Terence McKenna – DMT Revelations, Hypothesis, and Experiences (Video)

Terence McKenna - DMT Revelations, Hypothesis, and Experiences (Video) | Third Monk image 1

Terence Mckenna – DMT Revelations, Usage and Experiences


Terence McKenna describes a method to getting the most out of your DMT experience along with an anecdotal composite of over 40 of his DMT trips.

 

Terence Mckenna – DMT Hypothesis

Okay hypothesis one, DMT is not a drug, it is an extraterrestrial communication device. These are creatures somewhere in the universe who are so different from us that they come to us not in starships the size of Manhattan but in drug molecules that are dinky. So we are in contact here with some kind of extraterrestrial technology and these are true aliens of some sort. And God knows the weirdness of the situation supports the hypothesis.

Okay second hypothesis. There is a parallel universe, unsuspected by most human beings. It’s right here, all the time. It’s inhabited. These things have their own hopes, fears, problems, so forth. And somehow this drug just erases this boundary and then you find yourself in the elf nest.

Next hypothesis. These things, because they have great affection for me, because they seem intent on the task of communicating, perhaps they are human beings from the distant future. Perhaps this is what we are fated to become. You know, there’s always, since we were kids, the cliché ‘beings of pure energy’. Well it’s always been a little hard to wrap your mind around what that would look like, but, low and behold here appear to be creatures of pure energy. But there are a lot of problems with hypothesizing a future human technological breakthrough which would allow them to actually manipulate the past. Logical paradoxes and that sort of thing.

Well so then here’s another possibility. They are human beings. But they are not in the future in the ordinary sense or in the past. They are in the pre-natal and post-life phase. In other words these are either the unborn waiting in some limbo like dimension to descend into matter. Or they are in fact people who have had a sojourn in the domain of organic existence, and now have moved on. Let me not kid you, we’re talking about dead people here in that case. Well if you go to the shamans who access these places through Ayahuasca or the Virola snuffs or something like that. They will say ‘Well these are our ancestors. Didn’t you read Mircea Eliade. Don’t you know that shamanism works through ancestor magic?’ Well “ancestor” is a tremendously sanitized term for “dead people”. And if what is actually happening here, is that the much argued about soul is actually made visible by this pharmacological strategy… I mean god knows why, but god knows why anything else is the way it is…. Then this is truly big new. This is the confounding of rationalism. If what is happening is that by pushing the frontiers of pharmacology we discover a way to even momentarily and temporarily erase the boundary between the living and the dead, then this is a 180 degree turn on the evolution of culture that not even the most technically infatuated among us are prepared to assimilate. And over time, I’ve sort of come to incline to the idea that this is what is in fact going on. And the reason it’s so hard to bring anything out of the DMT flash is because at the center of the flash you find out something so unexpected, so appalling, and so existentially convincing in the moment of confronting it, that you simply immediately block it out and obliterate it.

Terence McKenna – DMT Vs. 5-MEO-DMT

This clip is taken from a talk titled “The Ethnobotany of Shamanism -Part 5” Podcast 191. In this clip Terence gives us his take on the difference between 5-MeO-DMT and nnDMT and his preference for nnDMT.

Some people do not prefer 5-MeO-DMT, I imagine this has to do with the ego death aspect of it…but the potential of both in a spiritual symbiosis may be exactly what the shaman ordered.

From Terence Mckenna Food of The Gods

“The DMT Experience”


What can be said of DMT as an experience and in relation to our own spiritual emptiness? Does it offer us answers? Do the short-acting tryptamines offer an analogy to the ecstasy of the partnership society before Eden became a memory? And if they do, then what can we say about it?

What has impressed me repeatedly during my many glimpses into the world of the hallucinogenic indoles, and what seems generally to have escaped comment, is the transformation of narrative and language. The experience that engulfs one’s entire being as one slips beneath the surface of the DMT ecstasy feels like the penetration of a membrane. The mind and the self literally unfold before one’s eyes. There is a sense that one is made new, yet unchanged, as if one were made of gold and had just been recast in the furnace of one’s birth. Breathing is normal, heartbeat steady, the mind clear and observing. But what of the world? What of incoming sensory data?

Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian labyrinth, a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience. There is a sense of other times, and of one’s own infancy, and of wonder, wonder and more wonder. It is an audience with the alien nuncio. In the midst of this experience, apparently at the end of human history, guarding gates that seem surely to open on the howling maelstrom of the unspeakable emptiness between the stars, is the Aeon.

The Aeon, as Heraclitus presciently observed, is a child at play with colored balls. Many diminutive beings are present there — the tykes, the self-transforming machine elves of hyperspace. Are they the children destined to be father to the man? One has the impression of entering into an ecology of souls that lies beyond the portals of what we naively call death. I do not know. Are they the synesthetic embodiment of ourselves as the Other, or of the Other as ourselves? Are they the elves lost to us since the fading of the magic light of childhood? Here is a tremendum barely to be told, an epiphany beyond our wildest dreams. Here is the realm of that which is stranger than we can suppose. Here is the mystery, alive, unscathed, still as new for us as when our ancestors lived it fifteen thousand summers ago. The tryptamine entities offer the gift of new language, they sing in pearly voices that rain down as colored petals and flow through the air like hot metal to become toys and such gifts as gods would give their children. The sense of emotional connection is terrifying and intense. The Mysteries revealed are real and if ever fully told will leave no stone upon another in the small world we have gone so ill in.

This is not the mercurial world of the UFO, to be invoked from lonely hilltops; this is not the siren song of lost Atlantis wailing through the trailer courts of crack-crazed America. DMT is not one of our irrational illusions. What we experience in the presence of DMT is real news. It is a nearby dimension — frightening, transformative, and beyond our powers to imagine, and yet to be explored in the usual way. We must send fearless experts, whatever that may come to mean, to explore and to report on what they find.

The Beatles – Strawberry Fields Forever (KJ Song Rec)

The Beatles - Strawberry Fields Forever (KJ Song Rec) | Third Monk

The Beatles – Strawberry Fields Forever
Album: A-Side Single of “Penny Lane”

“Strawberry Fields Forever” was inspired by Lennon’s memories of playing in the garden of a Salvation Army house named “Strawberry Field” near his childhood home. It is one of the defining works of the psychedelic rock genre and has been covered by many artists.

I was different all my life. The second verse goes, ‘No one I think is in my tree.’ Well, I was too shy and self-doubting. Nobody seems to be as hip as me is what I was saying. Therefore, I must be crazy or a genius—’I mean it must be high or low‘ “, and explaining that the song was “psycho-analysis set to music – John Lennon

The Beatles – Strawberry Fields Forever (Cartoon Version)

Terence McKenna – Return to Our Stoned Shaman Core of Mystery and Imagination (Video)

Terence McKenna - Return to Our Stoned Shaman Core of Mystery and Imagination (Video) | Third Monk

Terence McKenna talks about the diseases of modern society, the archaic revival, the psychedelic mystery, culture and transformation from the question and answer session of his lecture entitled ‘Eros And The Eschaton’.

The idea there is that we have gone sick by following a path of untrammelled rationalism, male dominance, attention to the visible surface of things, practicality, bottom-line-ism. We have gone very, very sick. And the body politic, like any body, when it feels itself to be sick, it begins to produce antibodies, or strategies for overcoming the condition of disease. And the 20th century is an enormous effort at self-healing. Phenomena as diverse as surrealism, body piercing, psychedelic drug use, sexual permissiveness, jazz, experimental dance, rave culture, tattooing, the list is endless.

I applaud all of this; because it’s an impulse to return to what is felt by the body – what is authentic, what is archaic – and when you tease apart these archaic impulses, at the very centre of all these impulses is the desire to return to a world of magical empowerment of feeling. And at the centre of that impulse is the shaman: stoned, intoxicated on plants, speaking with the spirit helpers, dancing in the moonlight, and vivifying and invoking a world of conscious, living mystery. That’s what the world is.

