Andrew Gallimore: DMT で「実在する高次元世界」を訪れ、超越的知性体と対面した
前置き
Andrew Gallimore は Rick Strassman と一緒に DMT の静脈注射の技法を開発している(1:34:35)という人物で、沖縄在住（the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology 勤務）。
彼は
Andrew R Gallimore, "Alien Information Theory: Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game", 2019-04-16
という著書(*1)を出版しており、それに興味を惹かれた Anthony Peake が遠隔インタビューしている。その動画が下。文字起こしを付けておく。
彼の発言から主要な話題を 2つ拾って本日の別記事、
Andrew Gallimore : DMT 摂取で「超越的な知的存在」に対面し衝撃を受けた ⇒ その正体を解く
にした。
(*1)
amazon.com によれば…
▼展開
先史時代から人類は、神々との交わりや自然とのつながりを求めて、あるいは精神と世界を変容させる純粋な喜びと驚きのために、さまざまなサイケデリック・ドラッグを使用してきた。しかし、ある天然のサイケデリック・ドラッグは、通常の覚醒世界を、多種多様な知的異星人のいる奇妙な別世界に置き換えてしまう驚異的な力において、とりわけ他のものを圧倒している。N,N-ジメチルトリプタミン、通称DMTは、最も強力であると同時に、自然界に存在する最も一般的なサイケデリックであり、地球上に散在する無数の植物種に含まれている。DMTには、我々の現実に埋め込まれた深遠なメッセージが込められている。 エイリアン・インフォメーション・セオリー』の中で、神経生物学者、化学者、薬理学者であるアンドリュー・R・ガリモア博士は、DMTがいかに私たちの現実の構造そのものに対する秘密を提供しているか、そして、私たちの宇宙がいかに宇宙的なゲームに例えられるか、私たち自身が今、プレイしていることに気づいているかを説明している。 ガリモアは、我々の現実が、我々の宇宙や他の無数の宇宙を、我々のような意識的な知性を出現させる目的で純粋な情報から作られたデジタル装置として生成した基本的なコードを使ってどのように構築されたかを説明する。基本的なデジタル情報がどのように自己組織化し、複雑化して、私たちの世界を満たす無数の複雑な形態や生物を生み出すのか、脳がどのように主観的な世界を構築し、サイケデリックドラッグがどのようにこの世界の構造を変化させるのか、DMTがどのように現実のチャンネルを切り替え、脳が普段は隠されている現実の直交する次元からの情報にアクセスできるようにするのか。そして最後に、DMTがいかにしてこの宇宙から永久に脱出するための秘訣を提供してくれるのか、つまり、宇宙的なゲームを完成させ、ハイパースペースの異次元市民になるための秘訣を知ることになる。 エイリアン情報理論』は、この隠された現実の構造と、その中でのわれわれの位置について、神経科学、コンピューター科学、物理学、薬理学など、さまざまな学問分野を駆使してユニークに説明している。
手抜き
34:30-36-34 DMT の領域に生息する知的存在
49:00-- 彼らは厄介
53:00-- AP, ET , abduction, 癲癇と共通要素
1:01:50 DMT を摂取したことがなければ、超越的知性体に対面することの理解が及ばない
1:09:30 この世界は DMT 世界の一部
1:34:00 AP パラダイム 変革
1:35:00 静脈注射で体験時間を伸ばす試み。
動画(2:00:56)
Dr Andrew Gallimore. DMT Realm. DMT Entities. Alien Information Theory
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Qp4Drte1qI
動画概要欄
6,800 views 2021/05/19
Dr. Andrew Gallimore is a computational neurobiologist, pharmacologist, chemist, and writer who has been interested in the neural basis of psychedelic drug action for many years and is the author of a number of articles and research papers on the powerful psychedelic drug, N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and its effects on the brain and consciousness. He recently collaborated with DMT pioneer Dr. Rick Strassman, author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule, to develop a pharmacokinetic model of DMT as the basis of a target-controlled intravenous infusion protocol for extended journeys in DMT space.
His current interests focuses on DMT as a tool for gating access to extradimensional realities and how this can be understood in terms of the neuroscience of information. He currently lives and works in Japan.
FasterWhisper AI(large-v2 model)
Hello, everybody. Welcome, and I mean, yet another Consciousness Hour. It seems they're coming thick and fast at the moment with Monday's amazing discussion with Graham Nichols, where we were discussing out-of-the-body experiences and the science and neurology of out-of-body experiences. But today is going to be a special treat in that this is somebody I've been wanting to speak to for a long time, ever since he literally blew my mind at breaking convention two years ago. (0:00:31)
I don't know if you know, breaking convention, for those of you who don't know, is probably, for me anyway, the high point of my every two years. It's a massive event that takes place at Greenwich University, facilitated by, among others, Dr David Luke, who's been a previous guest on this show. And literally, you get thousands of people coming from all around the world, and you have hundreds of speakers talking about matters esoteric, but mostly related to entheogens, mostly related to DMT and altered states of consciousness. (0:01:04)
And I had the opportunity to go to see Dr Andrew Gallimore speak. And I think I found it the most inspiring talk I've ever seen. It's something about Andrew's enthusiasm and his in-depth knowledge of his subject. And I mean, phenomenally in-depth knowledge. So Andrew really, genuinely knows what he's talking about. But his ideas are so revolutionary and so different. And in many ways reflect many of the ideas I've been coming across, that I've been writing about over the last two decades. (0:01:37)
Whereas Andrew, I try to do the science, but I do not have Andrew's knowledge of neurology and allied subjects, so he can really pull it together. And his latest book is absolutely sensational, I have to say this, Alien Information Theory, Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game, is, I would say, a central reading to anybody who's really interested in consciousness and conscious interface, whether this world is a simulation, many, many issues. (0:02:12)
And these are the issues we're going to be talking about today. What I'd like to do is to give you a little bit of background about Andrew. I will be reading this, so it'll be less spontaneous, but it's important that I get the information across about Andrew. Dr. Andrew Gallimore is a computational neurobiologist, pharmacologist, chemist, and writer who's been interested in the neural basis of psychedelic drug action for many years, and is the author of a range of articles and research papers on the powerful psychedelic drug NM-dimethyltryptamine, DMT, as well as other psychedelics. (0:02:41)
He recently collaborated with DMT pioneer Dr. Rick Strassman, and the author of DMT, the spirit molecule, to develop a pharmacokinetic model of DMT as the basis of target-controlled intravenous infusion protocol for extended journeys into DMT space. What a phrase. His current interests focus on DMT as a tool for gating access to extra-dimensional realities, and how this can be understood in terms of the neuroscience of information. (0:03:08)
He currently lives and works in Japan, and he works at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. In his groundbreaking book, Alien Information Theory, Psychedelic Drug Technology and the Cosmic Game, he makes some very extremely valid points about a lot of things. (0:03:25)
And these are the things we're going to be drilling into in great detail in the next two hours. And I hope you guys enjoy it, because I, myself, and I'm sure Sir, we certainly are. So, Andrew, welcome to the Anthony Peake Consciousness Hour. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Good to be here. And how's the weather over there in Okinawa? Well, it's picking up a bit now. (0:03:47)
It's... we're kind of nudging into the 30s, temperature-wise. So, it's getting hot. So, my air-con and my fans are on most of the time now. But we're sort of heading into the rainy season, I think. So, kind of expect hot weather, but with rain a lot of the time. I remember, I recall, we've both done interviews with those incredible guys, the Dreaming Jaguars. Yeah. And I recall that wonderful interview you sent to them from the beach on Okinawa. Yes. Which was well done, wasn't it? Because it looked as if you were talking directly to them, but they were down here in West Sussex, and you were over in Okinawa. Yeah, yeah. (0:04:31)
That took a bit of working out. Yeah, they sent me the questions, and then I got my friend, Taro, to film me on the beach answering the questions as if they were there. So, it kind of worked. The beach is a bit noisy, so it wasn't the best. People were saying, your audio was, you know, doing it at the beach, man, that's crazy. (0:04:47)
I was like, wow, I thought it was a good idea, but I don't know. Well, I think it worked very, very well indeed. I mean, at least it was a good deal more exotic than myself and the guys from Dreaming Jaguars when they filmed me when we were wandering around Tillgate Forest in West Sussex. It was still very nice, but it was quite sodden underground, and they like filming you. (0:05:10)
And the guy, when he's filming, is walking backwards. The amount of times he nearly hit tree stumps, and he's nearly brained himself on low-hanging branches. But it worked to a degree, which was good. Okay, well, let's get straight into it in terms of everything else. But before I mention this, your book, Alien Information Theory, again, I have to say that in all my readings, and I have read fairly extensively around the subject of DNT, alien entities, and everything else as well, and also around quantum physics and neurology, and I would like to say that your book, because of the unique way in which you do it, in the sense that the graphics are used in such a way to convey the ideas, but you use graphics in a digital way to put across some incredibly deep and meaningful ideas in a fun and enjoyable way, and I'd really suggest to anybody out there, if you really want to understand why quantum physics is so strange, and also the mysteries of the standard model and everything else as well, and how they interface neurobiologically with the chemicals in the brain, with neurotransmitters and everything else, and how in fact the brain communicates and how neurotransmitters work within the synapses, Andrew's book is probably the best introduction I have ever seen on this. (0:06:23)
So when you read my books, and I've said this to a few people, when you read my book, particularly The Hidden Universe, read The Hidden Universe and then read Andrew's book as a companion volume, because between the two of them, Andrew's book will probably qualify and make more precise some of the things that I waffly say in my books as well, so please do do that. (0:06:46)
So let's go, we're going to use a series of vaguely structured questions, because it's important, we have only two hours, we've got some important ideas to get across here. So in terms of, the first one really is, how psychedelic drugs work in the brain? It's something that has always puzzled me, as to why it is that chemicals can change completely how I perceive external reality. (0:07:10)
So Andrew, in two or three sentences, explain how these things do what they do in the brain. (0:07:19)
Well, two or three sentences might be a stretch, but... I was being facetious, so I'm going to need a lot more than that. But I think you have to start with, I think the problem in understanding psychedelics is that most people, you have to kind of get to grips with the normal, the structure of your world under normal circumstances. (0:07:51)
So when you're kind of awake and experiencing the world, when you're not under the influence of a psychedelic drug, what is that world, first of all? What's it made from? What's it built from? Once you understand that, then you can start to think about, well, how can that world actually change? Which is what psychedelics do. (0:08:15)
I like to kind of define a psychedelic as a molecule that alters the structure and dynamics of your phenomenal world. It's a slightly restricted definition in that, obviously, psychedelics, they have emotional and they affect you in kind of deeper ways than that. But I focus on the way that they alter the structure and dynamics of your world. Now, what your world is. (0:08:42)
So when I say your world, I'm talking about your phenomenal world. So this is your kind of irrevocably subjective world that you experience. And this world is a, it's a model. It's a model of the environment. Normally, it's a model of the environment, the model of whatever there is out there, outside of your brain, constructed by your brain. And your brain is fundamentally an information generator. This is why my book is all about information. (0:09:13)
It's because when you kind of get down to it, that's really what the brain does. It generates and processes information. It computes. And it constructs your world out of information. And that world is a model of the environment. It's mapped. It's tested constantly against information entering from outside of the brain, sensory information. So we would know this is light and sound and touch information, that kind of stuff. (0:09:47)
But it's all information. And what psychedelics are doing is they are changing, they work at a number of levels. They fundamentally, when they get into the brain, they work at the receptor level. So they're binding to protein receptors embedded in the information generating cells of your brain, which are the neurons. So the neurons generate information. (0:10:15)
And they form these large and inordinately complex networks. And they share this information. So they generate and share information. And this information is your world model. So what psychedelics are doing is they're going in, they're binding to these receptors embedded in the neurons and changing the way that these neurons behave, changing the way that they generate information, and changing the way that they share information amongst themselves. (0:10:42)
And so you have this very quite subtle change at the receptor level that becomes almost amplified as you go to the level of the neurons, the level of networks of neurons, and ultimately to the level of the world model, which is built from the information generated by these extremely complex network of neurons. So this is how psychedelics are working, making small changes, subtle changes at the neuron level, which are, which result in these very strange effects on the structure and dynamics of the world model at the kind of the higher, higher level. (0:11:15)
So that's kind of the broad picture. Of course, that doesn't explain why certain psychedelics have certain different effects. You know, there's the difference between salvia salvia divinorum and DMT, for example, or psilocybin for mushrooms. That's, that's different, but broadly, they all affect the structure and dynamics of the world model through these levels of organization from receptor level upwards. Well, this is... I think that does, because this in many ways, it's so important, isn't it, for people to appreciate that, effectively, we are surrounded by this three dimensional world that is brought to us by our senses. (0:11:59)
