’t we just call it intelligence? It looks intelligent, right?

At this point people always say, “You’re postulating an intelligent designer, and we don’t believe in intelligent designers.” It’s important to point out the designer is nature; there is no designer outside of nature, it’s nature itself that is intelligent, it’s nature itself that is self-organizing and self-regulating. The reason nature appears to be intelligent is that it actually is. Over billions of years it’s figured out how to optimize conditions to make life on Earth possible and enable it to persist.

What do they teach us? Well, for one thing, they teach us symbiosis; that’s probably the main lesson. They teach us an appreciation of the interconnected and interdependent nature of everything on Earth, of all living things on Earth. They teach us that we’re part of this process and that we are immersed in this web; we’re not separate from it. This is something that in the contemporary era we’ve forgotten. This is a big part of our problem—we think of ourselves as separate from nature, and this way of thinking is something we have to get over. They also teach us biophilia. Basically on a fundamental level you come out of psychedelic experience with a feeling for the sacredness of all life and a love for life, and that’s an important thing to integrate. They teach us animism: the perception that everything is alive and intelligent. And on the global level they teach us pantheism—the notion that the universe itself, the world itself, is alive and intelligent. This is the world-view of most indigenous cultures that use psychedelics, and it becomes the worldview of individuals in our culture that use psychedelics.

What we still lack—and this is a large part of the lessons that psychedelics are trying to teach us—is we have to close this gap between our cleverness and our lack of wisdom.

The Amazonian people have a view of reality in which the visible world that we usually see is a world of appearances that hides a more fundamental world that is normally invisible and contains powerful entities.

Often people are talking about mother ayahuasca; truth is that in half the indigenous cultures of the Amazon ayahuasca is a masculine entity.

One thing that the Amazonians report a lot more than DMT users is the importance of singing and learning the songs, and that how you interact with these entities is by paying attention to the sounds that they emit, which is how you learn from them. So maybe that is a suggestion for further research.

Half of Amazonian shamanism is attack sorcery. This kind of gets hidden when ayahuasca is brought into the West. We don’t talk about the kind of shadow side of it, nor do we hear too much about the shadow side in the DMT research and contact with these entities. I deliberately mentioned the warusinari insect beings that are from beyond the sky and come at you with their blades and weapons in reference to the praying mantis brain surgeons that DMT users encounter. The Yanomami people confirm that when you use DMT snuff these are the kinds of entities you run into. And it’s not easy.

It doesn’t stop with biology—in an animistic culture the rocks are alive, everything is alive and intelligent.

But there’s something particularly potent about psychedelics as a bridge or linkage between science and spirituality or materialism and mysticism. And that potency derives from the fact that, whatever else they are or whatever else they do, psychedelics are material molecules that we metabolize in a physical way that we can understand, at least on some levels, in strictly scientific terms. Psychedelics therefore play a key role in the constantly fought boundary war between the disenchanted model of the world that is the dominant scientific view and these spiritual counter-narratives that begin to grow and intensify in modernity. Psychedelics open up a space for new kinds of religious experience, for new kinds of mysticism, and for new ways of thinking about God. At the same time these drugs are material molecules that are produced and distributed not unlike other commodities in the market, and we can understand them naturalistically as potent forms of matter. As such, they become a site of this ongoing tension between science and spirituality, or naturalism and mysticism, or materialism and some altered dimension or the world of the sacred. That’s why “the spirit molecule” is such a wonderful phrase. It captures your mind right away, and it captures your imagination. Why? Because it’s roping together two registers that we generally separate. We usually do not think of spirit in terms of molecules, and we really don’t think of molecules in terms of spirituality. Bringing th...

So the example of extraordinary psychedelic experience can be used both ways. It can go both ways. And that paradox, that ambiguity, I think, is one of the key dynamics of psychedelics today.

And that’s what the multiple perspectives that contribute to psychedelic discourse should support. It should not just be a scientific conversation, it should not just be a psychological conversation or a conversation about regulation; it also has to be a conversation about the occult, about poetry, about history, and about myth. If we lose the squirrelier side of the conversation, we paradoxically lose our footing.

