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>> Those who have navigated the rabbit hole of strange
experiences that psychedelic plants illicit have probably
asked themselves at one point, what is reality?
How do we know this world is real
and the strange world of psychedelics
is just a distortion?
And there is no better candidate to evoke this kind of response
than dimethyltryptamine, or more commonly known as DMT.
N, N-dimethyltryptamine was first
synthesized in 1931 by chemist Richard
Manske in Berlin, Germany.
The psychedelic effects and its connection
with Amazonian snuffs like yopo and beverages
like yage and ayahuasca were unknown at this time.
It would be another 25 years until Hungarian chemist
and psychiatrist Stephen Szara synthesized DMT in 1956,
because he couldn't get his hands
on psilocybin or mescaline.
He read a paper about South American
hallucinogens containing this compound
and wanted to see if this was, in fact,
the compound responsible for these strange visions.
Oral doses were administered to no avail.
But he intuited that another method might
provide different results.
So he injected himself N, N-dimethyltryptamine
and was the first to publicize this new psychedelic substance.
But was this the first time humanity
had discovered the visionary properties of this compound?
A quick look back into ancient Egyptian history
and their sacred tree of life might tell a different story.
>> You'll always find these acacias along the edge
of the stream beds that flood occasionally.
You won't see them halfway up the cliff.
Sometimes, they'll be a few feet above.
They've got to get those roots out into that stream bed
or they don't survive.
When it doesn't flood, sometimes as much as 10 years or more
I'm told, the tree will go dormant,
and it'll stand here as if it's dead.
Then suddenly years later, you get a flood,
and it'll come back to life.
>> Osiris was known to the ancient Egyptians as the god
of transition, rebirth, and regeneration.
The myth Osiris is that he was locked in a chest
and thrown into the Nile River by his jealous brother, Set.
The chest washed ashore in the city of Byblos,
where some say an acacia tree grew around it, housing
the spirit of Osiris, which his wife Isis eventually recovers.
If it is possible that the Egyptians discovered
the properties of the acacia tree,
then a psychedelic death-rebirth connection
might have come from the experience elicited
by one of its compounds.
>> If you look at families that are known to contain DMT
or tryptamines like acacias, for example,
some of the most potent sources of DMT known are acacias.
Well, there's about 1,200 species of acacias.
Probably 75% of those contain DMT.
So it's very common in nature.
It's not an exaggeration to say that nature is drenched in DMT.
>> Acacia trees were well known in ancient Egypt,
as well as in the Middle East.
If these civilizations were experimenters
with local botanicals, as the tribes of the Amazon were,
it is possible that one of the local MAOI-containing plants,
such as Syrian rue, which was common in the Middle East,
could have made it into an admixture with the acacia tree.
Even yohimbe bark known to contain MAOI,
originated from South and West Africa
and was probably imported to ancient Egypt.
There is no archaeological evidence
to support this specific ayahuasca-like concoction.
But it is long known that the ancient Egyptians experimented
with the psychoactive blue lilies for ceremony.
The acacia was supposedly used for the Ark of the Covenant,
insinuating that the wood embodies an arcane secret.
The Freemasons use the acacia in their symbolism
for the immortality of the soul.
As the master architect of King Solomon's temple,
Hiram Abiff was buried with a sprig of acacia
to mark the grave.
It is also said that the Hebrews planted acacia
at the head of a grave of a deceased partner or friend.
Across the ocean in South America,
the ayahuasca brew is also known as the vine of the dead or vine
of the soul, which the syncretic ayahuasca UDV Church claims
that King Solomon paid a little known visit to the Amazon
in antiquity and imparted the knowledge of ayahuasca
to the indigenous.
Though these myths remain circumstantial;
the veneration of these plants in ancient civilizations
tend to spring from their usefulness.
Any plant given spiritual attributes
is likely to have properties that
cause for higher visions of reality that
transcend the limits of birth, death,
and three-dimensional reality.
Today, DMT far exceeds this criteria.
So, what exactly are dimethyltryptamine's effects
on consciousness?
>> It begins very quickly.
You begin to feel different within a heartbeat or two
after the completion of the injection.
