An Ecology of Souls

A section of Afterlife, now available as an audiobook

I am delighted to announce the release of the audiobook version of Afterlife.

Available from the Liminal Institute website here

or on Audible here.

The audiobook was produced and read by Jordan Albert Byrne, who is available for voiceover and other recordings. I hope you enjoy it!

Read a sample chapter from the book:

An Ecology of Souls

Both Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism define a number of different states of consciousness: waking consciousness, dream consciousness, and dreamless sleep consciousness. Some traditions define a fourth state as well, beyond dreamless sleep. According to the Mandukya Upanishad, this fourth state, Turiya, “is pure unitary consciousness, wherein awareness of the world and multiplicity is completely obliterated. It is ineffable peace. It is the supreme good. It is One without a second. It is the Self. Know it alone!” For these traditions, an essential purpose of esoteric practice is to attain lucidity in dream sleep but also, ultimately, to be able to maintain consciousness in dreamless sleep, as well as the level beyond it, Turiya, Nondual awareness, unitary consciousness or void-ness. 

According to various esoteric traditions, when you reach a point where you can remain conscious, aware, in dreamless sleep, you have already overcome death. You have broken through to Nonduality. At that stage, after death, you can choose to no longer incarnate in any Bardo. You direct your future incarnation or manifestation. 

The occult philosopher Julius Evola wrote a fascinating book on Western alchemy, The Hermetic Tradition. He argued that the secret formula and symbolism of the hermetic tradition described a process of attaining continuity of consciousness in dream and dreamless sleep. For Evola, continuity of consciousness after death is indeed available to human beings, but not for everyone. It is only available for a self-selected elite — for those who undergo rigorous esoteric training while they are alive. 

In fact, Evola’s view is not so different from Indo-Tibetan Buddhism where a spiritually developed person can access states of subtle consciousness that transcend physical death. These attainments may leave physical evidence, such as shrinking into the “rainbow body” or maintaining the corpse in an un-decayed state for several weeks. But these are achievements that require a lifetime of disciplined meditation. 

We may have to take seriously what various esoteric traditions tell us: Direct continuity of consciousness after death may indeed be possible. But it may be only possible for those who train and prepare for it rigorously, during their lives. For others, a level of continuity of consciousness after death still occurs, but in a cloudier, more dreamlike way.

I see a connection between these levels of consciousness and the two types of Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), nn-DMT and 5-meo-DMT. We find these two types expressed naturally by many plants. They also occur endogenously, found in our brains and blood. A pure form of 5-meo-DMT can also be extracted from the glands of the Bufo Alvaris toad in the Sonoran Desert of Mexico. 

Both nn-DMT and 5-meo-DMT, when smoked or taken intravenously, induce immersive “ego death” experiences, where the DMT user loses all contact with this world and enters into a different dimension that feels overwhelmingly real — even “more real,” somehow, than the normal world. The experience is subjectively convincing. According to Terence McKenna, “The testimony of DMT, for me, is that there is a nearby dimension, teeming with intelligences, that from one of the more conservative perspectives seems like an ecology of souls.” I tend to agree with this assessment. 

In 1990, the Drug Enforcement Agency approved a clinical study of nn-DMT’s effect on human subjects. Conducted by Dr. Rick Strassman at the University of New Mexico, the study was the first research on human response to a psychedelic drug approved for nearly two decades. Over five years, Strassman, a psychiatrist, gave repeated intravenous injections of DMT, in increasing dosages, to sixty subjects, studying their physiological and psychological responses to the drug, until he discontinued the project in 1995.

His reasons for undertaking this research were primarily esoteric and philosophical. “I firmly believed that there was a spirit molecule somewhere in the brain, initiating or supporting mystical and other naturally occurring altered states of consciousness,” he writes in DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Before he investigated nn-DMT, he researched melatonin. Discovered in 1958, melatonin is a hormone that controls our reaction to light and darkness, and has a function in sleep. Produced in the pineal gland, it is very similar in structure to DMT and serotonin. After early explorations of melatonin proved disappointing—even at high doses it had no psychically transformative effect—Strassman turned to DMT as his prime candidate.

Strassman suspects that the pineal gland, a singular organ buried deep in the brain, actually is, as Descartes and others have speculated, the seat of the soul. “The pineal gland of evolutionarily older animals, such as lizards and amphibians, is also called the ‘third’ eye. Just like the two seeing eyes, the third eye possesses a lens, cornea, and retina. It is light-sensitive and helps regulate body temperature and skin coloration—two basic survival functions related to environmental light.” He discovered that the human pineal gland “becomes visible in the developing fetus at seven weeks, or forty-nine days, after conception”—almost precisely the same time that the sex of the fetus is determined. 