The irony is that, to my mind anyway, such literalism actually goes against one of the main features of psychedelic experience and psychedelic cognition, which is that the world, whatever else it is, is profoundly metaphoric. Our experience is not literal; the world is not literal. And yet people want to discover a literal drug at the heart of religious experience to reduce the latter to the former, just like good skeptics. For many I think it is so they don’t have to take religion seriously anymore. If it’s all just covert psychedelics, then you can just stick with the psychedelics and ignore the other issues that religion and spirituality raise.

If set and setting are partly composing the thing, then when you set up a holier space, that’s also making the thing. Not all of it, maybe, but a lot of it. So the sacred emerges not because it’s all holy coming down on us. It’s that through our art and intention we are building the holy space, building the sacred context, and setting ourselves up for meaning.

Psychedelics therapeutically are basically used to treat spiritual illnesses on a cultural and individual level, so they are medicines for the soul and for the spirit, and biomedicine is absolutely terrified of them. Because in order to use those in biomedicine, biomedicine has to acknowledge that there is a spiritual aspect to medicine and healing, and the whole mechanistic model of healing goes out the window. In fact, they have to accept enchantment again, because they’ve spent four or five hundred years trying to exorcise that out of science. It creates a conundrum for both sides, which is right where we want to be.

psychedelics are an inoculum against faith. Faith is being asked to believe something where there’s no evidence. You don’t have to have faith to experience psychedelics. In fact, it’s better if you don’t. I imagine Rick will take issue with this, but it doesn’t require faith; it simply requires receptivity and curiosity . . .

There was a nineteenth-century British ex-missionary in China, and he meets a guy and he asks, “Are you Confucianist or Taoist?” And the guy says, “Yep.”

You can learn from shamans and gurus, but you should never worship them.

ROBIN CARHART-HARRIS: I’ve been listening with an open mind since I’ve been here and more and more building up a feeling that I should say something in defense of what’s sometimes referred to as a materialist approach. It’s an unfortunate term, sort of sounds like materialist as in the acquisition of material goods. In terms of hearing you talking about the dry language that you will find in scientific literature, I want to frame that slightly differently. I want to say that what we aim to do as scientists is to be dispassionate, to really give ourselves the best chance to glean what is true. I also want to argue against the idea that scientists are only after getting the next publication or the next grant. I’m here with an open mind; I’m interested in these entity experiences that can be induced by DMT. I want to say my motivation is one of pragmatism as a scientist. I want to hear the phenomenology, I want to be systematic, I want to be pragmatic in my approach, and I want to test these ideas. I want to put them to the test and use that model as a way to glean truth. What worries me slightly about a desire for enchantment is that there’s something wishful as well as basking or luxuriating, I suppose, in mystery and enchantment, which is fine. As I say, I come here with an open mind wanting to understand the phenomena but with a motivation to try to study it. I think if you just leave it in this enchanting space, then you might be motivated not to even study it. So I just...

Dimethyltryptamine [DMT] and other psychedelics may shift information processing from the neuroaxonal toward the subcellular level. The most difficult technique is to get rid of the dominance of the brain by yoga meditation.

From my point of view, auras are some sort of synaesthesia. In synaesthesia, two sensory modalities are combined. For example, someone sees a brown sound. If a sensory modality—visual in this case—is blended with nonlocal information in a synaesthesia-like relationship, then that can give emergence to auras, or spirits, or perhaps even DMT entities.

However, this intuitive way is so nebulous that it has big problems with replicability, and that’s why Big Science ignores it. Many scientists realize measuring things is not the sine qua non of science, but scientists are definitely tied to replicability. I would quote George Carlin: “Drop your need, buddy!”

Some would say, “Well, that comes from evolution; this is biology—you can’t argue with that,” but I say even that’s not the case. The brain cares not about truth. What I mean is that the brain’s model of reality is the model that best allows it to make it to reproductive age and to reproduce. This is the basis of selection—fitness. That does not necessarily mean the model of reality must be the truest model of reality.

