I Smoked DMT

Excerpt from Breaking Open the Head

I’ve had an influx of new subscribers recently. I imagine many of them are unfamiliar with my first book, Breaking Open the Head (Broadway Books, 2002), about psychedelic shamanism. I wrote that book before the current “psychedelic renaissance” was underway — when it was still taboo to speak about these substances in social situations, and the mainstream media ridiculed anything psychedelic. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 33, describing the first time I smoked DMT, at an ethnobotany conference in Palenque, Mexico:

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It was past three A.M. at the Chan Kah hotel in Palenque. I was with John and Sara, two attendants at the conference. I held the long glass pipe to my lips, watched as the small beige clumps began to release themselves into the air. I inhaled—one, two, three breaths. The dry smoke was wickedly noxious and bizarre, with an extraterrestial plastic tang. As I had been warned, it was like smoking a shard of lawn furniture. With the next intake, the unfolding, the unveiling, began. Runes and geometric patterns filled the air, hovered around me, tattooed themselves over the walls, the furniture, the other people in the room. These images were copper- or golden-colored and I had only a few seconds to look at them. In those few seconds I saw an intricate interweave of sacred geometrical motifs—pentagrams, seals and symbols, golden triangles—drawn from every mystical and traditional source. As I was sucked into the golden funnel it seemed startlingly clear that all of those symbol systems were not just metaphorical codes but actual gateways to literal dimensions outside of our own. John, a video art student from San Francisco and DMT veteran, had described these patterns as the entry point—once you saw them, you were just one breath away. I’m going to get there, I thought to myself, surprised, even shocked. I took in one more deep plasticky breath and held it, and I started to go. John took the pipe from my hand. I fell back on the mattress as I shot out of myself like a rocket.

How to explain the rush, the terrifying and ecstatic trauma, of leaving your body, and your brain, and everything that is you, except some infinitesimal tendril that has no existence in space or duration in time, which is an astral probe spiraling out into the infinite, far beyond the shell you left behind?

I seemed to be projecting forward at an incredible speed. At the periphery of my vision I saw twisting white columns like high-tech swizzle sticks, as if I was following a ladder or lattice up, or in or out or all of the above, to hyperspace. I had the sense of floating through a fractal tapestry, a curving and infolding plane of synthetic, plastic, fantastic whiteness and gleaming colors in endless vibrant hues. This extradimensional realm I had pitched into was made, I felt certain, of data, of quantum equations, visible shamanic harmonics, and the self-weaving fabric of extradimensional superconsciousness. It was science fiction made fact. A dimension devoid of natural things, of plants and human need, of our weak and imprecise symbol systems. DMT land was an interweave of tantric mandalas, virtual reality fantasias, stained-glass aureolae; a ten-dimensional Walt Disney World projected into some far-fetched and far-flung future. There was, in that place, rushing toward me, an overwhelming force of knowledge and sentience. I knew it was impossible that my mind, on any level, had created what I was seeing. This was no mental projection. This was not a structure within the brain that the drug had somehow tapped into. It was a nonhuman reality existing at a deeper level than the physical world.

Suddenly I was rocketing through their cities. Multidimensional, jewel-faceted, hard and immaterial palaces where geometrical and tentacular constructions were being taken apart and reconstructed at such lightning speed that I cannot recall more than a tiny and trivial fraction. I was taken on a flyby at a tremendous velocity. There were beings in this place. They were humanoid, as far as I can remember, which is unfortunately not far enough. I recall a blue entity (a blue the color of certain celestial Buddhas in Tibetan thangka paintings), gesturing—in my memory I see him with one hand raised, waving at me. There were fountains and spinning mandalas like lit-up roulette wheels or flowering chakras that seemed organic as well as mechanical. At the center of the city there was a great fountain, like the fountain at the center of a Renaissance town square, where bits of data or perhaps mathematical potentialities or burbling new test tube universes were flowing in rainbow patterns of ultraviolet froth. This realm was in a state of continual transformation, yet solidified in synthetic matter. Everything I “saw” glittered with an artificial sparkle. There was something impersonal, detached, about my visit. It seemed as if the entities were tranquil, even unemotive, as they went about their work of cosmic supervision.

Everything seemed to be communicating to me a chattering greeting. Although I can’t remember sound, I felt there was sound all around me. Weeks later I began to recollect it as high-frequency buzzing, clicks, and trills. As I recall, the beings in the DMT universe were saying to me, over and over again:

“This is it. Now you know. This is it. Now you know.”

I began to remember that I had a body, although it was lost to me. I felt myself breathing. Every now and then I would swallow involuntarily. My breathing and my swallowing seemed like a program they were running. “I” seemed to be exactly like a program they were running in their fabulously impersonal cosmological system: As I breathed, they were breathing me.

“Now you know. This is it. Now go back. Now go back. Now you know. This is it. Now get out.”

As soon as I recalled my human identity, I was flowing back into this world. I noticed there was something . . . a room containing me. I was lying stretched on a hotel bed. Then the engulfment quickly receded, returned to morphing geometric gold forms that spun down, quickly whirling out of existence as I returned to who I had been.