And it's been processed and recreated and presented to consciousness within the brain. And we just take it for granted, you know, and there are there are individuals that are unfortunately called naive realists who argue that there is a one to one relationship between what I'm perceiving now, as I'm looking out of my eyes, I'm seeing my eyes and my ears and everything else as to what is externally out there. (0:12:20)
But of course, it's internally processed. And as you quite rightly say, in your book, you know, it's internally processed in the visual cortex in the darkest part of the brain, where electrical signals, you know, entering the eye, photons entering the eye are then converted into an electrical signal, which then travels via the optic chiasma to the deepest, darkest part of the brain where it's reconstituted again, into a visual experience. (0:12:43)
And of course, the retina itself is postage stamp size, the image on the retina is inverted. And from that signal, the visual cortex creates this visual world that is three dimensional, has depth and everything else as well. But it's all an internal construct, isn't it? And it's not. Yeah, you know, it's not and therefore, it is not at all surprising that chemical substances can affect this in some way. (0:13:11)
And one of the things, the great, great challenge, great challenges sometimes is to get people to realize that, you know, this is a mystery. And on top of this, we even take that further back to Chalmers's 1995 hard problem of consciousness and the idea that what is it that's doing the perceiving in the brain? What is being fooled even? What is, what is the eye in the brain? (0:13:34)
And who is the observer? And this comes down to it, doesn't it? That really, what is it specifically that substances such as DMT, what does DMT do? We've talked about entheogens in general. But tell us a little bit of just assume total ignorance of everybody here. (0:13:55)
Explain exactly what dimethyltryptamine is, where it is found, and what it's, how it is activated within the brain. Yeah, so, so let's kind of start, I'm going to reiterate here. So, so yes, the world you experience is this model. And that's always the case, right? So whenever you are experiencing a world, it's always a world that's being constructed by a brain. Now, when you're waking, when you're, when you're waking, when you're awake in normal waking life, that world is modulated by sensory information from the environment. (0:14:31)
Actually, sensory information from the environment never really gets into your brain, which is weird thing, it kind of tickles it from the outside, it stimulates and modulates them. So, so your world is always constructed by your brain. And that's always also the case when you're dreaming. So when you're dreaming, sensory information is largely cut off from the environment, where your brain is largely cut off from set information from the environment. (0:14:57)
However, for most people, for most of the time, they will tend to experience the normal waking world, largely, it's less stable, it's more kind of fluid, it can shift from scene to scene. But generally, you're experiencing the same model, because your brain evolved to construct this model of the environment, your brain is very, very good at building this model. And this is why you can dream in great detail with all of the senses fully intact. (0:15:23)
And even though your brain has no access to sensory information from the environment. So if a drug is changing your, the world you experience, what we mean is that it's changing the model, it's changing that model. And that model, that could be quite a subtle change. So if you take, let's say, a drug, one dry gram of magic mushrooms, the world will, it's almost like you've, you've slightly nudged the dial out of tune. (0:15:50)
And so the world goes from being very, very stable, and familiar, to being kind of unstable and fluid and slightly more dynamic, and less familiar becomes more novel, the brain loses its ability to properly kind of map the model to the sensory information. So the brain, the model becomes less of a functional model of the environment, that doesn't mean it's, it's a less true model of the environment. (0:16:17)
What is the truest model of the world? And it doesn't make any sense. We, as you said, you referred to naive realism there, and the idea that people assume that what they see is the real thing. That's the reality. If your, if your world is altered by psychedelics, then it's a distortion of reality. But there is no true model of reality. All that's happening is that the mapping maybe between the model and the environment might change, but that doesn't mean your model is any less true, it might be less adaptive, it might be less functional, it might be less useful. (0:16:59)
But we can never say which model is true, and which model is not true. And then when it comes to so when we talk about DMT, what DMT is doing is going beyond what psilocybin, magic mushrooms, or LSD, even normal doses does. So rather than the dial being nudged slightly out of tune, your brain, it's like you've switched to an entirely new channel, which is a useful metaphor for a number of reasons. (0:17:31)
But firstly, because your brain basically switches from constructing this model, the familiar consensus world model, to constructing an entirely new model of reality. That's what's happening. Your brain is suddenly, and for reasons that is still very, very mysterious, and rather confounding, for me, as a neuroscientist, it's easy to say that this is just a hallucination, it's actually quite difficult to kind of explain the DMT state away as mere hallucination. (0:18:07)
Your brain is actually constructing an entirely new model. And this model normally takes the form of this extremely complex and inordinately complex hyper dimensional reality that is replete with this diverse, almost like hyper dimensional ecology of intelligent entities that are eager to communicate with you. And so that's so in a way, it's kind of the most remarkable and astonishing molecule on the planet. (0:18:49)
But it's not kind of restricted to the benches of some obscure chemistry laboratory. This is the most commonly occurring, naturally occurring psychedelic molecule on the planet. You know, it's everywhere. It's, you know, nature is drenched in DMT, as Dennis McKenna likes to say a lot. You know, you look out your window now, you can probably see half a dozen plants that contain some amount of DMT. Some sources are better than others. (0:19:17)
And there are some very good go to sources of DMT, but it is practically everywhere. It's scattered across the globe in countless plant species and indeed in some animal species as well, such as ourselves. Can you explain what the DMT molecule is and how it functions? (0:19:36)
Very quick. Yeah, so DMT, dimethyltryptamine. So it's closely related to the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is 5-hydroxytryptamine. So you have 5-hydroxytryptamine and dimethyltryptamine. So these are very, very closely related. They're both derived from the amino acid tryptophan. And you need basically two very simple chemical steps to go from tryptophan to get to DMT. So it's not, you know, the reason it's kind of ubiquitous, I think, is because it's so easy to make. It's very, you know, the enzymes that are required to build DMT from tryptophan, and of course tryptophan is a very common amino acid that's also found in every single living organism, pretty much. (0:20:29)
So the two enzymes required to go from tryptophan to tryptamine and tryptamine to dimethyltryptamine are also ubiquitous. They're found in pretty much every cell. So it's not surprising that this molecule is very, very common. But it is confounding and quite astonishing that it's not only very, very common, but also just happens to be the most efficient reality switching molecule that we know of, basically, that will actually switch your reality channel from the normal waking world within 30 seconds or so into this bizarre hyper-dimensional, hyper-technological alien reality filled with intelligent beings. (0:21:11)
That is not easy to explain. Yeah, because that's the whole phenomenal mystery of it, isn't it? As to how this happens, how a chemical that is so common and is found virtually everywhere, when it's placed within the brain, causes these incredible things to take place and are seeing the world in a different way. And I'm very keen to explore this a little bit further, because one of the areas I'm quite fascinated in is, and I may be totally wrong on this, and this is my golden opportunity to ask an expert on this, is how closely related is dimethyltryptamine to melatonin? I mean, could you synthesize or create DMT from melatonin? Is that possible? It's difficult, because chemically it involves some rather strange transformation. (0:21:59)
You can kind of go in... I mean, melatonin is also derived from tryptophan. So you go from tryptophan to melatonin through a slightly different pathway. But I have sort of heard some people saying that melatonin is converted to DMT in the brain, or even to 5-MeO-DMT in the brain. But it's extremely unlikely, because melatonin is a slightly more complex structure. (0:22:25)
So it would involve some slightly strange chemical transformation to get from melatonin to DMT. So no, and it certainly wouldn't be an efficient way to do it. If you want to make DMT, you would go via tryptophan. You certainly wouldn't go by melatonin. Thank you for that, because I think that's quite important, because I know in my books I have mentioned this in the past, you know, this concept of melatonin. You know, the idea of it can be formulated in the brain in some way. (0:22:52)
So that's quite an important point. So let's move on now to the magical transformation whereby DMT enters the brain. And of course, before we do this, I'd just like you to discuss, because I've discussed it in many ways, and it's something that also fascinates me, is the role of MAO in terms of stopping hallucinatory substances such as DMT reacting directly. You know, the old idea of ayahuasca and the way ayahuasca works. (0:23:26)
So if you can just explain a little bit about that first, and then we'll move into the entities, if that's okay, because I just want to put everything into perspective. Yeah, I mean, so your body has a number of systems, enzymatic systems, which are designed to break down, to metabolize exogenous molecules, so what the body would consider to be toxins, basically. (0:23:52)
And also to break down its own molecules, you know, its own neurotransmitters and neuromodulators. They need to be broken down when they've been used and kind of recycled or excreted. And one of these enzyme systems is called monoamine oxidase. And it's a number of them, there's two specific ones, MAO-A and MAO-B. And these are found in the gastrointestinal system, also in the brain as well. (0:24:18)
But when you, if you swallow DMT, then it's very, very rapidly broken down. And you don't, it doesn't make it into your bloodstream and then into your brain. Which is why when Stephen Zahra, actually, who discovered DMT, he discovered the psychoactive properties of DMT back in 1956, and he synthesized it. (0:24:44)
He suspected that it might be psychedelic. He thought it might be the psychedelic component of one of these traditional Amazonian snuffs. And he synthesized DMT, 10 grams of it, and he swallowed increasing amounts. And he ended up swallowing about a gram of the stuff, pure DMT. But nothing happened. And he was, he was close to abandoning the whole enterprise until one of his friends reasonably said, well, have you tried injecting it? Which he did. (0:25:08)
And the rest is history. And then he realized that, yeah, indeed, he had discovered the great reality switching molecule DMT. But yeah, it kind of, it shows that you can't assume that swallowing a drug is going to have the effect that you want. The body's quite, well, it's a very complex system, and some roots are better than others. (0:25:37)
So ayahuasca is fascinating because the kind of the minimal ayahuasca decoction contains two plants. One of them contains DMT, and the other one, the ayahuasca vine, Banisteriopsis carpi, which contains harmaline, which is this monoamine oxidase inhibitor. So it binds to the monoamine oxidase and basically stops it from working. So when you, when you take either of these plants together, you make a tea or brew of some kind of either of these plants together, you don't really get much of any effect, basically. (0:26:21)
When you put them together, that's when the magic happens. So you drink them together as this brew, this decoction, this very foul, bitter, unpleasant, thick, black decoction. You swallow it together, and then you're swallowing the monoamine oxidase inhibitor, which stops the monoamine oxidase from breaking down the DMT. And then you're also swallowing the DMT, which then allows it to escape that destructive system and actually get into your bloodstream and into your brain. (0:26:52)
And then you, you undergo kind of this, this already active DMT experience. And there's the ayahuasca trip. And what's particularly fascinating about it is that, as I said, you know, you, you, you take either of these, not like they discovered, well, this plant is psychoactive and this plant is psychoactive. What happens when we put them together on their own? They're basically not, they're completely inactive. (0:27:14)
They're psycho inactive, I guess you would say. And so you have to combine them. And that raises the question naturally as well. How did these tribes, you know, two, 3000 years ago, you know, depending on who you ask, know from all the countless plant species in the Amazon rainforest, I mean, you know, the most biodiverse place on the planet. (0:27:40)