There's a feeling of acceleration
and inner-psychic tension that begins and builds quite
rapidly, almost overwhelmingly.
The visual image of the room, if you had your eyes open,
would start to break out in a pixelation kind of pattern.
If your eyes are closed at that stage,
it's a display of kaleidoscopic images.
Also during that time is a high pitch kind of sound.
Usually high pitch-- it could be oscillating "wa, wa, wa"
kind of sound.
Might be some crinkling kinds of sounds.
But it's increasing in intensity.
So it's crescendoing, which kind of
parallels the anxiety or the feeling of stimulation.
And then you just break out of your body.
It's as if the internal pressure just can't be held in the body
anymore, and your consciousness breaks loose.
And you know, that's kind of the plateau between two minutes
and seven minutes or so.
And then you start coming down.
And things slowly recongeal.
>> The rapidity, intensity, and conventional insanity
of the experience has caused word to reach the public
through the internet, as well as authors and researchers writing
and speaking on the matter.
Another hot topic is that DMT is an endogenous compound,
meaning it's produced naturally in the human body.
And yet no definitive explanation for this
has been discovered.
>> There is a huge amount of it in the lungs.
That's where most of is.
But it's throughout all the tissues in the body.
No one knows what it's doing in the lungs.
>> Interesting work is being done right now
on the endogenous functions.
There's a very interesting book just published
called, "Questions for the Lion Tamer."
It's about endogenous DMT.
And it's relating that to all these
other rather interesting what you
might call physiological states, which
have to do with gamma-wave activation in the brain,
and which DMT can reliably do this.
>> The gamma-brain-wave state is associated with high-level
cognitive function and peak concentration,
as seen in studies with meditating monks and nuns.
Gamma waves originate in the thalamus
and move back and forth through the three lobes of the brain
about 40 times per second.
Therefore, it is credited with integrative processing,
the flow state that athletes and musicians experience,
and improves memory, mood, and seems
to optimize many natural functions of the brain.
>> And what I see is happening is that as a consequence
of the destabilization of this central control center
that's linked to the prefrontal cortex and our egoic thinking
in the top down management of the brain.
And so what's happening is that the kind of material
that is normally left in the unconscious or the subconscious
is now being forced up into the front of the brain.
So, it's as if these deep parts of the brain,
these ancient aspects and are called
the reptilian brain and the paleomammalian brain
are being liberated and integrated
into our conscious awareness.
>> This high-level integrative processing of ancient neural
functions might account for the deeply profound visions
and feelings of experiencing and conquering death.
But this still doesn't answer what
DMT's function is in the body.
Many believe it's an ancestral neurotransmitter that
used to be more prominent in our lineage
before modern diets and lifestyles diminished
its effectiveness.
Others have suggested that DMT might
be a prenatal neurotransmitter that
builds the perception of the pre-birth world,
then gets replaced by serotonin shortly after birth
to create the consensus world that we all perceive.
Both compounds cause the brain to generate distinctly
different models of reality.
But what is a model of reality?
Isn't there only one?
The neurobiologist and chemical pharmacologist Andrew Gallimore
has been studying this exact theory.
>> Seeing a world is not a passive process.
It's always an active process.
The brain is a world-builder.
You can separate the information, if you like,
into two parts--
the information generated by a brain and all the information
being generated by whatever's outside your brain.
You can call it the external world, if you like.
Your brain is an information-generator.
And your world is built from the information generated
by your brain.
And this applies under all circumstances.
So whether you are in normal waking life,
when you descend into REM sleep at night when you dream,
but also if you're on the peak of a high-power DMT experience.
The world is always built from information.
So, the idea that one world is real and another world
is unreal--
the idea that this waking world is real
and yet the DMT state is not real is not really supported.
Most people, when they hear about these strange worlds,
will say this is a distortion of reality.
This is, perhaps, a breakdown of the brain's ability
to construct the correct model of reality.
But there is no true model of reality.
People always have this assumption, perhaps,
that the world they inhabit is the real one.
And that's really important to them.
What psychedelics do is they break down
the kind of the boundary between the real and the unreal.
And they show you actually that the world is much more fluid.
>> The notion that what we perceive is merely the way we
and our neurochemistry causes the information around
and within us to build our world is mirrored by stand-up
comedian and psychedelic researcher Shane Mauss.