I was left with little doubt that I had visited what we, for lack of a more accurate word, traditionally call “spiritual reality.” The trip supported the idea of a soul existing outside the body, woven into the extradimensional fabric of the cosmos. The cosmos, what McKenna called the “cosmic giggle,” is something they were spinning, or we were spinning with them. I had been given more than I ever expected. I had been shown the hard kernel of everything that I wanted to know.

The DMT realm is “next door,” behind every billowing curtain, hidden inside the dark matter of consciousness, now playing every night in disguised form in our dreams. It is so close to us, adjacent or perpendicular to this reality. It is a soft shadow, a candle flicker, away.

DMT is Direct Mystical Transmission. Drastic Magical Transport. It is, as McKenna put it, just too much. Once you have had the experience, you are permanently rewired. You can consign existentialism to the scrapheap as you wrap your old ontological constructs around this new pole. Of course, many questions are opened by the jolt, while only a few are answered. For me, the DMT vision suggests that we are incarnations in some way, sent from that place of boundlessness to this one of sticks and stones and hard knocks, perhaps over the course of lives Ping-Ponging back and forth between the dimensions with certain tasks to perform, or with knowledge to learn. Or perhaps what is happening is more ambiguous and multipurposed than we can language.

The experience called to mind Mircea Eliade’s book The Eternal Return, in which he analyzes the consistent belief held by archaic cultures that all places in physical reality have a double in the spirit world. Every temple and city built by human beings actually relates to a “celestial archetype.” Eliade writes: “Not only does a model precede terrestrial architecture, but the model is also situated in an ideal (celestial) region of eternity.” The DMT city seemed to be something like a celestial metropolis, a fabulous ideal that our physical cities are a feeble attempt to imitate, utilizing blunt matter rather than bright magic.

For many people, ayahuasca—a slowed-down low-res interface of the DMT flash—seems to convey strong messages from the natural world, of nature as sentient energy and spirit matter, of the need to protect the planet we have been given. Yagé whispers that human beings are meant to be gardeners of this reality, journeyers, storytellers and singers, weavers of the sacred. DMT, on the other hand, conveys no overt human or humane message. It is a doorway you can step through to greet the beings who run the cosmic candy store. Spinning down from the immersive matrices of DMT, I suspected those beings were, in some way or other, superconscious entities who created and maintain our universe. They made us for some purpose, to play with us or to be us, to tantalize or teach us. But of course this raises only more questions: Who created them? Is that the only other dimension out there? If not, what other dimensions, what other forces, are acting upon us or seeking to communicate with us?

I was left with the notion that creativity is one purpose of existence; we are meant to evolve toward them, become like that, entities beyond the physical plane, and make universes, palaces of thought, gnostic hieroglyphs of our own, as they made this one. Building another universe—it would be the ultimate act of creativity we could imagine. But perhaps it is just one of their parlor tricks.

Beyond all of this, I mulled over the old litany of questions anybody would want to ask the spirits, if they could: Why so much suffering down here? Is this life a test in some way? Why are we, so often, so forsaken? And why is the DMT dimension so synthetic, as if it were built out of mathematics and machine logic, out of language evolved to some ecstatic equation? Are those beings like us, in some way, but perfected to a point where they dream-engineered themselves out of the time-space continuum? Are they, perhaps, ourselves, evolved to a point of disembodied immortality, having learned to bend and snap the time-space continuum like a twig? Are they ourselves so far in advance of where we are now that they can only communicate with us in orthogonal fashion, the way a three-dimensional being might try to express itself to a two-dimensional dweller of flatland in a language of incomprehensible dots and lines? Am I, are you, just a program running in some alien supercomputer? Is that what this universe is?

We have the DMT receptor. It is a trigger placed in our brain to launch us out there—try to get used to the idea. It is there so we can commune with that (or with it, or with them, whatever)—a trip that will eventually force us to revise our science texts and rewire our way of conceiving reality. Why has this experience been allowed to emerge into the modern consciousness at this precise time? To put it another way, why am I the first, after untold numbers of dreaming ancestors, to return to this startling source? As technology turns ever-more treacherous and our weather gets weirder, I suspect there is intentionality to it.

DMT flashes the question of free will: Is there any such thing? I still suspect there is—however much spiritual hierarchies are running this show, each of us can choose to create our role in it with the theater props lying around this quaint little planet. There may simultaneously be free will and a knowing of everything that happens and can happen; all kinds of paradoxes may coexist in those quantum interstices, those tiny curled-up dimensions of vibrating superstrings that physicists found, to their own surprise, hidden within this one. With DMT, once we know it is there, we are left with a choice that is itself a classic test of free will: All of us can choose to go there, push to activate the circuits that give us access to that impacted labyrinth. Or we can avoid it, cut ourselves off, deny its existence out of a completely sensible cowardice. Personally, I don’t think the pure DMT flash is a journey we should take too many times; it feels intuitively threatening. But certainly we are meant to go see for ourselves, at least once or twice. The fact is that the portal exists. Not to explore it would mean denying our heritage of human curiosity.

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