And they discovered that you take these two plants together, that you get this, you know, remarkable effect. And that's still something of a mystery. (0:27:45)
If you ask them, of course, they will say, well, the plants told us. Who are we to argue? I guess. I know, because it's extraordinary, isn't it? The shamans would say, well, you know, the plants just, when we go into a shamanic trance situation, we go into this location, and our spirit guides or the snakes or whatever, take us and point out these plants and say, put this plant with this plant. (0:28:09)
And I think it was Benny Shannon, wasn't it? Somebody that was discussing that in his book, The Antipodes of the Mind. And when I first discovered that, that really, I found extraordinary. It's the idea that suddenly, there is an idea that there is, there are entities that you can interface with, in altered states of consciousness, that have sentience and knowledge that you don't have. (0:28:34)
And of course, this segues perfectly into, doesn't it, the next section of what I want to talk to you about, the role of entities in these scenarios. So to take us a little bit through this, could you take us through a classic DMT experience, you know, from either taking it intravenously or orally, what you experience, what happens, and then how do the entities manifest themselves? Yeah, so a typical DMT trip, normally it's the most popular route of administration is vaporization. (0:29:06)
So people would normally around 30 to 50 milligrams, it's in a small glass pipe with a crack pipe, vaporized very gently. And then normally one or two lungfalls held in, then you would normally close your eyes and lie down. This is not something, it's not a kind of wander around the forest kind of trip. (0:29:34)
It's a roller coaster kind of trip. So then within a few seconds, really, whilst the DMT is still in your lungs, the world will begin to change. And normally, there's this feeling of great acceleration. And you're kind of processed or propelled through this rapidly changing procession of highly complex geometric imagery. This is when you know it's happening. (0:30:03)
Now, eventually, assuming that you've got the dosage sufficient, I mean, that in its own is quite startling, to say the least, because the complexity of it is quite unlike and the vivid nature of the colors. It's like anything you experience in this world, that in itself is pretty mind blowing. Then assume that you reach what's called the breakthrough phase, you will reach kind of a membrane or the sense of bursting through some kind of membrane, what Terence Buchanan used to call it the chrysanthemum. (0:30:37)
The chrysanthemum. Yeah. And you would then burst through into this domain, this new place. And this is where things diverge depending on the individual and from time to time as well. People often experience entering a dome, a dome like structure. Some people describe entering what they call a waiting room, where they have to kind of, they have to hang around until they're kind of guided through the space. (0:31:20)
But generally, what happens is you will enter a space that is, again, varies in its quality and its structure, but is very often described as being highly inorganic, highly constructed, highly technological, in that it appears to be a place that has been constructed by an extremely advanced civilization. A place that feels like it's trillions and trillions of years old, that feels like our universe is, we are, you know, barely out of, you know, barely walking kind of stage, you know, and this seems to be a universe that has been around for much, much, much longer, if, you know, maybe even kind of a timeless space. (0:32:12)
But as well as this kind of structure of the space, which is often described as hyperdimensional, so it's not just highly complex, but often described as impossible in its construction. (0:32:26)
It cannot be possible. Now, what that means is we have to be a little bit careful what you mean by impossible. But I guess we could say it's impossible relative to the kind of the constraints of our universe. So we live in this fairly simple universe, in a way, there's three dimensional, fairly predictable, things kind of seem to happen with some degree of regularity, time seems fairly constant, this kind of thing. (0:33:04)
Whereas this place seems to have additional dimensions, additional structures, impossible kind of geometries, impossible levels of complexity, that actually make it almost impossible, not only in its structure, but also impossible to kind of to describe it in a way. It's un-Englishable in its construction, as Terence McKenna's favorite way of describing it, you know, it cannot be Englished. And I think that's as good as you can do. (0:33:38)
People do fairly decent jobs of getting the ambience of the space. There's some really good DMT artists now that you can find online, who do a really nice job of getting that feel, you know, you look at some of these images and you go, whoa, that's creepy, because they get that ambience just right. (0:33:57)
But the actual being able to actually properly render this space, it feels like it can only be done inside a higher dimensional space. It can't be done in three dimensional space, maybe as some kind of shadow of the DMT space, but never really get to it. You have to go there to really experience it. (0:34:19)
And then, of course, it's not just the structure of the space, but also its occupants. And this is where it becomes really interesting for me, because you're getting, you're not just going to some strange place, you're actually going to some strange place, a meeting with intelligences, what appear to be intelligences that seem to be extremely powerful. (0:34:51)
They seem to possess a level of intelligence that is way beyond anything that any human could even conceive of. It's awe-inspiring in the truest sense of the word, that you feel like you are in the presence of god-like intelligences here. I don't think they are gods in any sense of the word. I think that's probably not the right word for them. They seem to be beings that are way, way, way more advanced, levels of technological and intellectual sophistication that we can't even conceive of. (0:35:29)
These are not just unexpected or unpredicted, but they cannot be predicted. An intelligence of this level could not be predicted. It's that kind of far ahead. And that normally will shake people. It percusses you right to the very core of your being, being in the presence of such intelligences. You can talk about the idea of god-like beings until the cows come home, but to actually be confronted, to be at the feet of an intelligence of that level is quite shattering and astonishing. (0:36:07)
Again, you know, Terence McKenna used to say, the only danger is death by astonishment, and he wasn't joking. These are very bizarre, very strange populated realms, and they are to be taken seriously, I think. I think it's very dangerous to assume that we know what they are, or where they come from. We should go there with some degree of humility and say, okay, we don't know much, but we're here. And, you know, what can you tell us? (0:36:40)
Because that is fascinating, isn't it? And of course, one of the things we do have to stress that within the UK and within North America and various other countries, DMT is a prescribed drug and therefore illegal to take. But of course, you can under controlled circumstances and under laboratory conditions, and I know there's research being done at Imperial College at the moment on the effects of DMT. So we're just, because we need to put that proviso in. (0:37:05)
But effectively, for me, what is the difference, would you say, Andrew, between this and an ordinary dream? You know, putting a sceptic's hat on to say, well, you know, but isn't it just another form of dreaming? What would your response to that be? (0:37:21)
Well, this is, yeah, so the idea that DMT, I mean, that people have suggested, actually, that dreaming is caused by DMT. This goes back to the 80s. A biochemist called Jace Calloway wrote a paper in which he proposed that DMT might, or the production of DMT at night, nocturnal synthesis of DMT might be responsible for the dream state. (0:37:53)
And this is something I've thought about, and I've written quite extensively about it as well. Well, the idea with the link with melatonin comes in, I guess, I suppose, as well. Yeah, yeah. So it's all kind of connected. And the idea that maybe it's a one of these tryptamines that the brain only produces during the dream state. (0:38:12)
And it's an idea that I've kind of entertained. But I don't think that the dream state is even comparable to DMT. Most dreaming, I mean, there's quite a lot of research on dreaming, not just on how we dream and the neural activity, but also on the phenomenology of dreaming. So the structure and content and dynamics of dreaming have been very well studied. (0:38:39)
And we know that for most people, the vast majority of the time, people are going, well, not me, I have very, very strange dreams. Yes, some people do have very strange dreams. But the vast majority of people, the vast percentage of the time have dreams that are continuous with waking. This is called the continuity hypothesis of dreaming. It basically says that the dream state is continuous with the waking state. (0:39:01)
The brain is constructing this model in the same way as it does during the waking state, except that model is not modulated by sensory information from the environment, which is why you tend to see the same things, have the same kind of experiences in the dream state, except it can become kind of unstable. (0:39:26)
You can shift. The identity of people will often shift before your eyes, or the scene will often shift unexpectedly. But generally, it's a situation from the normal waking world. Now, that, of course, is absolutely nothing like the DMT state. The DMT state is disjoint from the normal waking world. It bears no relationship whatsoever to the waking world into the DMT world, as we can see it. (0:39:56)
It seems to be a completely orthogonal, a completely disjoint reality, which makes it all the more remarkable. We know that the brain evolved to construct this model of reality, the normal waking world. That's the purpose of your phenomenal world, really, is to function as a model of the environment. And your brain spent millions of years, really, honing this model. (0:40:23)
It's always honing this model, using sensory information from the environment. So it should be the only model that your brain knows how to construct. And yet, when you take DMT, suddenly the brain instantly knows how to construct, because it must construct this world. The DMT world, again, this is another mistake. People say, is the DMT world constructed by the brain, or is it a different reality? Your normal waking world is constructed by your brain, but we know that it's mapped to information from the environment. (0:40:55)
The dream world is constructed by your brain. The same with the DMT world. If you want to experience another world, it has to be constructed by your brain. Now, the question then is not, is the DMT world constructed by a brain, because we know that it must be. The question is, is that world mapped to some kind of other place? Is the brain receiving information, some kind of alternate form of sensory information from this other space? (0:41:25)
And again, this is what I spoke about at the breaking convention, the idea that the DMT world could be a sensed world, and that when you go to this, the reason your brain is constructing this DMT world is because it's actually receiving information from this other reality, and thus is kind of using that information to construct this model, which is experienced by you as the DMT world. But your brain always has to construct it. This is interesting, isn't it? (0:41:55)
Because this is an application of the ideas of people like C.D. Broad, and individuals like Aldous Huxley, and the idea, and going back to Henri Bergson, and the idea that the brain acts as an attenuator, the brain takes out information in order for us to function effectively within this environment, whatever this external phenomenal world is that we experience. But it seems that what DMT does, if I'm understanding you correctly, is it seems to override the brain's ability to attenuate information, and it allows information to be coming in from somewhere else. (0:42:32)
Is that the point you're making here? Yes. So basically, the patterns of information that your brain generates, it's kind of like, and we have to be a little bit careful with the metaphor, it's like if you have a, let's say, like a steel drum that resonates with a certain frequency, or anything really, you know, a wine glass or something, and it kind of resonates with certain frequencies from the environment. (0:43:05)
So if you sing with the right frequency, you know, you get these opera singers that will sing at a wine glass, and it will shatter, right? Because they get the natural frequency. If you change the shape of the wine glass, if you kind of heat it, and maybe change its shape, then it will alter its resonant properties, and it will start to pick up different frequencies. (0:43:29)
And although it's not quite the same, I think this kind of changing the frequency of the brain, it's overused, or it's used a little bit too literally, I think, you have to be a little bit careful. But certainly, the information that your brain is generating, which is your experience of your phenomenal world, is in a sense, matched to information from the environment. (0:43:50)
Your brain is basically trying to predict the patterns of information that it will receive, and then it kind of blocks them. It's really trying its best to reduce the amount of information that's actually entering the brain all the time. Because sensory information, it stimulates neurons, this information then travels through the networks of the brain, it has to be kind of dealt with and processed. (0:44:11)