Vice – World’s Scariest Drug, Scopolamine “The Devil’s Breath” (Video)

Vice - World's Scariest Drug, Scopolamine "The Devil's Breath" (Video)  | Third Monk

VICE’s Ryan Duffy went to Colombia to check out a strange and powerful drug called Scopolamine, also known as “The Devil’s Breath.” It’s a substance so intense that it renders a person incapable of exercising free will.

The first few days in the country were a harrowing montage of freaked-out dealers and unimaginable horror stories about Scopolamine. After meeting only a few people with firsthand experience, the story took a far darker turn than we ever could have imagined. vice-world-scariest-drug-Scopolamine-devils-breath

Joe Rogan – The Mind in a Sensory Deprivation Tank (Video)

Joe Rogan - The Mind in a Sensory Deprivation Tank (Video) | Third Monk

Joe Rogan speaks on what the mind goes through in a sensory deprivation tank and the awesome potential you can achieve with one.

The first 20 minutes for me at least is sort of like a seminar on my life. It shows me all that the different issues in my life that I don’t like and that I need to fix, things that are bothering me, things about my own behavior that could have been better, and things where I disappointed myself

Then it will show me some things where I’m on the right track, this is good, continue here, continue doing this, continue thinking like this, continuing explore these ideas but then once it gets ME done, it’s like let’s clear all this bullshit in your life, let’s think about the big picture.

And then it’s pure thought, it’s like the mind completely untethered from the body and then I start contemplating everything, I start contemplating the universe, the role of human beings and each individual’s actions all accumulating to one specific event, I start thinking all kinds of crazy shit but without the body in the way.

Check out Intro to the Isolation Tank (Floatation Sensory Deprivation) for our post on the development of the tank and how you can try out the experience.

Graham Hancock – It’s Not A War On Drugs, It’s A War On Consciousness (Video)

Graham Hancock - It's Not A War On Drugs, It's A War On Consciousness (Video) | Third Monk

Graham Hancock: Western culture has criminalized and demonized all experiences involving altered states of consciousness and any substances that put us into an altered state of consciousness. And this is clearly a war over consciousness that’s going on.

It’s clear that our societies have an investment in preventing us from exploring where altered states of consciousness will lead us. Perhaps there is a deep fear that if we do explore those altered state of consciousness, we will not accept the power structures and the fairytale illusion of material wealth that we’re all brought up to pursue as though that’s the only thing to existence.

If I, as an individual, am not sovereign over my consciousness, if I cannot decide what to do with my consciousness, which is the heart of my being, then I am not free, and I need not talk about freedom or living in a free society, or such issues as democracy, if my society will not allow me to explore my consciousness. If, in an altered state of consciousness, my behavior is disruptive in the public arena, then that behavior  should rightly be controlled by society. But the personal and private exploration of our own consciousness  is our own business, in my view, and is not the business of the State.

Graham-Hancock-war-consciousness

Dock Ellis Throws a Baseball No Hitter Under LSD, Acid (Video)

Dock Ellis Throws a Baseball No Hitter Under LSD, Acid (Video) | Third Monk

In celebration of the greatest athletic achievement by a man on a psychedelic journey, No Mas and artist James Blagden proudly present the animated tale of Dock Ellis’ legendary LSD no-hitter.  Of the 263 no-hitters ever thrown in the Big Leagues, we can only guess how many were aided by steroids, but we can say without question that only one was ever thrown on acid.

A year before the great Dock Ellis died, radio producers Donnell Alexander and Neille Ilel, had recorded an interview with Ellis in which the former Pirate right hander gave a moment by moment account of June 12, 1970, the day he no-hit the San Diego Padres.

Reindeers Crave Magic Mushrooms (Video)

Reindeers Crave Magic Mushrooms (Video) | Third Monk

In this clip from BBC’s wildlife show Weird Nature, learn more about the reindeer appetite for magic mushrooms, and perhaps discover a little more about the origins of Santa’s flying companions. Researchers believe reindeer deliberately seek out the shrooms to escape the monotony of dreary long winters. “They have a desire to experience altered states of consciousness.