>> A lot of what we consciously see we take as fact.
This is a metaphor for our perception in general.
I don't think we should trust any of our perception.
I think all of our perceptions are fickle and subjective.
And I think we should be really questioning all of them.
This life is a trip.
This life is just as trippy as any psychedelic experience
you could ever have.
It's just we spend so much time in this world
that we are bored by this trip that we're on.
And a psychedelic journey is such a short amount of time.
And it's so intense, so novel, so salient.
The brain loves latching onto stuff like that.
That's why it seems so true.
>> If it is true that perceptions are merely the way
we decode information around us, and those perceptions are
subject to personal and cultural biases,
the question still remains--
why would psychedelics have the seemingly primary function
of altering our perception?
And do all psychedelic substances
alter us in the same way?
>> The LSD, psilocybin, mescaline--
they change the world to be novel, more fluid,
more unpredictable.
But they seem to change this world.
It seems to be an alternate version of the consensus world.
Whereas DMT is different.
DMT changes the information generated
by the brain in such a profound way
that it is essentially what Terence McKenna used
to call a 100% reality switch.
It switches the brain very, very rapidly
within 30 seconds from constructing the consensus
world to constructing this bizarre, highly-complex alien
reality.
And it does it with great efficiency.
>> Psychiatrist Rick Strassman, who did the first DMT studies
in the early 1990s after the prohibition,
published the reports in his book titled, "DMT:
The Spirit Molecule."
This was the point where many case reports started
showing very similar phenomena happening
under the influence of DMT.
>> Well, one of the things that's unique about DMT is that
it seems to get one into a state where there is an intelligence.
And so there's been a lot of speculation
as to what that might be.
Might it be extra-dimensional beings?
Or might just be activation of certain areas
of the brain or something in between,
like psychological processes?
So that's a unique property of DMT.
And we ought to not necessarily limit
our scope of it investigating what it might be.
>> DMT is in a class of its own.
It takes us into a reality that both feels
more real than this one and is inhabited
by entities that feel more real than this world as well.
So, coming out of an experience like that where
whether or not it's true, it feels true.
And it creates an opportunity to reassess your entire worldview,
your spiritual, religious, and materialistic worldview.
It brings everything into question.
>> The hot topic that has emerged from DMT studies is
the recurring theme of the well-ordered structure
of the place it seems to send people and the feelings
of entities inhabiting this space.
There are accounts of this happening
through the DMT-containing brew ayahuasca, as well.
There are sparse accounts of other psychedelic plants
transporting people's minds to other places
to visit other-worldly beings.
Even psychological illness has been
known to show similar traits.
However, it is the sheer amount of reports from DMT alone
and the peculiar realness of this space and the beings
that cause for a deeper interest in this compound's effects
on consciousness.
Author and psychedelic researcher Graham Hancock
has pored over the DMT trip reports
and found correlations with shamanic reports
of altered or expanded states.
>> They experience encounters with supernatural beings,
as they construe them.
Those supernatural beings may communicate with them
telepathically.
This is very common in the shamanistic trance.
They may give them teachings.
And very often, they'll have a therianthropic appearance.
They'd be part animal and part human.
>> Sometimes they were malevolent and frightening,
scary, threatening.
They hurt people.
Yeah.
Other times, the beings, or those things
they encountered that they called beings, were beneficent.
They did healing.
They gave advice.
Some predicted or showed volunteers the future.
Some were examining the volunteers.
Some were putting things in their bodies.
But one of the hallmarks of the interaction
was the strength of those beings.
>> The experiences seemed to be so life changing that
maintaining the memory and yet returning to the consensus
world amongst people who can't conceive of what just happened
to you is a quality that calls for community counseling
and bonding among others who've shared the experience.
Over 50% of Strassman's volunteers
reported beings that felt distinctly
individual from the volunteer and indescribably real.
Out of 300 of Phillip Meyer's trip reports, roughly 66%
of them claimed encountering intelligent creatures.
Report number 213 said, "I did see
intelligent insect-alien god beings who
explained that they had created us and were us in the future.
But that this was all taking place outside of linear time."