So the brain has this working model, and it uses it to try and predict what's going to happen next. Based upon what it thinks is now, it tries to predict what's happening next. And when it gets the prediction right, it basically quenches that information. So it's only the surprising information that actually makes it through into your cortex, into this network of neurons. (0:44:34)
Just very quickly, that's interesting, isn't it? So the element where it's something we'll touch upon later in terms of Shannon and information theory and everything else, that of course, the way information works is like with bits, it's an element of surprise. It's what you don't know and what you're expecting. (0:44:57)
And that suddenly, and it just dawned upon me then, and look at a flash of inspiration, I said, yes, of course, this is how information theory works. It's the element of surprise, which means that it's something you don't know. We'll come back to that later. But I think that was intriguing. Thank you. Thank you for that, Andrew. That was great. Yes. So what a psychedelic is doing is disrupting these patterns of information. (0:45:22)
And this affects the brain's ability to maintain a stable and functioning model. And so when the model starts to break down, the brain's ability to predict information, predict the incoming information also breaks down. So you get more information coming in. So the brain loses control over the information flowing through itself and the information flowing into itself. So this is why the world becomes more... everything becomes more surprising. (0:45:58)
Colors become brighter, things kind of pop out. Everything seems a new in a sense. It's like you're seeing the world as a child when you take a psychedelic. And in a sense you are, because your brain is losing that ability that it's honed throughout your life by successfully predicting sensing information. Your brain loses that ability a little bit. (0:46:26)
And so it's kind of like, although it's almost impossible to remember, kind of like you would have seen the world as you emerged from the womb. This kind of completely new and novel environment, you know, crisply popping soundscape and these bright colors and these patterns and it's all dynamic. None of it makes any sense. And then throughout your life, your brain is picking out the patterns and going, ah, when this happened, this happened. (0:46:54)
You know, when these things happen, then these tend to move together and it forms connections and it starts to find and basically pieces together the world. And that's the world you experience now. You're experiencing this world full of objects, which are representation. There are no objects in the world as such. You know, how do you, is a chair an object? Yes. What about its legs? Were they also objects? Yeah. Okay. They're objects. (0:47:19)
The back of the chair, is that an object? You know, the seat, is that an object? Okay. You know, then if that's made from pieces, then you, you know, you could go on forever thinking about, you know, what is an object? But an object you experience is an object representation. It's, it's a, it's, it's something the brain is constructed. (0:47:40)
Your brain has learned that certain patterns of sensory information tend to occur together. You know, when your brain sees this kind of pattern of information, it thinks, ah, this is a face and it, and it constructs a face representation. And that means it doesn't have to follow all the different features. It knows that when the eyes move, the nose and the mouth is probably going to move with it as well, unless something very weird happens. (0:48:02)
And if it did, you'd know about it very quickly. So your brain is doing that all the time. And it's, you know, why you see faces in the clouds, or, you know, you see Jesus Christ on a slice of burnt toast. (0:48:12)
It's because your brain is trying to find patterns all the time. And so it can predict sensory information. That's basically what your brain is doing. It's, it's a, it's a pattern detector. And psychedelics disrupt the brain's ability to, to, to predict the sensory information. And so filter the sensory information, basically. Yeah, kind of went off a bit of a tangent there, but not at all. (0:48:39)
No, absolutely. This is exactly what Incon is all about. It's going off on tangents. It's tangendental. It's orthogonal thinking in many ways. And, you know, immediately, as soon as you were saying that the worlds of William Blake were leaping into my mind, you know, if the doors of perception were clenched, we'd see the world as it really is infinite. (0:48:59)
And in fact, that's effectively what you're saying, isn't it? You know, the brain expects to see things in certain ways and construct its reality around those expectations. We're going back now to the philosophy of Schopenhauer. We're going back to Husserl. We're going back to Heidegger. We're going back to some very, very interesting ideas of exactly what perception is and how we relate to external reality. (0:49:24)
But of course, the intriguing thing here is, is the role of these entities. You know, are they brain constructs? Are they something that we expect? Because from what you're saying about the DNT world, it is not expected. It is not. It is completely counterintuitive. It is throwing us completely open to a new world and a universe. But within this universe, there are these entities that seem to be expecting us. (0:49:50)
They seem to say, you know, we were waiting for you for years. As you say in your book, you know, this wonderful line about the little machine elves cheering when you appear and they're being fawning and laughing and joking with you. So there's almost this element of control, but there's elements of crazy madness as well. And how do those two things work together? (0:50:10)
Yeah, that's remarkable. I always describe it as like a comical ambience to the DMT space. There's a cosmic game or a cosmic joke, even. It's like you've been let into a joke, and you've almost been let into the joke. And they're kind of just teasing you and asking you if you actually get the joke yet. (0:50:39)
And of course, you don't. You know, this silly little brain of ours, and we don't really get the joke. And they're kind of teasing you and jumping in and out of your chest. And, you know, and lights are flashing, the bells, and there's a sense of awesome levels of power in the space, but also a sense that there's a tricksterish, mischievous element about it. (0:51:05)
They don't take things too seriously. They've really gotten life down. They have a fucking great time in there, I think. There can be some quite nasty entities in there. But often, it's like a wacky toy factory. Timothy Leary used to describe it as this wacky toy factory. People always describe like this kind of fairgroundy kind of ambience, and the machine elves, of course, but lots of other types of entities that seem to that seem to be kind of playful, or in some way, comical and mischievous and trickstery. (0:51:43)
And that's, yeah, that's kind of a really fascinating characteristic, I think, for DMT space, that people repeatedly experience this kind of thing. There are some dark places in there as well. You can go to quite dark areas of the DMT space where you meet less than some quite objectionable characters, some that can be quite menacing. But actually, that's relatively, relatively rare. (0:52:20)
For most people, the majority of the species, I guess you'd call them species, the entity types are reasonably friendly and want to kind of guide you and often seem positively delighted that you've burst into their realm. They just kind of want to play and say, hey, look at this, look at this, look at this. (0:52:39)
You know, I want to show you around. And, you know, if I lived in a place like that, I'd want to show someone around as well, you know? (0:52:45)
You know, I keep leaping into my mind. There are two images that keep leaping into my mind. This is the Wizard of Oz and Oz and the way Oz felt. And also Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a kind of a melange of both of these things. But one of the most important things, and you touched upon this before, and just to explain to everybody that Andrew and I will both be involved in the Contact in the Desert virtual event that is taking place later this summer. (0:53:13)
And I'll post details about this. And one of the things that Andrew and I would have been doing last year, had the lockdown not occurred, would have been doing, actually been physically over in Southern California to do the event in the desert, the Contact in the Desert. We were going to be doing a workshop together and a panel discussion together where we'd be discussing a lot of these issues. (0:53:43)
And one of the things that leaps into mind here is very much the parallels between the DMT world and the basic theme of Contact in the Desert, which is contact with aliens, but aliens of a more standard nature, the aliens of ufology and everything else as well. And I'm always reminded when I was writing my book on alien encounters, the hidden universe, there was the parallels between what seems to be the DMT world and the kind of the world of alien abductions, you know, the darker side of alien abductions where experimentation has taken place on individuals. (0:54:19)
And then you can move into that, into the effects that people that experience temporal epilepsy have, the shamanic journeying into the shamanic world, the dismemberment that takes place in these things. What are your ideas on this, of any links that can be made, do you think? Yeah, for sure. I think people, we have a very limited, we have very rather limited imagination when it comes to aliens. (0:54:46)
We're very much, we tend to restrict ourselves in terms of how we think about, you know, what an alien could be and what the kind of forms that an alien might take. And Terence McKenna was very, very, you know, he spoke about this a lot. We do lack imagination. We do seem to assume that the aliens are to be found on distant galaxies. (0:55:08)
They are to be found out there. And I think that's certainly true. I think life is likely to be ubiquitous. I think the universe is likely to be teeming with life and probably with intelligent life, life at all levels, a lot of it far more advanced than us. I think that's almost certainly true. (0:55:34)
And even the most sober of scientists now would be kind of, you know, would be seen as being a little bit churlish if they said, no, we're the only, you know, the only intelligent species in the universe. I think that's now is a very kind of old way of thinking about it. But even that, I think, is very, very limited. (0:55:50)
Because we assume that an intelligence or an alien intelligence would take biological form, first of all. Life is not necessarily limited to doing things on meat, as the story goes. There's a great story about that. But anyway, you know, we can't assume that life has to be instantiated on carbon water based, you know, protein structures, you know, held together on bone, you know, this is how we're constructed and how life seems to be constructed on earth. (0:56:29)
But we can't assume that that's the only way to instantiate life. So you can kind of think about the evolutionary trajectory of any kind of intelligence, or any kind of organism, any kind of life form, if you like, let's take it away from the biology, you would start, let's assume that it began in a biological form, you would call this, so we sit in what you would might call the technological phase. (0:57:03)
So we're a technological species, we have the ability, we've reached the ability to be able to conceive of intelligences outside of the earth, basically. So we're at the stage where we can actually begin to think about how we might communicate with other intelligences. Now, 200 years ago, that, you know, that would have been completely beyond our, you know, we might be able to conceive of the idea, but there's no way we could have really taken any kind of steps towards that. (0:57:36)
So this kind of pre-technological species, there might be lots of that in the universe, pre-technological organisms, but they're basically, they're out of the question, you know, we can't communicate with those. You've then got this technological phase, and this is where people focus their attention. Species like us, or maybe more advanced than us, but you know, biological carbon-based life forms that move around in the physical form, and those are what we assume an alien is going to look like. (0:58:08)
However, as Paul Davies, who's a great physicist, and written some wonderful books, and he makes the point that the biological phase, or the technological phase of an organism, is likely to be quite brief in terms of its technological advancement. Once an organism reaches the phase where it can begin to think about intelligences elsewhere in the universe, and think about how it might leave the universe, and think about how it might use, you know, interface with computers, and that kind of thing, it's probably only a few hundred years away from actually dispensing with the biological form in its entirety. (0:59:02)
And so that means, initially, would be to kind of instantiate our intelligence on a computer, and then I suggest going further, would be to actually instantiate our intelligence deep within the structure of reality. So once you understand the fundamental, assuming that nature, or the ground of reality, is fundamentally computational, there might be a means to kind of instantiate one's consciousness, one's intelligence, deep within the structure of reality itself, if that makes sense. (0:59:36)