During the dream state your brain is perfectly happy constructing the world. In fact the neural activity, this intrinsic activity, of the cortical system that builds the world in the waking state is exactly the same as in the dream state.

In my opinion, I think we can take seriously the idea that these DMT entities are conscious, that they are aware of your presence, and may well be far more intelligent than you. So we need to open up an avenue of communication. We think of the DMT reality as another vibrational structure, another mode of the way that this consciousness tends to self-complexify and self-organize, and it’s just as real as this one except normally we’re unable to interact.

This is remarkable, but this makes DMT amenable to continuous intravenous infusion.

We can use this very same technology that was developed for anesthetics with DMT.

If we’re going to learn, if we’re going to open up two-way communication between these different collective realities, if we could validate the idea not only that these alternate dimensions exist but that we can actually communicate with them, then these would be the greatest discoveries in the history of mankind. Thank you.

In the past three or four years within biology there has been a crisis, which goes under the name “the missing heritability problem.”

So I think morphic resonance underlies the inheritance of form and of instincts and also enables things that have been learned to spread within populations much more quickly than they would normally spread.

Now, I myself think that the way in which some psychedelics act is through disturbing normal neurotransmitters and normal brain activity, releasing us from the direct connection with sensory reality; that’s what happens in our dreams, as several people have mentioned. I think that a drug like DMT—which in high doses stops us from doing anything, you’re sort of paralyzed by it, really—liberates us from the normal constraints on our mental activity, just as dreams are liberated from the normal constraints of sensory inputs. Other psychedelics can disturb normal patterns of activity, allowing this immense capacity for forming images and worlds that we experience through our dreams. I think they open up these realms of consciousness. I myself think that in the near-death-type experiences with DMT and in blissful states induced by other drugs, we are actually linking to the divine mind. I think mystical experiences are not, as materialists would say, just produced inside the brain through short-circuiting bits of the brain and through molecules affecting axons, neurons, synapses, and things. The potential to participate in the divine mind is there all the time—but normally we block it out. In the Dzogchen tradition and in Krishnamurti’s teachings, the idea is it’s here now, all the time, it’s just that we block out access to it, we create barriers; because we’re so busy getting on with our normal lives, and with all the distractions that the modern world has to offer, it’s prob...

I think that the psychedelic revolution—the expanding interest in psychedelics—is one of the things that’s actually driving the paradigm shift at the moment, because most people aren’t very interested in reading detailed arguments about the nature of reality, the nature of nature, and so forth. I am personally, but I very soon realized that this is a minority interest, whereas most people are interested in their own experience—and rightly so. If they’ve had experiences that break open their worldview and show that it is far too limited, far too incomplete, then this breakthrough is a very important part of a quest for something else.

The temple here [at Tyringham Hall] has an inscription about being in the quest; is it the quest for truth? Normally, most people don’t feel much motivation to go on a quest to a truth—life’s too full of distractions and answering emails and things—but psychedelics do inspire such a quest. They did for me. My first experience was with LSD in 1971, and it completely changed my view of reality. I think for many young people now psychedelics are a rite of passage; they’re like a near-death experience, like dying and being born again into a new world and a new reality. I think that what we’re talking about here is actually at the cutting edge of this transition in our culture, because most people change their worldview because of experience; and it’s now on a mass scale that people are taking psychedelics, often unwisely, not well guided, and there are casualties along the way; nevertheless, I think it’s an extraordinarily powerful driver of this change. It’s not really coordinated or organized by anybody, it’s just happening, and that’s why I think that what we’re talking about now is highly relevant to this change in worldview, and...

CARHART-HARRIS: I don’t see that. I mean the idea that science is a religion that rests on some kind of leap of faith, I just don’t think it holds up, because the scientific method is one of testing. It’s one that, to your credit, you practice yourself. The idea of these scientists who are so narrow-minded that they won’t allow you to test something like telepathy is problematic. They should allow that.