He also learned that Buddhists believe the soul reincarnates seven weeks after death. Astonished by this synchronicity, he develops the hypothesis that the pineal gland is like a receiver that picks up the spirit— the quantum monad, in Goswami’s terms—and DMT is the conductive element. “When our individual life force enters our fetal body, the moment at which we become truly human, it passes through the pineal and triggers the first primordial flood of DMT. . . . As we die, the life-force leaves the body through the pineal gland, releasing another flood of this psychedelic spirit molecule.”

For Strassman, this theory would explain the pineal gland’s unique structure and placement inside the brain. Formed from “specialized cells originating in the fetal mouth,” the pineal “nearly touches visual and auditory sensory relay stations. The emotional centers of the limbic system surround it, and its position allows for instant delivery of its products directly into the cerebrospinal fluid.” DMT is quickly destroyed in the blood by MAO enzymes, but if DMT is produced in the pineal gland (a hypothesis now supported by evidence) it would diffuse directly into the visual, auditory, and emotional centers of the brain. 

“This reasoning further develops the idea that decomposing pineal tissue affects residual awareness after death,” Strassman writes. DMT, released by the pineal after death, could diffuse through the “sensory and emotional centers” even without a functioning circulatory system, allowing the departing soul the time to make the life review as so many NDEer report, or pass through the Bardos as catalogued in the Bardo Thodol. A minimal flow of DMT might also catalyze the dream state during sleep.

When smoked or injected, both forms of DMT provide overwhelmingly powerful phenomenological experiences, but they are completely different from each other. With nn-DMT, people generally find themselves transported into an other-dimensional reality that seems full of colors, populated by other forms of sentience or intelligence. There seem to be many different levels one can access within the nn-DMT experience. 

Pavel Souviron, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The ultimate level, I found, involves entering a realm that is impossible to describe in human language — and impossible to remember exactly. It is shockingly Other to anything we know in this reality. The feeling is a bit like entering a council of super-beings or Gods. You feel surrounded by impossibly futuristic, titanic, hyper-technological-seeming entities at a vastly more advanced level or frequency of consciousness and intelligence than we possess. You seem to experience this other reality with different sensory organs. It feels, subjectively, like encountering a living supercomputer orchestrating reality from a different space-time dimension. Many people who have this experience are permanently changed by it, while others shrug it off.

At other levels of the nn-DMT experience, people report all kinds of immersive hallucinations. These can include dilations in the subjective experience of time. One friend of mine reports that she lived what seemed to be centuries during one single 20-minute trip. This was, for her, a hellish experience as well as a teaching about her responsibility for the world. She found herself trapped in a kind of jail or nursery, where she begged for what seemed like many decades to be allowed to escape. She went through a series of tests and was shown scenes of global apocalypse. More commonly, people report encountering various kinds of alien beings who are often probing or experimenting on them. 

In DMT: The Spirit Molecule, Strassman presents a number of reports from his subjects’ trips. According to one participant: “I felt like I was in an alien laboratory, in a hospital bed. . . . I was being carted around. . . . They weren’t as surprised as I was. It was incredibly unpsychedelic. I was able to pay attention in detail. There was one main creature, and he seemed to be behind it all, overseeing everything. The others were orderlies, or disorderlies. They activated a sexual circuit, and I was flushed with an amazing orgasmic energy. A goofy chart popped up like an X-ray in a cartoon. . . . They were checking my instruments, testing things.”

Another reported: “There were four distinct beings looking down on me, like I was on an operating-room table. . . . They had done something and were observing the results. They were looking just over the traction bar in front of me. I guess they were saying, ‘Goodbye. Don’t be a stranger.’” This subject noted, at the end of the trials, that DMT had shown him “there is infinite variation on reality. There is the real possibility of adjacent dimensions. It may not be as simple as that there’s alien planets with their own societies. This is too proximal. It’s not like some kind of drug. It’s more like an experience of a new technology than a drug.”

While nn-DMT experiences do not provide evidence for the existence of consciousness after death, they reveal unknown aspects of psychic reality and other dimensions of consciousness that we don’t understand. New worlds await our investigation, beyond the limits of the old paradigm. An individuated consciousness, beyond the physical body, may be able to maintain itself in higher (or perhaps “subtler” is more accurate) space-time dimensions in ways we cannot as of yet understand within a scientific model. 

String theory is a modern branch of physics which postulates the existence of extra space-time dimensions curled up within this one. “If string theory is right, the microscopic fabric of our universe is a richly intertwined multidimensional labyrinth within which the strings of the universe endlessly twist and vibrate, rhythmically beating out the laws of the cosmos,” writes Brian Greene in The Elegant Universe. According to string theory, there are as many as ten or eleven dimensions in total. 