So rather than relying on advanced computer systems, if you can actually find a way of interfacing with the computational level of reality, deep down at the ground of reality itself, you might be able to instantiate yourself there. So then you're in a post-biological phase, where you would be completely transparent to any means of communication from a being like ourselves. You know, certainly firing electromagnetic radiation into the cosmos ain't going to do it. (1:00:07)
And so what that means is that you've got these three phases. You've got this long pre-technological phase, where you can't communicate with them. Then you've got this narrow technological phase, where we are in now. And so there's probably a limited number of biological intelligences in that phase, which we normally focus on. But then you've got, potentially, probably the vast majority of intelligence in this universe is likely to be post-biological, which means we have no idea what it looks like. (1:00:38)
We have no idea how it instantiates itself. We have no idea how it could be communicated with. We have no idea of its possibilities, of its potential, whether it's embedded deeply within the structure of our reality, whether it's found a way of exiting this space-time, whether it's found a means of leaving, basically exiting our universe and instantiating itself somewhere else in some way, and yet perhaps maintaining some kind of conduit. We have no idea what could be possible. (1:01:09)
And of course, that's usually speculative stuff. But it means that we have to be very, very careful when you are confronted with an intelligence that appears to be vastly beyond, vastly ahead of us. You have to be very careful because it could just be who it says it is. When you meet an intelligence in the DMT space, it's very easy from the outside, someone who's never taken DMT, to say, oh, that's just a hallucination. (1:01:40)
But when you're confronted with a that level of power and intelligence, you have to be very, very careful, because you really could be confronting and standing face to face with an intelligence that exists deeply embedded within the structure of reality. And that may simply be the normal trajectory of intelligence in this universe, from the pre-technological to the technological, to the post-biological. That would explain why these beings tend to have... you would expect these post-biological beings, they must be extremely advanced by definition. (1:02:24)
They must have extremely high levels of intelligence by definition. These are post-biological beings that are dispensed with this kind of gelatinous information generating thing in the head to kind of control things. They've gone much deeper. So we would expect, if we're going to... if we would confront this kind of being, that it would kind of look like, appear like, perhaps in some ways, the beings that you experience under the influence of DMT. Which is why I do not dismiss these intelligences, these beings as mere hallucination, because I think it's... it could be a grave mistake. (1:02:59)
That's fascinating, because of course it's an application, isn't it, of Ray Kurzweil and the idea of transhumanism. And also, when you were talking there, there was ideas leaping into my mind about individuals like Teilhard de Chardin and the Omega Point and everything else as well. And of course it's the idea, isn't it, that intelligence and consciousness and everything else is entrapped within these meat machines. (1:03:21)
But, you know, there could be civilizations trillions of years ahead of us in one way or another, and could have indeed created the simulation we're living in. You know, we could be living within a simulation. And that's a point I'd like to return to in a second, both in terms of simulation theory, information theory, what we mean by information as well. (1:03:41)
But I'd like to draw Sarah in here now, as to any observations, thoughts that she's had, or any comments that are being made over there in the chat room. (1:03:46)
Yeah, there's loads of questions. Thank you very much, Andrew. People are really interested in this one. But one thing I wanted to ask, and it does touch upon some of the questions that other people have asked here as well, is have indigenous Amazonian people been given DMT to smoke to see what they see? Because I know in ayahuasca experiences, they're more likely to see a sort of fantastical double helix serpent orientated realm. (1:04:17)
So this is something that we've discussed a lot. You know, this is a very common question. You know, what happens if you, not just Amazonian, what if you give DMT to, say, you find some tribe in the Siberian tundra or something, you know, that's never had any experience with DMT, whether with ayahuasca or with pure DMT, and then you give them, so they've had no cultural conditioning about what they should experience, what do they experience? That's the great experiment. (1:04:50)
But finding such a kind of a group of people who are kind of completely DMT naive, not only they've never taken DMT, but they've never been exposed to the idea of having taken DMT. That's what would be really cool to do. But it hasn't been done. But people talk about it all the time. And it's a great thing. It's the same, similar kind of question of what happens when you give DMT to someone who's been blind since birth. (1:05:23)
And there are kind of philosophical problems with that, how you would judge whether or not they saw something, because they don't really know what seeing is. So even if they did, I mean, that's kind of cool. If you give someone who's never seen DMT, if they did see something, how would they know that that's what seeing is? Because the quality of seeing is not there. (1:05:43)
If you're completely color blind, you suddenly see the color red. Yeah, it's a messy one. So that went off on a tangent a little bit there. But yes, people have talked about these kind of experiments before to try and help. I guess really what it does is it appeals to our desire to know if this space is really real, if these really are intelligences that we're dealing with. (1:06:15)
And we try and think of ways of getting at that, trying to clear away the kind of the cultural conditioning and cultural baggage that we bring to the experience and try and scrape that away and try and get to the essence of the DMT experience. And of course, we can't do that because the DMT space is being constructed by your brain. (1:06:41)
Your brain has to build it and it uses the materials that it's got, which is these networks of neurons. So can I go on a little bit here? Please, please. Yeah, no, absolutely. Please do. So you kind of said that in the Amazonian rainforest, they will tend to see kind of serpents, jaguars, anacondas, things that are more related to their experience. (1:07:10)
And that doesn't... whereas someone in the Western world, we're more likely to see these technological aliens or robotic or insectoid kind of beings. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's... that these are definitely kind of fantasies or hallucinations. All it means, the brain is trying to make sense of the information that it's receiving and it will often grasp for the closest familiar structure that it can and try and form a coherent structure from that, which would be obviously influenced greatly by one's culture. (1:07:44)
So your brain always has to work with what it's got and try and put it together. So it doesn't surprise me that the experiences would be different for someone who lives in Amazonia compared to someone who lives in the Wirral. I mean, one of the things that's... No, the people in the Wirral are really good. (1:08:03)
Oh, Anthony, I so want you to do like DMT Live on the Consciousness Hour one day. That would be great. Because one of the things that someone's mentioned to me is that when they're on... they're having the DMT experience, that the number of entities matches the number of entities that's in that actual environment, but they have these extra dimensional qualities to them. (1:08:25)
But the essence of the being is that there is a real being that exists there in that moment. Sorry, I wasn't there. I didn't catch that. The number of beings in the... Yes, so say, for example, someone is being administered DMT in a clinical environment and there's three people in attendance in that room, then the person experiencing the DMT experience is three entities. (1:08:52)
The match is the number of real entities in the room, but they have this extra dimensional quality. Yeah, that's quite common. And there's an overlaying of the DMT space with the normal waking world. It's almost like we are... the DMT... I kind of... I always describe, in the book, I describe our world as a thin slice of reality. (1:09:17)
And the DMs say, you know, our reality is kind of like this. And then the DMT reality is kind of higher dimensional structure extending beyond it. So I think the DMT space appears, in my opinion, it appears to be a much older, a much larger, much more complex structure. And we exist at this very, very thin slice of reality. (1:09:41)
We've kind of emerged within this thin slice of reality. And that we are, in a sense, we are part of the DMT space. But we're normally cut off from it. And that DMT is allowing us to interface with that space and effectively become part of the DMT space. So your brain actually becomes a hyper dimensional object within the space, because your experience, you become this, in a sense, you become a hyper dimensional entity within the DMT space, when you take... You just quickly very much there, Andrew, just explain to the watchers, the listeners, or the egregorals that are watching us, in that when we talk about orthogonal space, we talk about orthogonal time, we talk about hyper dimensionality, we talk about the cubes and things. (1:10:32)
What do you really mean by that, just so that people can grasp exactly what we mean when we're talking about something like a tesseract or something? What is, because people use these term, ultra dim, other dimensions, but I really don't know what they mean by this. Okay. Yeah, well, I mean, it's like, so a, you know, a two dimensional object, you know, that that's a two dimensional object, right? This square, it's kind of a square. So that said, the pen pointing out the page is orthogonal. (1:11:00)
So we would not so normally orthogonal, he refers to like a right angle. But basically, what orthogonal means is that the, so you can move around in this space, but you maintain exactly the same position in this space, which is completely irrelevant, you're not moving in that third, that third dimension, basically. And what I use the term, slightly guardedly, because it helps to visualize, I think, the way that these systems were, I don't think it's simply a case, kind of like, you know, going from a flat land to a three dimensional, you know, going from a square to a cube. (1:11:52)
I don't think it's as simple as that. I think it's far more complex. I think, but I think visualizing it like that helps you to kind of get to grips with that idea. (1:11:57)
You know, this is not just a kind of five dimensional or four dimensional space that you're entering, you seem to be entering a space that contains many more dimensions, people will commonly describe seeing all sides of objects at once, you know, there's a very, this is where I think a lot of the idea of the impossibility of the space comes in. And the geometry is, could only be experienced in pure abstraction. (1:12:29)
If you were an algebraic topologist, a mathematician, you might be able to write the equations or visualize this space in some way computationally, but you would never be able to experience a five or six or seven or eight or nine dimensional space, except in pure abstraction. In the same way that being in a flat land world would never be able to experience a sphere or a cube, you know, they might be able to write the equation down for a sphere, or the equation down for a cube, or a cubic topology, a cubic space, but they would have no idea what that would feel like. (1:13:14)
And what DNT does is seems to thrust you into this high dimensional space. You don't need to know anything about the mathematics of it or the topology, but you instantly recognize this isn't possible. This, these shapes, these structures cannot be, it's not possible that they could exist. Because I think it is high dimensional. (1:13:42)
And that suggests to me that, again, going back to the idea of simulation theory, there's a, I forget who it was now, Brian Whitworth, a physicist who wrote about the idea of a digital simulation. And he makes the point that the simulator reality would have to have more dimensions than the simulated reality. So in other words, you know, if it's simulating our three dimensional plus time reality, it would have to exist in a higher dimensional space. And so that kind of makes sense. (1:14:21)
I'm not saying that we're living in a simulation, and we can perhaps get into why that's not the case. But certainly, it's why it's good to think about the DNT space as being this higher dimensional structure, because it is something that we can always we can relate to at least least by thinking about two versus three dimensions and flat lands versus, you know, three dimensional structures, it gets you to the gets you close to the concepts, at least. (1:14:51)
Back to you, Sarah. Can I come back to what you were saying about DMT being present in most plants and living things, and this idea of the shamans communicating with the plants, which I think happens through maybe a more subtle DMT interaction, because maybe DMT somehow is this language that communicates information between living organisms. And it reminds me of Mark J. Plotkin's book, Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice. So I think it's very likely that using this subtle plant language, shamans were able to communicate with plants and find out this kind of information. (1:15:32)