Just last year there was this post-materialist manifesto where a large number, maybe a hundred, scientists signed this, basically saying that we have to expand our concept of science to accommodate the sort of phenomena we’re talking about and that really the distinction is between science and scientism.

there were people who used to say psychedelic experience is a kind of cheat and real mystical experience is something quite different. I don’t believe that; I think that they’re very closely related. And people can access different states through meditation. There’s all sorts of altered states of consciousness: you can arrive at them through meditation; you can arrive at them through experiences in nature such as mystical connection with nature; you can arrive at them through drugs; you can arrive at them through near-death experiences. And there are many ways to alter our consciousness and contact other realms—through rituals, liturgy, and chanting to name a few.

He and I had a long discussion about it, and he had this idea that underlying the world we live in—the phenomenal world—is what he called the implicate order. The implicate order unfolds into the explicate order, or the phenomenal world. But the implicate order is not itself in space and time, or at least it’s in other dimensions of space and time. It’s not in three- or four-dimensional space and time. So as I said to Bohm, if you just have the implicate order giving the explicate order, then you’ve just reinvented Neoplatonism—you’ve got a kind of platonic realm that folds out to the phenomenal world.

Perhaps that’s what we’re all universally accessing in altered states of consciousness: not a hidden doorway but a hidden archive within our own bodies that contains all the knowledge and all the information of an ancient and alien civilization.

HANCOCK: Is there a category of data or information that could be brought back from that realm that would settle the matter and would say to us, yes, this reality is definitely freestanding? LUKE: That is the really interesting question. I think this also bears relevance to the point you raised, Graham, that perhaps ancestrally we had altered states of consciousness appearing, obviously indicated by art, at the same time as culture advanced and civilization began, etcetera. So was that information being fed by these discarnate entities in some way? I think part of answering that question ties in with the same question you’re asking, Andrew: How do we go about testing the ontology of these very entities themselves? Now Marko Rodriguez put forward this proposal: you send the entities some really difficult math tasks that you don’t have the answers to but which you can then verify. This is a great idea, but then it falls down when you know a little bit about the psychical research, which has been going on already for about 130 years with mediums, trying to establish the veracity of communications with discarnate entities known as “spirits of the dead.” It falls down on the problem of what’s called the “super-psi hypothesis,” which is that if you garner some great information from an apparently discarnate source—information which you shouldn’t know already and that can be verified—that ultimately it could just be some kind of telepathy or clairvoyance, which presents a problem...

If so, so what? That is, What is it good for? Other than our knowing that it’s there, we need to consider whether the world is a better place, or we are better off, for knowing about it. This is where the meaning and the message of the state take precedence.

The paradigmatic spiritual experience in the Hebrew Bible is prophecy.

Theoneurology suggests that God created the brain in such a manner as to be able to communicate with us. This is in contrast to the neurotheology model, which suggests that the brain creates the impression of God communicating with us.

and we have yet to shine the light of day on it. Have we really determined that the Eastern unitive-mystical state is better, more to be sought after, helpful, or therapeutic than the interactive-relational one?

They may be sensible representations of normally insensible processes or forces. For example, the beings appear to consist of light, but this may not be their true nature. Instead, “light” might be only the visible representation or manifestation of a particular process. This would be akin to how a flame visibly expresses the operation of combustion. Our perceptual apparatus, as it were, can only see what it is capable of seeing.

What are the external forces that the beings may thus represent? They may include healing and illness, strength and weakness, love and hate, evil and good, wisdom and folly. Using the medieval Jewish philosophers’ metaphysics, these are God’s intermediaries, the vehicles through which divine efflux or emanation influences the universe, how Providence is effected in the world. For example, apprehension of the activity of the angel Raphael may represent the local action of universal healing forces, and Gabriel those of strength. These world-affecting forces manifest in comprehensible visual, somatic, and other modalities, using the repertoire our minds possess.