Bill Maher On Creativity and Psychedelics (Video)

Bill Maher On Creativity and Psychedelics (Video) | Third Monk

Adderall is the drug of choice these days on campus. Oh, what fun. I don’t know what I would enjoy more, the extremely focused parties or the highly detail oriented sex. But here’s the thing, when Steve Jobs was young, the drug of choice was acid and Jobs told his biographer that dropping acid as a young man was one of the best things he ever did because when he took it with his girlfriend, the wheat field started playing Bach. Which is pretty unbelievable – a computer nerd had a girlfriend?

Now, maybe there’s not a connection between LSD and genius, but it’s something no great American ever said about a Kit-Kat bar. If it weren’t for acid, you might not have an iPod and you definitely wouldn’t have some of the best music in your iPod. Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA while on acid. The Beatles made “Sergeant Pepper” while on acid.

And it’s not just anecdotal. In a study from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine last month, scientists found that a single dose of psilocybin, which is the drug in mushrooms, created a quote “long-term positive personality change in most patients.” People improved in the areas of sensitivity, imagination, and broad-minded tolerance of others. In pharmaceutical speak, psilocybin is known as an asshole inhibitor. And couldn’t we use a little more of that?

Intro to the Isolation Tank (Floatation Sensory Deprivation)

Intro to the Isolation Tank (Floatation Sensory Deprivation) | Third Monk image 5

The sensory deprivation tank — a temperature-regulated, salt-water filled, soundproof, lightproof tank that can isolate its occupant from numerous forms of sensory input all at once — has gone by many names over the years, but its overall design and purpose have remained largely unchanged: to find out what your brain does when it’s shoved into a box all by itself and left alone for a while.

 

Just Your Mind, All Senses Gone

Inside the tank there is no light, and therefore no sense of vision. You experience the kind of quiet that allows you to hear your muscles tense, your heart beat, and your eyelids close. The extreme buoyancy of the water lends your environment an almost zero-gravity quality. The lack of a temperature differential plays with your ability to perceive where your body ends and where the water and air begin.

 

John C. Lilly, Developer of the Isolation Tank

While John C. Lilly is certainly well known for developing the world’s first isolation tank, he was by no means a stranger to revolutionary, albeit sometimes strange and uncharted, areas of medical and scientific innovation.Lilly was a pioneer in the field of electronic brain stimulation. He was the first person to map pain and pleasure pathways in the brain. He founded an entire branch of science exploring interspecies communication between humans, dolphins, and whales; conducted extensive experimentation with mind-altering drugs like LSD  and spent prolonged periods of time exploring the nature of human consciousness in the isolation tank.

 

Experiences in the Tank

Lilly claimed that the sensory deprivation tank allowed him to make contact with creatures from other dimensions, and civilizations far more advanced than our own. He would forever refer to his very first encounter with entities from another dimension as “the first conference of three beings,” the details of which are recounted in great detail on Lilly’s website. Lilly’s, however, is an experience that others who use tanks have rarely reported.

By comparison, characterizations of sensory deprivation like this one by comedian Joe Rogan begin to sound downright grounded — and Rogan’s descriptions of hallucinations, heightened levels of introspection, and the sensation that the mind has left the body are actually among the most commonly reported experiences among tank users. Even renowned physicist Richard Feynman described having hallucinations and out-of-body experiences while using sensory deprivation chambers.

Reports of a heightened sense of introspection and out-of-body experiences by tank users mirror those of people with extensive experience in meditation, and both practices have been linked to decreased alpha waves and increased theta waves in the brain — patterns most typically found in sleeping states.

 

When, Where To Try The Tank

You might think that you can just get into the tank and have a psychedelic trip right away, but it doesn’t work like that. Absolutely nothing might happen the first time. If you are interested in using the tank, practice meditating first. Meditation helps you develop that habit of “letting go”. If you can’t free your mind, your tank experience may be boring as you’ll just be floating with impatience and anxiety.

Depending on your proclivity for psychoactive drug use, sensory deprivation tanks can offer anything from a means to achieving relaxation and reflection to a vehicle that can aid you in your travels through time and space. And if you should feel the itch to explore what sensory deprivation might be able to offer you, you can seek out nearby tank centers over at Float Finder.

> Guide to Isolation Tanks | io9