From a representative sample of a suitably psychedelic crowd, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who couldn’t tell you all about Albert Hofmann’s enchanted bicycle ride after wallowing what turned out to be a massive dose of LSD. The world’s first acid trip (Hofmann, 1980) has since become a cherished piece of psychedelic folklore. Far fewer, however, could tell you much about the world’s first DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine) trip. Although less memorable than Hofmann’s story, it was no less important. The folklore would come later and reveal itself to be far weirder than anyone could have predicted. A DMT trip is certainly one of the most bizarre experiences a human can undergo and, although six decades have passed since the very first DMT trip, the experience continues to confound and remains fertile ground for speculation regarding its significance and meaning…
Read More“All that glitters is not gold. Such a maxim might well serve any psychic voyager on a journey into the weirder realms that psychedelics can serve up. After all, out here on the edges there is seldom firm evidence that the beatific or hellish visions beheld whilst chemically neurohacking your wetware have any basis in consensus reality. Indeed these visions are often so extravagantly strange and terrifyingly ineffable that reminding yourself they are not real can serve to keep your sanity on a short leash when madness looms. Nevertheless, as John Lilly put it, how does one recognize one’s insanity from one’s out-sanity? And in any case, how would one even begin to try and prove the ontological credibility of the psychedelic experience of visiting some other world or meet-ing some alien entity?”
“When described by independent and seemingly naïve DMT participants the entities encountered tend to vary in detail but often belong to one of a very few similar types, with similar behavioural characteristics. For instance, mischievous shapeshifting elves, preying mantis alien brain surgeons and jewel-encrusted reptilian beings, who all seem to appear with baffling predictability. This opens up a wealth of questions as to the reality (i.e., the ontology) of these entities. The discussion of the phenomenology and ontology of these entities mixes research from parapsychology, ethnobotany and psychopharmacology – the fruits of science – with the foamy custard of folklore, anthropology, mythology, cultural studies and related disciplines…”
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