But one of the other things I'd really like to ask you about, because I do a lot of dream research, and you were talking about when you're dreaming, you're shut up, you're shut off from sensory input coming in from the outside world, but you are processing sensory information, and you're often processing sensory information that arises internally. (1:15:47)
So I wonder whether the DMT experience may be this inner realm rather than this projected-out-of-your-body type of experience? Yeah, I think it's an oversimplification to say that the sensory information is cut off, but the normal conduits through which visual and sound information. But there's been recent research that shows that you can even ask people, if they're lucid dreaming, you can ask people questions and they can actually respond in real time and answer them. So certainly it's not completely cut off, yeah. (1:16:21)
I think, you know, this becomes really confusing when you think about the internal versus the external, which is basically what you're getting at there. Is the DMT, you know, we could ask the question, is the DMT world purely internal, or is it also external? And then you have to ask, so what we mean by external versus internal? Is it just physically what's the difference between a world that exists purely in your head? And we get into kind of Jungian ideas now, the idea of the collective unconscious, and the idea that there is this world that exists within our consciousness. (1:17:07)
And there are physical interpretations of that as well. It's kind of embedded in the connectivity of your neurons in your brain, your cortex. There are these structures, these neuro-gnostic structures, which can express themselves in every brain. So this gives rise to these archetypes. Neuro-gnostic structures, that is a wonderful term. I love that one. Yeah, so neuro-gnostic structures. (1:17:40)
So basically it's a way of connecting the Jungian ideas of archetypes, which are these patterns, these forms, often take the form being, you know, trickster archetype, etc, etc. And trying to connect that to the actual neurobiology, and the idea that they're embedded within the complex connectivity patterns of the brains. You're kind of born with these, and only under certain circumstances are they kind of expressed and can rise to the surface. (1:18:14)
So then you're getting into, if we can kind of segue into Jung a little bit, and the idea of complexes, the idea that the psyche can actually fragment and form these structures, which Jung called complexes. So people's understanding of what we mean by a complex. In a Jungian sense, people say, oh, you're giving me a complex. That's related, but really what a complex is, is a fragment. (1:18:42)
It's a piece of the psyche, which is kind of separated itself. And, you know, the main complex is kind of your, you know, your kind of your ego and your kind of experience of the world normally. But there are these, perhaps these fragments of your psyche, which would be patterns of neural activity that are kind of embedded somewhere, but not being expressed or being somehow disconnected from the normal patterns that allow you to kind of experience your normal phenomenal world. And what Jung suggested is that these complexes can become autonomous. (1:19:24)
So they can actually be not just fragments of your psyche, but actually become completely autonomous, actually develop and change and grow. And, you know, all of these things completely separate from your main psyche and yet still be part of you in some way. And he also never, he never denied, he never affirmed, he was a little bit kind of ambiguous on whether or not they could become conscious themselves. And that would be kind of striking, because then you've got an entity, you've got a conscious entity, that's basically a fragment of your psyche, that's become completely autonomous. (1:20:12)
And this, just very quickly, this is fascinating stuff, because of course, this is where I'm going with my work on the egregores. So that is that is wonderful. Thank you for that. Yeah, yeah. So these, you would basically your brain or your psyche, which I think psyche in your brain, you know, we can see that the psyche is probably an expression in some way, the structure, at least an expression of neural activity of these patterns of connections and patterns of information being generated by your brain. And that part of your psyche is being able to fragment and to actually separate itself, but actually could be conscious. (1:20:52)
And what's the kind of evidence that this can happen, of course, is people with multiple personality disorders. So very rare, but very well documented, where people can switch between entirely different psyches with different completely different personalities, it would suggest that the psyche can fragment, that it's possible to switch between them. And that they must have some kind of autonomy. And of course, they are both capable of consciousness, because, you know, you can, you can switch between them. (1:21:23)
So you can imagine these small pieces of the psyche kind of popping off the main structure, and then evolving and being reliant, they're almost like parasitic, parasitic structures that maintain themselves based upon the informational complexity of your brain, they rely upon it. And yet they also, they kind of instantiate themselves in your neural software, would be another way of thinking about it. (1:21:51)
And yet be completely independent of it and running themselves independent, then who knows what capabilities they have. And then DMT, just to kind of make the final point, DMT might be allowing these these normally disconnected structures to somehow show themselves to actually come into the main, the main complex, you know, the main structure of your ego. (1:22:17)
And thus, this is when you actually experience these entities is when they kind of burst through and you find themselves in that space. (1:22:21)
Folks, you have just witnessed the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle being placed in to the jigsaw. I'm not sure about that. Oh, it is for me, Andrew, it is for me, believe me, from where my writing is going, that was the that was the bit I needed. I need to talk to you about this at another time, in terms of finding the papers related to the things you've just been talking about that. (1:22:47)
But just to just to say, wow, that was extraordinary. And I'll guarantee there are two or three of my associates who I'm working with on various themes that when they watch this either now or watch this later, we'll be jumping up and down with glee on what you've just done. They will be dancing like McKenna's machine elves around us. (1:23:09)
I'm going to tell you that now. Sarah, going back, Sarah, again, there were other things you wanted to pursue. Yeah, the other thing I wanted to ask is how DMT interacts with memory processing in the brain and if that has a specific relationship, because I think especially in terms of dreaming, memory is a very interesting part of the dream experience. (1:23:29)
Yeah, I mean, memory and DMT are complicated for a number of reasons. So first of all, there is often the kind of the memory function, the ability, I mean, memory is a process of reconstruction. It's almost a process of re-experiencing in a way when you remember something. And there are different types of memory, of course. (1:23:54)
But the problem, part of the problem with the DMT space is that when you come back from the DMT space, memory is often very, very fleeting. It's very similar to dreaming and that you will kind of burst back, pop back, it feels like, into this normal waking world and you're ranting and raving and you saw this and you saw this and you saw this and then kind of it drifts away and it's gone and you can't remember. (1:24:18)
That's so interesting, Andrew. Sorry, I've never taken DMT and I didn't realize that the memory of the experience was fleeting. So that's really... Yeah, yeah. Not for everyone. Some people are very good. You know, it takes training. You have to, I think the problem is that you're going from a hyper-dimensional space, you effectively become this hyper-dimensional object, your brain has anyway, and you're experiencing this hyper-dimensional, high-dimensional world that's basically impossible. (1:24:44)
And then you have to kind of, when you come back and you're back into this lower dimensional space, this normal three-dimensional world, you have to try and render, you have to kind of render in a lower dimension, you have to kind of construct a lower dimensional projection of this high dimensional space. And that's quite difficult to do. (1:25:06)
And some people are better than others at doing it. And with practice, you can learn how to render it and how to hold on to the experiences. But for most people, you can remember the overall character. Maybe if you have a particularly powerful entity encounter, you will remember something about that. But often the details are gone. (1:25:26)
So you could have a lucid DMT experience potentially then, and some people are able to remember exactly what happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And some people claim that there are certain herbs you can take for, they will allow you to remember it. I mean, all this needs to be tested. Andrew, it's a very quick question. (1:25:47)
Do you think it is possible that you could hypnotically regress somebody into a DMT state? Yes, we've discussed this before as well. And that's kind of it. Because of course, with these alien abduction experiences, often that's how you get to that data. How you get to those memories is through regression, because they don't remember it. It might be possible. (1:26:14)
I think the difficulty perhaps is that with, is the high dimensionality of the experience, that it might be difficult without DMT for the brain to actually reconstruct. You know, your brain still has to be able to somehow reconstruct in some form, at least, even if it's in a low dimensional projection of the experience. So it might kind of work. But I think the best thing would be to, you know, getting into the kind of the extended state stuff would be to actually hold someone in the space and devise techniques for the real time transmission of information from the space to the team waiting on the outside. (1:26:50)
And that would be a very effective way, rather than relying on these post experience trip reports, which work to an extent, you know, as soon as they come back, you get them to tell you in a tape recorder what happened. But being able to relay information, that's the only way you're going to get complex, detailed information. (1:27:15)
Because the DMT space is often full of information, you get this sort of download of information from the space. Because that would almost be equivalent, wouldn't it, to almost the DMT person being a medium, in its literal sense, of being a medium of communication between us here in this dimensional space, with the dimensional entities that that person is interfacing with. (1:27:38)
Yeah, if I'm making sense here, that could be very... Absolutely right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that would be that would be the plan. And you know, there are technological ways you can do this, you would have, you wouldn't have to just rely on them kind of telling you what was going on, but you could have devices. Timothy Leary in the 60s developed this experiential typewriter for DMT, where each key was connected to like a pen, and it would it would record some aspect of the experience. (1:28:04)
And so you can in real time, you can kind of, without having to speak, you can, if you're very practiced, you can learn to communicate the kind of aspect of the experience. I can imagine doing that on a much more sophisticated level of having someone plugged in and being able to work this, this machinery with their hands and actually communicate what's going on. (1:28:29)
Yeah, I mean, possibilities are endless. I was wondering about things like emotion and feeling and how they might be processed in the DMT state. Because one of the things that you reminded me of when you're talking about the, the elves and the sort of jokey element to it, is it reminds me of, I mean, I'm not saying that DMT state is the same as the dream state, but a lot of it does remind me of especially lucid dreaming, where I have experiences very often where there's some sort of funny joke expressed with some action or some characters. And it's hilariously funny, but it's not actually funny at all in reality. (1:29:00)
If I took that situation out of the dream state, there'd be no truth attached to it. It's just a thing. (1:29:06)
And the same happens with when I've encountered divine entities, that they're able to project like a sense of divinity and awe into me as well. So I wonder what's coming first, the feeling, and you're matching the visuals to the feeling, or vice versa? Yeah, we don't know is the answer. These are the sort of questions that would be interesting to answer. If you undertake a really well-organized world space or DMT space exploration project, these are the kind of things that you would do, the kind of experiments that you could do within the DMT space. The possibilities really are endless when it comes to what could be done. (1:29:53)
We're really just touching the surface. It's like you're being over the edge of a boat, and someone's holding you by your legs, and they're kind of dunking you in the water, and you kind of look around, and then they kind of pull you out again. It's like that. But what we're suggesting is you put on a deep-sea diving suit and actually go down there. (1:30:12)