Physics indicates that there are other dimensions of space-time. These are explored through mathematical proofs, but are not conceived in relationship to conscious experience. If the multidimensional universe is actually a projection of consciousness, as monistic idealism proposes, then these other dimensions, in all likelihood, also represent conditions or states of consciousness. It may be literally the case that, when you smoke or inject nn-DMT, you find yourself — your single-point of awareness — transported to an alternative space-time dimension. That is certainly your subjective impression during the trip. 

In a sixth dimension, one could pass through time as we move through space, here in the fourth dimension. There might be a higher (eighth or ninth) dimension that contains all possible timelines of all possible universes as an enormous “hyper-object.” And there may be a dimension beyond that one, which would be a spaceless and timeless dimension of pure potentia, where the infinitesimal super strings vibrate, like an underlying loom or harmonic structure, out of which all other space-time dimensions are formed. 

This is what the phenomenological experience of 5-meo-DMT seems to reveal. When you take enough of it, your ego dissolves and you directly experience Turiya —what Eastern traditions call Nirvana, Void, or Nonduality. There is absolute bliss and timelessness but there is no separate “you” to experience it. The closest visual representation is the white crystalline patterns in certain Islamic mosques, going off in all directions forever. But you don’t see these patterns from a point outside of them. At the peak of the experience, “You Are That,” the divine revelation, eternity, itself. 

I don’t see any reason not to presume that this phenomenological experience is, in fact, what Buddhism refers to as Nirvana: infinite bliss with no subject/object dichotomy. When we conceive it from a String Theory multidimensional perspective, the Buddhist postulate, “Nirvana is Samsara” becomes sensible. Nirvana is that loom of potential, the infinitesimal Superstrings that vibrate in all of the dimensions at once, while Samsara is the various space-time dimensions built on top of it — above all, this fourth dimension, where we experience the subject/object split due to the tangled hierarchies created by our complex physical brains, as well as experiencing the pain of loss and all the beauties and difficulties of sense-world phenomena. 

The experience of blissful non-dual absorption into the Infinite, or Turiya, as well as lucid consciousness in dreamless sleep, are states that Tibetan adepts can access after lifetimes of dedicated meditation practice. For normal people, maintaining consciousness in dreamless sleep is simply impossible. Most people, also, hardly recollect anything from the peak of the 5-meo-DMT trip. 

If 5-meo-DMT allows us immediate access to this spaceless and timeless condition of Nirvana or nonduality, then nn-DMT seems to give us direct access to the underlying state or hyper-dimension of dream consciousness — perhaps what many esoteric traditions call the Astral Plane. As I mentioned, users of nn-DMT frequently describe encountering a kind of hyper-dimensional, eerily futuristic, geometrical and technological interface, seemingly populated by sentient beings. It is like a peek behind the curtain of reality, revealing another dimension from which this universe is projected. 

For another way to approach this, we can borrow the language of Kabbalah. Cabalistic mystics speak about God having an Unmanifest as well as a Manifest aspect. According to this terminology, 5-meo-DMT allows us to directly experience the Unmanifest aspect of the Godhead, which Cabalists call the Eyn Sof, “understood as God prior to any self-manifestation in the production of any spiritual realm,” unending,” or “infinity,” according to Wikipedia. On the other hand, nn-DMT opens the gate to the Manifest aspect of the Divine. Both induce high-voltage shocks of awe and ecstasy.

According to Brian Greene, string theory factors in a pre-existing or underlying dimension that is eternal, without space or time: 

Similarly, since the triumph of string theory is its natural incorporation of quantum mechanics and gravity, and since gravity is bound up with the form of space and time, we should not constrain the theory by forcing it to operate within an already existing spacetime framework. Rather, just as we should allow our artist to work from a blank canvas, we should allow string theory to create its own spacetime arena by starting in a spaceless and timeless configuration.

I believe the recent discovery that we can access these states directly, via chemical means, is not accidental but synchronous. An evolution of human consciousness is happening, at a time of accelerating ecological catastrophe and exponential technological progress. Revelation is a theatrical unveiling, anticipated by various world religions. One part of our ongoing revelation is the phenomenological encounter of DMT, which makes mystical experience accessible. Another is the scientific investigation of areas such as psychic phenomena and NDEs that once belonged to the category of the sacred.

Of course, this is a hypothesis. But it is a hypothesis built on direct experience. When we explore the subject of consciousness itself, we must take our direct experience into account. We now have access to a number of extraordinary states of consciousness via chemical compounds. We must explore what these states reveal about consciousness itself. It is extraordinary that the physical brain is constituted so that it naturally produces these psychedelics. Tryptamines are similar to Serotonin, which modulates our normal waking state. But DMT plunges us into a nonphysical, inner dimension where, as McKenna noted, we seem to encounter a vast “ecology of souls.”