Spiritual Forum

DMT, Moses, and the Quest for Transcendence

by Cliff Pickover, Reality Carnival

"DMT in the pineal glands of Biblical prophets gave God to humanity and let ordinary humans perceive parallel universes."

The molecule DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) is a psychoactive chemical that causes intense visions and can induce its users to quickly enter a completely different "environment" that some have likened to an alien or parallel universe. The transition from our world to theirs occurs with no cessation of consciousness or quality of awareness. In this environment, beings often appear who interact with the person who is using DMT. The beings appear to inhabit this parallel realm. The DMT experience has the feel of reality in terms of detail and potential for exploration. The creatures encountered are often identified as being alienlike or elflike. Some of the creatures appear to be three-dimensional. Others appear to lack depth.

Author Terence McKenna has used DMT and feels that, "Right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, and extremely alien... What is driving religious feeling today is a wish for contact with this other universe." The aliens seen while using DMT present themselves "with information that is not drawn from the personal history of the individual."

DMT is also naturally produced in small quantities in the human brain, and it has been hypothesized that DMT is produced in the pineal gland in the brain. The pineal gland appears in the developing human fetus around 49 days after conception. Perhaps an embryo should not be considered human until DMT production commences. Note that "zygotic personhood" (the idea that a fertilized egg is a person) is a recent concept. For example, before 1869, the Catholic church believed that the embryo was not a person until it was 40 days old. (See my letter to President Bush on Cloning, Abortion, and Stem Cell Research.) Naturally occurring DMT may play a role in near-death experiences and alien-abduction experiences.

Is it possible that the reality exposed to humans by injecting DMT is in some sense a valid reality, on par with our normal reality? Our minds, which evolved to help us run from lions on the African savannas, might not be engineered to see these other realities under normal circumstances.

What is the guarantee that our minds are naturally designed to sense the "true reality"? Perhaps there is no guarantee. If this concept seems weird, consider a far-fetched example. Imagine a creature or phenomena that has been lurking among us since the dawn of evolution. If our ancient ancestors died every time they perceived the phenomena, evolution would favor creatures who did not perceive the creatures or phenomena. One might counter this argument by saying that our modern instruments, such as X-ray machines and cameras, should be able to make the creatures apparent to us, even if our unaided sensorium is not up to the task. Reasoning further, because our instruments have not made these realms apparent to us, the realms must not be real. However, perhaps our traditional instruments and theories are also not up to the task. Or perhaps our interpretation of the instruments' results is incomplete. Perhaps DMT is an instrument.

As a metaphor, consider infrared goggles. A person leans on a tree. At night, we don't see the person. Put the goggles on, and a new reality results -- a truer reality -- and we see the man. Similarly, is it possible that our brain is a filter, and the use of DMT is like slipping on infrared goggles, allowing us to perceive a valid reality that is inches away and all around us?

In my book The Science of Aliens, I write about some of Whitley Strieber's experiences. Strieber is famous for his book Communion, which describes his encouters with aliens. When I had written my book, I was somewhat "down" on Strieber due to some of the more zany descriptions he once gave of "aliens" he encountered. Some looked cartoonlike, while others were the more standard versions of aliens that most of us contemplate today. In light of reading about DMT experiences, I can see more of an overlap in Strieber's descriptions and DMT-induced aliens.

According to Phillip Klass's UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game, Strieber appears to have had a lifetime of unusual experiences. For example, in April 1977 Strieber held a brief conversation with a voice that had come over his stereo system in his New York apartment. Streiber has also encountered robotlike aliens, aliens with pug noses wearing blue coveralls, an alien with an inept cardboard imitation of a blue double-breasted suit (complete with a white triangle handkerchief sticking out of the pocket), and tall aliens in tan jumpsuits. One alien had a "ridiculous excuse for a curly black toupee on his head." Strieber once even saw a giant, ugly insect that made him feel mothered and loved. Another time he reported seeing the head of a living woman named Kathie Davis on a shelf inside a UFO. We can view these descriptions in a new light, now that we know that DMT can often produce visions of cartoon-like aliens.

If we were to hunt for the DMT elves, would we direct our attention to Hawking's waveform model of the universe or Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, or even higher dimensions?

Is it possible that that some of our human ancestors produced more DMT than we do today? For example, many of the ancient Bible stories describe prophets with DMT-like experiences. (See my book The Paradox of God.) Consider as one example (Isaiah 6):

Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another:

"Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory."

At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

These sorts of ecstatic singing and repetitive exaltations remind me of subjects who took DMT and heard: "Now do you see? Now do you see?" along with singing voices. (These cases are described in Rick Strassman's book DMT: The Spirit Molecule.)

Maybe this is why the ancients seemed so in touch with God and with miracles and visions. Maybe Moses and Jesus had a greater rate of pineal DMT production than most.

When I asked Rick Strassman, M.D., author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule, about my theory, he responded: I'm not familiar with a specific theory that we made more DMT in the old days than now. But, are you familiar with Jaynes' idea of the bicameral mind--that people routinely hallucinated until the connections between our hemispheres got evolved out for whatever reason? I don't think hemispheric connections would support his idea as much as might higher levels of endogenous DMT. If indeed we made more DMT in the past, this may have to do with the increase in artificial light that has come upon us in the last 1000 years or so.

Also, recall that DMT experiences sometimes include 2-D cartoon-like characters. Often DMT entities lack depth. Could a higher-production of DMT in ancient people influenced artwork. Is that part of the reason why cave paintings and Egyptian art are so two dimensional?

One way to imagine how other realities could exist side by side with our own is to consider the forces that produced the diversity of senses and intelligences right here on Earth. In a real way, there are already alien worlds right here among us. Every Earthly creature perceives the world in an "alien" way. Dogs. Bees. Bats. Cats. They experience the world with different kinds of senses. They can smell what we cannot, they can see what we cannot, they can hear what we cannot. If the organisms of the Earth were somehow able to describe their world to you, it would probably not be recognizable to you. It would seem like the wildest world from any science-fiction story. Moreover, if you were able to describe the world to another species, they would "see" no resemblance to their own. Our sense of reality would be different; our way of thinking would be different, and even the practical technology we would produce would be different. We do not have to contemplate aliens or science fiction to imagine alienlike senses and bodies. The animal world of Earth is so diverse and full of different senses, that creatures are already walking among us possessing "alien" awarenesses beyond our understanding.

By studying the creatures of the Earth, we can hypothesize on the diversity of realities here on Earth. Aliens would no doubt see a different world than we do. To best understand this, consider the Indian luna moth, which has a wingspread of about 10 cm (4 inches). To our eyes, both the male and female moths are light green and indistinguishable from each other. But the luna moths themselves perceive in the ultraviolet range of light, and to them the female looks quite different from the male. Other creatures have a hard time seeing the moths when they rest on green leaves, but luna moths are not camouflaged to one another since they see each other as brilliantly colored.

For a related Reality Carnival story, see "People with Charles Bonnet Syndrome See Beings from Parallel Universes" and "DMT Users See Insect Gods".

MORE: http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/pc/dmt.html