Report number 19 said, "A gaggle of elf-like creatures
in standard-issue Irish elf costumes
were doing strange things with strange objects that
seemed to be a weird hybrid between crystals and machines."
And well-known psychedelic psychonaut Terence McKenna
was very vocal about the possibilities of what
stories like this might mean.
As an avid psychedelic psychonaut and philosopher,
Terence half-jokingly mentions global population
and ecological concerns that may call
for outside-the-box solutions, such as shrinking
the size of humans to the size of fruit flies
or even exploring societal functions within realms
of the imagination to perform future tasks
rather than depleting terrestrial resources.
He also lucidly acknowledges the incredible leap
that the modern mind must make to accept solutions
that technology and modern science today
is not capable of thinking.
Yet, balances this by emphasizing that these problems
do need to be resolved.
And even Albert Einstein said, problems cannot be solved
by the same level of thinking that created them.
Can DMT be a physiological key to unlock higher-level problem
solving?
>> I sincerely believe DMT is pointing us into an area
of reality that has not had enough attention.
And that is the higher-dimensional nature
of reality.
We can try to perceive or imagine
what more than four dimensions is like.
But it's not possible in our current and normal waking
state.
Whereas dimethyltryptamine gives us an opportunity
to perceive higher dimensionally,
to actually look at something either internally or externally
and see it from a space that contains more than four
dimensions.
>> For space, time, and form-related problems N,
N-dimethyltryptamine might be a revolutionary tool in future
generations.
when major problems need to be resolved
in a short amount of time.
This specific compound is commonly known
to generate unique geometric visuals and interactions
with strange beings.
However, there is another form of DMT
that has been used by the indigenous of the Amazon
in ayahuasca-like brews called yage.
5-methoxy, or 5-MeO-DMT, is quite a bit more potent than
and N, N-DMT.
And mixing these common doses could cause respiratory arrest,
among other issues on 5-MeO.
However, in the right amount and under the proper supervision
with a well-trained sitter, it is
said that the experience of 5-MeO-DMT
brings the user to a place beyond time, space, and form.
>> 5-MeO-DMT is 5-methoxy dimethyltryptamine.
So it's slightly different chemically.
But in terms of its effects, 5-MeO versus N, N-DMT
are often referred to as the power and the glory.
5-MeO-DMT is the power.
Whereas N, N-DMT is the glory.
N, N-DMT is the highly-visual experience.
Whereas 5-methoxy is often completely non-visual.
But often-- a friend once described to me--
said that, DMT is like the fifth dimension,
and 5-methoxy DMT is like the 12th dimension.
It almost takes you beyond these worlds and into oneness
into the white light, as it's often described.
Often much more terrifying with complete destruction
of the ego, the complete destruction of the self.
>> Australian researcher and journalist Rak Razam has
studied Amazonian indigenous uses and myths of DMT.
>> So, it seems to me that the indigenous cultures say that
there's a way to navigate the tryptamine dimensionality.
And the way to do that is to become
empowered by rejoining the light.
Now, the Sequoia tribe in Ecuador--
they call their brew yage.
Right?
It's their word for ayahuasca.
They say that the secret of yage was given to them
by the star people or the heavenly beings which
live in the light.
Many cultures across Peru say that they
were told to make ayahuasca by the plants or different entity
beings, and how they connect.
The difference with how they are is
it contains wambisa, which has 5-MeO-DMT, not the N,
N-DMT in most other brews in South America.
So, when you drink their brew, they go to the light.
>> The beta-Carbolines in the ayahuasca vine are
phytoreactive, meaning they attack the bacterial, fungal,
parasitic, and viral infections when exposed to light.
It has also been suggested by Nick Sand
that he discovered DMT's piezoluminescent qualities.
Alexander Shulgin confirmed this by saying, "A totally
pure salt, when dry and when shaken in the dark,
will emit small flashes of white light."
Although it might seem likely that all ceremonies containing
DMT would be done during the day,
many Amazonian tribes will only conduct the ayahuasca
ceremonies in total darkness.
Although accredited scientific research is scarce,
authors Ross Heaven and Simon Buxton
write in the book, "Darkness Visible,"
that in total darkness, melatonin is produced.
