DMT Dialogues: Encounters with the Spirit Molecule

by David Luke

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 the fact that none of us really know the answers is part of where we are. We’re exploring, we’re trying to find a new path and a new way of bringing together into coherence traditional views, modern views, scientific technical views, studies of the brain, and so forth, each in our own way.