That's the difference. It's like you get plunged into this space. You're completely disoriented. You don't know what's going on. You meet some entities, probably thousands of entities. You're just about to establish some kind of communication, kind of get your bearings, and then you're kind of dragged out again. And so it's not ideal, that approach, I think, that our rather primitive way that we use DMT. I think we need to treat it more as a technology, and use it accordingly. (1:30:57)
It does remind me what you're saying there, this way of seeing the world. I think it might not be in the Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice book, but I'm sure I read somewhere with the Ayahuasca experience, somebody wrote that a shaman or some sort of facilitator in the Amazon that they were with, said that if you don't have a kind of powerful enough spirit, the Ayahuasca sees through you, rather than you seeing through the Ayahuasca. And there is this idea in Ayahuasca ceremonies, at least, that the space needs to be held by someone who's experienced with these dimensions. (1:31:36)
Sure, I mean, obviously that's very culturally informed, that way of seeing it. And we have to be a little bit careful about... I hate the word appropriating, it's been ruined, but just taking that way of seeing... they have their own way of seeing the world, they have a worldview, these shamans, these traditional tribes, and it works for them. (1:32:02)
They've discovered a way of interacting with the space, the Ayahuasca space, the Ayahuasca entities, etc, that works for them. And we have to be very careful that we can just kind of take that and make it work for us, and it probably won't. And we certainly shouldn't assume that it would. I think we can... certainly we should go in there with the... not the assumption, but with the mind being open that we could be dealing with actual conscious intelligences. (1:32:35)
And yes, we don't know what they could be capable of and what's the best way to kind of deal with them. And yeah, I think we can bring ideas from these shamanic tribes that have been dealing within this space, that have been interacting with entities in this space for a lot longer than we have. But I think we really need to kind of build up our protocols and build up the way that we interact with them, almost really from the ground up, and go in there very, very... with a great deal of humility, really, and accept that we don't really know what's going on, but we're kind of open to learn and open to information that they might want to impart, I guess. (1:33:28)
You know, this is something we'd never have dreamed of way back in the 1960s when I was starting, when I was a young guy. The idea of communicating with alien intelligences was a circumstance whereby an alien would land in your yard in a filing saucer and get out and say, take me to your leader. (1:33:49)
Whereas it is far more subtle than that, and far more exciting. And all I can say is, from the things you've been saying now, that I feel that we are just tripping on the edge of something extraordinary, and an extraordinary breakthrough in human understanding, an almost paradigm change in terms of our understanding of how the universe functions. (1:34:04)
And I think a lot of the things you have said today have stimulated so many ideas in my limited intelligence as to where this could be channeled in one route or another. But as long as DNT remains prescribed in that, you know, it is considered to be dangerous, and therefore we can't use it in the right way, and everything else as well, we're rather restricted as to how far we can go. (1:34:34)
Now one of the things that you mentioned, that you're working with Rick Strassman, and I'm really fascinated because Rick is somebody I would love to get on this show, is your target-controlled intravenous infusion technology for extending DNT trips. This is really an intriguing advance. Can you tell us a little more about this? Yeah, so the idea of... so the problem with the DNT state, well it's not a problem for most people. (1:34:57)
Most people, it's a kind of a blessing, is that it is very, very brief. It is only a few minutes. But as I said, if you want, if you really want to establish stable communication, really want to do experiments within the space, and kind of establish whether or not we are really dealing with intelligences that are subjective and self-aware and conscious, then we need to spend more time in the space, beyond the few minutes that the normal modes of administration will allow us. (1:35:34)
So vaporization in a glass pipe, or injection, sort of bolus injections, you give somebody 30 milligrams or so of DMT into a vein, the levels rise in the brain, they have the experience, and then they kind of tail off again. And this happens over the space of maybe 10 minutes or so. (1:36:00)
So it occurred to me about six years ago that DMT seems to be, the kind of the pharmacological peculiarities of DMT make it amenable to this target-controlled intravenous infusion, which is basically the technology that's been used by anesthesiologists for decades to maintain a stable, a reasonably stable level of general anesthetic drug molecule in the brain over time. (1:36:30)
So they can bring you into an anesthetized state by bringing the level of drug into your brain to a certain level, so it's just you're unconscious, and then use a continuous infusion of the drug into your blood vessels and actually keep the level to kind of compensate for the metabolism removal of the drug, and so the level remains fairly kind of constant. (1:36:57)
And DMT has all of the kind of required pharmacological properties that these short-acting general anesthetics have. So it occurred to me that why can't we use that technology? Now it has to be said that the idea of kind of DMT drips goes back to the maybe the 70s. There's a girl called Crystal Cole who spoke about using like a normal kind of drip bag to kind of ride the waves of the DMT, the DMT space, over extended periods of time. (1:37:32)
But I think what's kind of new about this is the idea that you can actually program this infusion device to actually taking into account the rate at which it's metabolized and distributed throughout the body to actually control the level in the brain. This is a much more targeted, a much more precisely regulated way of delivering DMT rather than just using an infusion. This is a pharmacologically, pharmacokinetically informed infusion. (1:38:07)
So it's the next level, I think, beyond these ideas of the DMT drip. And really, in my opinion, this really does exploit, not exploit, that's the wrong word. This really does, I think, bring us to the stage where we are treating DMT more like a technology. I don't think it's sacrilegious or profane in some way to talk about DMT as a technology. (1:38:46)
Because if we are dealing with advanced intelligences from deeply embedded within the structure of reality or within the structure of ourselves or in another universe or whatever, then it's almost like we are duty bound to bring our best tools to the table. We can't assume that these old methods of smoking a little glass pipe or whatever, these old modes of administration that basically hurl us into their domain so that we kind of look around wide eyed for a few minutes, and then kind of bugger off again. (1:39:29)
That's not a very diplomatic way to deal with an advanced intelligence. If we really do take seriously the idea that we could be interacting with intelligences not of this world, then we need to bring our best tool to the table. We need to use the technologies that we have developed in the best way that we can to enter their domain in a controlled fashion, to remain there for sufficient periods of time so that we can establish communication with them and treat them with some degree of dignity and respect, for goodness sake. (1:40:01)
It's not respectful, I think, ultimately, to burst into someone's world and look around and then bugger off. It's not respectful. It's not diplomatic. We are not showing ourselves in a good light as an intelligence of the cosmos to behave like that. So I don't really have much trust with people who go, oh, you know, injections and these are bad. (1:40:27)
You need to be sat on a hand-woven rug and you need to be facing the North Star whilst the moon is in the eighth house, you know, sunset or whatever. And this is the way you need to take DMT. I think, I'm sorry, but you can have that. That's great. But we need to... the big boys now. Can I say that? Maybe not. That's a bit rude. (1:40:49)
I love the bleak reference to the Fifth Dimension song from the musical Her, when the sun is in the seventh house, my generation rather than yours. But effectively, what I was really interested in there was, there's a couple of things, there's been a couple of comments made that are in the chat room, which I want to focus in on as well. (1:41:18)
But I was very interested, one of the other areas that myself and my little group are working on, are communications using other alternate sources. (1:41:25)
And one of the areas that a lot of the people I'm in contact with are talking about mediumship communications and channel communication and various other communications that are being used from alternate realities. And I'm immediately reminded of us dunking ourselves in, and I think you're dunking out of a boat into the water analogy, it's absolutely fantastic, is that, you know, all through time, we've had these supposed communications from alternate realities. (1:41:54)
I'm reminded of the Imperator and Rector cases in the 1890s that were recorded by the Society for Psychical Research. We then move forward into modern times, and we have things such as, and I use the term advisedly here, things like the Skoll experiment, and also EVP and other areas of communication, whereby it seems that there are other groups that are trying to communicate into our world in a similar way to the way we're communicating into the DMT world. (1:42:23)
And it's almost as if there's kind of nested worlds, nested dimensions, where we're all desperately trying to communicate with each other, but we haven't got the tools to do so. Which is intriguing, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, I think that's exactly what it is. We have no idea what the kind of largest structure within which we're embedded is, what it looks like, and how it interacts with other structures. And so we have to remain completely circumspect about the kind of intelligences that might be extant within other places, and how they might interact with us as well. (1:43:03)
We can say nothing about it. We can't rule it out. Even if you are a hardcore orthodox physicist, you can't say anything about what some other place, what is or isn't possible in some other place, and how it might interact with our universe. Which means that we certainly can't rule out the possibility that there could be intelligences that exist in that other place, or deeply embedded within our universe, that might want ways, or might have found ways to communicate with us. (1:43:39)
And the most natural way to communicate with us would be through our brains, in my opinion. It's not flashes, not lights in the sky. If you've got an advanced intelligence that is post-biological, it's likely to... the most efficient way for it to communicate with us is to interact with our brain directly. And somehow DMT seems to be perhaps some kind of embedded technology within our slice of reality that we have kind of discovered, and that allows... when it enters our brain, it changes the patterns of information that our brain generates, and kind of gates the flow of information from this other space, which basically allows us to communicate. (1:44:22)
You know, that's what communication is. It's the transmission of messages, transmission of information. And what's beautiful about transmitting information into the brain is it allows you to go to these other worlds, because you don't... I think, you know, if you want to travel to another reality, another dimension, it doesn't require anything to move from this reality to that reality. Your brain doesn't have to go anywhere. (1:44:49)
Your consciousness doesn't have to go anywhere. All that has to happen is that information has to be transmitted from that other space into your brain, and your brain constructs the model of it. And so you're able to visit that place without having to go anywhere. (1:45:01)
So it's kind of like if, you know, you had a... you wanted me to show you around your apartment, let's say. We could use a VR headset. I could, you know, I could put it on, and you could feed me information, and I could walk around your apartment, and I could see it, you know, and basically visit your house, and without ever going there, simply by feeding information, visual information, into my eyes, and, you know, doing it that way. (1:45:31)
But you can imagine taking that to the next level of stimulating the brain directly, gating the flow of information directly into the brain. That would allow you to actually enter that space without any movement or any... even any flow of information from this reality into that reality would need to occur. All that would need to happen is that DMT would somehow have to perturb the information generated by the brain such that it gates the flow of information from that space. (1:46:02)
This, in many ways, reminds me of the famous quote, well, I don't know how famous it is, but in Benny Shannon's Antipodes of the Mind, he talks about this ice cream salesman that he met, and, you know, the story that the ice cream salesman said that many, many years ago, God had the secrets of the universe, and he wanted to hide it somewhere. (1:46:20)
So he chose initially, and he thought to himself, I will hide it at the bottom of the ocean. And then he realized that humanity would advance, and given sufficient advancement, would be able to go to the depths of the oceans and find it. And then he thought, I'd place it on the moon. (1:46:35)