But after three to five days, it gets
converted to pinoline, which is an endogenous MAOI secreted
by the pineal gland.
It is suggested that the secretion of pinoline
triggers the production of endogenous DMT, which
would match the critical ingredients of ayahuasca.
Unfortunately, scientific testing
has not been done to confirm or deny this claim.
The modern confusion revolving around DMT
and its peculiar effects has to do
with the newness of the substance
in the modern materialist worldview,
as well as the subjectivity of the experience that
springs forth after ingestion.
Does endogenous DMT play a crucial yet forgotten role
in the human body?
Are the visionary effects simply the mind malfunctioning?
Or are they glimpses beyond the veil
of limited human perception?
Rick Strassman, in his new book "DMT: The Soul of Prophecy",
takes a new look at the common yet mysterious realm
of imagination.
>> You know, the importance of the prophetic state to studying
psychedelics, to learning about them,
to figuring out what they're good for, how best to use them,
we need to have as full an account as possible.
We can't limit ourselves.
That's why I think there's been a lot more resulting
from the psychedelic experience in our culture
through the arts as opposed to through the sciences.
Because it's the imagination which is being stimulated,
as opposed to the intellect primarily.
You know, the intellect being stimulated requires education.
Maybe the imagination is the point
at which psychedelics act.
>> At present, the imagination is so scarcely understood that
people are either left to the conventional reductionist view
that it's generated by the brain or to mystical
and philosophical explanations.
To know for certain whether the DMT world actually
exists, perhaps in another dimension
or in a future holding space of potentiality
called the imagination, is beyond all conception,
except to those who dare to enter that space.
>> Whether DMT is a different dimension,
or you're accessing this world inside of your head that you
don't normally have access to, or you're seeing God,
or whatever, the different possibilities that there are
are all pretty incredible and are all pretty important
and all worth looking into.
And definitely we do need to get down to the bottom of it
and learn more.
>> In order to learn more, there seems to be two distinct
methods.
Firstly is to dive headfirst into the experience
by ingesting the psychedelic substance.
Secondly is to study the effects the substance has
upon the body and the brain, whether the substance is
taken or produced endogenously.
The issue with the second approach
is that even with the amount of research that
has been conducted, the data still
must be interpreted by limited human minds.
Most humble researchers will admit
that there is no solid explanation as to what
the DMT world is and why DMT is produced in the body.
>> The suggestion is in rats in the last year
or so, there's been confirmation that DMT is produced
in the pineal gland in rats.
But we do know in general it's produced in the lungs,
in the spinal fluid, in different parts of our body.
And then it accumulates and comes up.
So the pineal gland is this almost mythical organ
in the body.
They call it the third eye.
The third eye appears in Egyptian culture, the Eye of Ra
in the mystical sort of glyphs they have.
It's all through sort of--
well, all through different historical cultures
the past that really revered this idea of the third eye
as the gateway.
>> The romantic obsession with the pineal gland among mystics
and psychedelic psychonauts may have a neurophysiological
basis, but is currently still subject to debate.
Therefore, the contention that the Eye of Ra or Eye
of Horus in the Egyptian culture represented the pineal gland
can only be seen with a metaphorical leap.
Some suggest that the connection lies
in the myth where Horus gives his eye to Osiris
in the underworld.
Osiris ate the eye and was resurrected,
which could fit with the Eleusinian kykeon, Persian
haoma, Vedic soma, Amazonian ayahuasca; even
the Mazatec mushroom rituals, which regularly included
death and rebirth experiences.
But at present, only speculations can be made.
Perhaps our ancestors with cleaner diets
and more nature-based lifestyles produced larger amounts.
Perhaps the answer is lost to history.
Perhaps the DMT world inhabited by beings
that appear to be more real than real
can only be explored by ingesting exogenous sources.
But one thing seems certain.
Romantics may preach about the possibilities,
and the skeptics may scoff at the gaps.
But the fact that a psychedelic compound that
causes the most mysterious of effects
is produced inside each and every one of us
is worthy of serious investigation.
Up next, join us as we dive into the mysterious and ancient
origins of psilocybin mushrooms and the scientific research
showing how they're revolutionizing
psychotherapy and psychoneurotic exploration.