DMT Dialogues: Encounters with the Spirit Molecule

by David Luke

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...