And then he realized that humanity would get spaceships and go to the moon and find it there. And then he thought, no, the best place to hide it, the secret of the universe, and the secret of communication is deep within the human brain. And clearly, this is exactly what you're advocating here, aren't you? The same kind of model, that these are communication facilities that somehow is within our world. (1:46:58)
You know, DMT is, as you say, it's everywhere. It's in the human body, you know, and of course, we know the GMO, Borgigin experiments, where they have found it in the pineal gland of live rats. So clearly, it is there. And what is it there for? Why is it evolved? Why are there trace amine associated receptors in the brain that seem to work with, with DMT? (1:47:15)
It seems like an evolutionary imperative that were happening here. But one of the points that's just been made in the discussion group is that somebody said that, Dave Hallett has pointed out that our mutual friend Carl Hayden Smith is doing this infusion method now. Is that true? Is Carl involved in this at the moment? Yeah, sorry, I went off on a tangent. (1:47:40)
And I was supposed to get to that. But yes. So Imperial College have been planning this for a while now. (1:47:50)
And they're actually, so the paper that I published with Rick Strassman was kind of a proof of principle, basically to show that the properties of DMT would allow it to be used. But they've actually now they've actually worked with a pharmacologist in Sweden, called Michael Ashton, who's actually done a much more detailed analysis and a much more detailed model, which they've now deploying at Imperial College. So this is the, in my opinion, the world's foremost psychedelic research group headed by David Nutt and Robin Carhart-Harris. And yeah, they're doing infusion, they're using basically this kind of model, basically, this protocol, this continuous target controlled intravenous infusion protocol. (1:48:39)
And Carl Smith, I think he might have been the first person to undergo it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, if he don't, he'll do it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So yeah, I think he's already done two. I mean, I'm not sure. He hasn't spoken much about the experiences. I've seen him give a talk a couple of weeks ago, but... He's not allowed to talk about them, is he? Because Chris Timmerman has said that he shouldn't influence any future takers. (1:49:07)
Yeah, okay. Well, that makes sense. That makes perfect sense. There we go. Yeah, so I'm not sure what stage though. It's obviously an early stage. So I don't know how long he went under and how deep and all these kind of stuff, but it's happening. It's no longer just speculation that we could do this. It's actually being done. So yeah. Well, as Carl said on this show a few months ago, when he was here and he turned around, some of the entities turned around and said, you shouldn't be doing it this way. (1:49:40)
This is not the way to do it. Maybe this is what they were suggesting, that maybe this longer infusion technique is the way to go. And maybe that's where he's gone at the moment. There's a very interesting question from Samantha Lee Treasure over in South Korea. I have a question. How do you tell between what is an external agent or your own mind, like most dream characters would be? And that's an interesting point, isn't it? How can you tell the level of agency here? (1:50:06)
That's a great question. And that's a question we don't know the answer to. We know that, so when you meet someone in a normal waking world and you meet someone in a dream, we kind of understand the difference there. The experience is the same, basically. The difference is how that experience maps to the environment. (1:50:31)
So when you're waking and you're speaking to somebody, then you understand that there's a clear relationship between the experience of that person and what's actually going on in the environment. They're there, they're talking to you, etc. In the dream, the experience is exactly the same. The difference is that there's no mapping to them. So your brain is purely constructing the model in the same way, but it's fabricating even everything that's, you know, the movements and what they're saying, all that kind of stuff. (1:51:02)
Now, the question then is, is that in the DMT space, when you encounter an entity, an intelligent entity, I always ask the question, what is it like? Is there something it's like to be a machine elf, is the question. Is there someone else behind those eyes? Is there something it's like to be them? Are they conscious? Is it a projection of your mind? Is it something else? (1:51:32)
Is it a pure cortical fabrication of some sort, a hallucination of the truest kind? Or are you actually interacting with intelligence? That's the real interesting question. I think questions of is it real or not real? Is it true or not true? Is it hallucination or not hallucination? They're less interesting. (1:51:59)
What's really interesting is, are you dealing with a being that is just as unable to deny its existence as you are to deny yours? As Descartes showed us, you can deny everything apart from your own consciousness. You cannot deny your own existence, the existence of your own mind. This is almost a Turing test for alien entities, isn't it? Right, exactly. (1:52:18)
So the question is, are you dealing with a being that is also unable to deny his existence? And he might be asking the same thing about you. You know, and it's the problem about the mind. Do you have time while you're there to ask them questions to try to work it out, like a question that they wouldn't possibly know the answer to? Is it Searle's Chinese room hypothesis, isn't it? Right, so exactly. I mean, there are lots of approaches you can take to this of how would you ascertain whether or not it's a real intelligence? Whether it's conscious, that's... I mean, it's impossible for me to ever know whether anyone else is conscious. (1:53:01)
This is the problem of other minds and and that's something that seems to be insurmountable. We can never know whether another being is conscious, really, as far as I can see anyway. But there might be a test for whether or not it can, you know, it's an intelligence that can perform calculations and computation that can do things that intelligent things can do that you can't do. (1:53:29)
So, you know, can it solve complex mathematical problems that you could not do in your head? You know, could it factorise, could it find the unique prime factors of this very large number? Something that might take a computer many days of, you know, a supercomputer, it might take it a long period of time to do this and certainly the human brain can't do it. (1:53:54)
So could you give it one of these large numbers? This is a classic test that people have proposed for a few years now. And could you get an answer from it? Would that some way establish the kind of the true ontological status of this intelligence? And you can think of lots of these kind of experiments. But I think in a way, it's quite presumptive to go in there and ask them to prove that they exist. (1:54:23)
It's rather rude, you know, a little thing like, how do we know that you exist? It's like, you've got no fucking idea, mate. Absolutely. Can you imagine? I don't believe you exist. (1:54:34)
I don't know, I go up to dream characters, and I ask them to tell me things, or I try to engage them in conversation. And often, I recognize them as being projections of my own consciousness, because they only know what I know. And then sometimes they have their own consciousness or their own independence. Yeah, yeah. And so these kind of, and then they can become a formal test that one can think about doing, performing. (1:55:06)
But again, we have to be a little bit careful, because you are going in there with a kind of an attitude that we're the real thing, we're the kind of the foremost, we're the conscious entity here, and you need to prove yourself. And it's like, well, if it doesn't, it seems that we're kind of, we're turning the tables a little bit there. (1:55:31)
And I think that's rather unwise, we might get smacked down. What if you ask them, what do you want us to know? Or you ask them to tell you what they want to communicate to you? Right, that's, that would be the approach, it would be you go in there very, very open ended and think about how do you, I mean, this is, I mean, I'm not an expert on how you communicate. (1:55:52)
It's like you go into a tribe, did you watch that, that program called tribe with Bruce Parry? And you, you know, he goes and meets this tribe. And it's like, how do you establish communication without getting shot with an arrow? Right? You know, you go in there, oh, they bring tobacco. (1:56:09)
Not with a Bible. Not with a Bible. Yeah. Right. But it's just, you know, there are ways that you deal with this is what's the best way to approach an established communication? That's out of my, I'm not qualified to answer that question in a way. And that's why you would bring in a team, you would have, you would have the anthropologist, you would have the experts in communication, you would have mathematicians, you'd have theologians, even, you know, psychologists, neuroscientists, physicians. (1:56:36)
It's like that Donovan song, the physician, the poet, the farmer, the scientist, magician, you know, you have that one way down below. Yeah. Atlantis. That's it. Yeah. Great song. But yeah, you would, that's the requires, I think, linguists, of course, you name it, it's going to be a whole team of different specialities that would be required, I think, for this kind of expedition, if we're going to take it seriously, then it's, there's gonna be quite a team involved. (1:57:12)
I think that we're nearing the end of our most wonderful two hours. This has been extraordinary. I've got so many ideas now exploding in my head, as I expected I would, I've got to go and go away and make notes and watch this again and make notes from it. Andrew, we've got to have you back for another two hours. We haven't even really discussed so many areas. (1:57:26)
We haven't touched upon your book. We haven't touched upon information theory or anything, because we haven't had the chance, but this is exactly what I wanted it to be. I wanted to be a flow of ideas. So we're coming near the end. So if you can let people know how they, guys, read this book, believe me, it's one of the best books I have ever read. (1:57:44)
I read it for the third time over the weekend, and I absolutely loved it. It is a great book. So Andrew, how can people get hold of you? How can they contact you? Your website is extraordinary, by the way, and there's so much downloadable material on there as well. So, you know, really getting into the mind of Andrew Gallimore. So Andrew, how can people contact you and all your contact details and everything else? Yeah, so my website is buildingalienworlds.com. So there, as you said, you can find the articles that I've written. (1:58:16)
You can find the first chapter of the book in audio form as well. You can find the first chapter read by myself and some sample pages and interviews, podcasts, lectures, all that kind of stuff is on my website, buildingalienworlds.com. You can also find me, of course, on Twitter and Instagram. Alien Insect is my handle. (1:58:41)
And of course, you can buy my book. You can get it from Amazon. You can get it in hard form. There's a softback version. And there is now, just come out last week, there is an ebook version as well. Also on Amazon, you can buy if you want to get the kind of the iPad reading experience. Yeah, that cover it? Yeah, I think so. (1:59:03)
And also just to stress about, again, our involvement in the way which we will both be doing workshops and lectures on Contact in the Desert. Yes. And that is, I've forgotten the dates. June 28, I believe. Right. Contact in the Desert. Yeah. So I think we're both, I'll be giving a main lecture where I'll discuss some of these ideas of alien communication. (1:59:31)
And then also a workshop where I go right into the weeds about how it kind of DMT works in the brain, how it gates the flow of information, all that kind of stuff. And then after each of those, I think there's a question and answer session so people can answer. Yeah, so it's all pre-recorded apart from the question and answer session. (1:59:45)
So yeah, people do check that out. Yeah, do check that out. It's a huge event. And if you actually, when you buy your ticket, you have access to literally hundreds of lectures and you have to pay slightly extra for the workshops. But it's a big event and we're hoping that probably next year, Andrew and I will be there in the flesh, down in Southern California, discussing these items in detail. (2:00:07)
But by the sound of it, there's so many interesting things happening. Next year, we could have blown the lid off this. So it's going to be very, very exciting. But again, thank you everybody for listening in at an earlier show. And as usual, Sarah, thank you so much for your continued support on this, because without you, I couldn't be doing it. (2:00:27)
And it just be working so well. So everybody, thanks again. And I'm sorry, there's been a large amount of in-cons this week with two, one after the other, two in three days. But I think both of them have been absolutely excellent. (2:00:37)
And it really shows the direction that this podcast is now taking. We want to be the leading edge podcast. We want to be the ones that people are coming to, to really interface with people, great minds like Andrew Gallimore. Thanks everybody for listening in. And we will be in contact with you soon. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. (2:00:55)
(2024-12-28)