Actually breaking through to the other side
Omega-level operators speak about their time in ‘DMTx’ breakthrough states lasting hours as opposed to minutes
Mary Jacoob, ‘Divination of the Municipal Bank’
They told Dr Andrew Gallimore ‘It can’t be done. You’re mad.’
But as arguably the most far-out head in the space explained in he and Dr Rick ‘The Spirit Molecule’ Strassman’s proposal for extended voyages with intense visionary substance DMT, all you’d need is a regular target-controlled intravenous infusion kit. Like they use to administer general anaesthetic. Which you can buy off the Internet for £90.
Better still, get the interns at Imperial College Psychedelic Research Centre to whip up what’s colloquially become known as ‘The DMTx Machine’. And recruit some present-day explorers into the unknown to have a go on it first.
“It’s like bounding into the strongest moment of an ayahuasca session,” says Anton Bilton, founder of The Tyringham Initiative and backer of trials in extended DMT – ‘DMTx’ – experiences.
“This is a closer route to the mystery of our existence than sending rockets into space”
Eight intrepid psychonauts in total hooked up to titrated DMT drips under the expert eyes of Dr Robin Carharrt-Harris and team.
Pioneers from the hyperspace mission’s crew – Carl Hayden Smith, Jack Allocca, Alexander Beiner and Bilton himself – spoke about their courageous foray in a heavyweight forum hosted by Graham Hancock and DMTx’s inventors, Andrew Gallimore and Rick Strassman.
Psychedelic history hang in the air as Gallimore and The Strass witnessed their seemingly lunatic plans come to fruition, surprisingly smoothly.
It was only the day after his initial extended DMT voyage that I first met Dr Allocca, at the Breaking Convention conference in Whitechapel this time last year. He showed me photos.
“Can it help access the active intellect? The sum of all past, present and future knowledge?”
There he was with the brain scanner flashing away on his head, which looked visually appropriate at least. As did the chap playing a lute sat in the corner. The rest of the clinical testing room, ochre carpet and all, not so much. “I was literally being probed and scanned, like I was in a bad trip machine,” he relayed during an online debrief held this week.
I noted how healthy and insouciant he appeared, considering. Since, I’ve also noted he always appears healthy and insouciant – due to healthy psychonautic living, he says. At a talk by Dr Allocca I attended here in Shoreditch last month, he suggested that some DMTx crew members relished the experience more than others.
"We have to be careful not to create a biochemical Netflix”
Alloca, Bilton, Beiner and Carl Hayden-Smith – who went first, and spoke at length during Breaking Convention in Exeter – were certainly effusive on the call. Perhaps not in the manner of your average hyperspace debrief though – feelings of humility and gratitude, rather than stuff like the Library of Alexandria rushing past, provided a common thread in their trailblazing trip reports.
Props to Noonautics and Dr Gallimore for putting the panel together.
On preparing for DMTx
Carl Hayden-Smith: ”I treated it as a DMT church. For a month: no drugs, no caffeine… and no orgasms. That radically ramped up the intensity."
Jack Alloca: “I followed the psychonautic lifestyle that I always do. I haven’t even drank a cup of coffee for years. But being among first brings apprehension: ‘What am I doing to myself?’ I’d flown straight in and was really jet lagged.”
Anton Bilton: “I tried to bring a sense of sacredness that is important to me. Four to six weeks of no sex, no drugs, no alcohol, lots of meditation.”
On riding it out
Jack Alloca: “I’ve taken over 100 different psychedelic compounds. The body load can be strong during DMTx, I used controlled breathing to moderate that. My neuropharmacology knowledge assured me about toxicity.”
Alexander Beiner: “A entity told TerenceMcKenna ‘Don’t give way to amazement.’ I used attitudinal techniques like curiosity, then discernment, and a combination of concentration and mindfulness meditation, to attempt that.”
Lessons from the deep
Alexander Beiner: "The sophistication of the teaching was impeccable, with a crisp quality. It demonstrated the overlap between the metaphysical realm and how we show up, every day, as a human.”
Jack Alloca: “The message was of primal being, connected in nature. A beautiful pastoral environment with Dr Seuss style simian entities who were uninterested in my presence.”
Carl Hayden Smith: “‘Live well.’ Human life is precious and short. Life – brief, void – forever. ‘Entities’ obviously have a very different ontology.”
One small step for heads?
Anton Bilton: “My interest lies primarily in communicating with the sentient other. This is a closer route to the mystery of our existence than sending rockets into space.”
Jack Alloca: “I was able to savour a narrative about myself which isn’t usually possible with regular, shorter DMT trips. Real world lessons about responsibility. Although I did rush to the toilet while still breaking through at one point, which was the first time I’d moved around in the breakthrough state before.”
Carl Hayden Smith: “I was taken beyond the white room of the DMT space and was surprised to be shown there was more than one ‘oneness’… an infinite multiplicity of cosmic unions.”
Being sensible…
Carl Hayden Smith: “The human experience is vital and extremely important. Aldous Huxley warned about ‘living in a dreamworld’ and this tech could combine with AI to offer exactly that."
Jack Alloca: "We have to be careful not to create a biochemical Netflix. How can we understand what is useful and bring it back to the human experience, seamlessly and coherently and healthily?"
Okay now we can talk about entities
Carl Hayden Smith: “They benefit from our energy. There’s a mutual exchange. The MRI scanner first seemed to attract entities; they were intrigued by the notion of someone else doing the scanning. Second session in the MRI, there weren’t any. I think they were embarrassed they’d given the game away that I was immortal last time.”
Jack Alloca: “I have been privileged to see entities in spaces besides DMTx. My lucid dreams often feel more intense than DMT. Are we equipped to navigate hyperspace? Or are we simply devising a way to process the deluge of incoming information? Either way, we are faced by a very powerful modality.”
The Strass sums up
Rick Strassman: “Nobody’s mentioned endogenous DMT. What is the relationship between the concentrations of DMT used in our daily lives and a breakthrough dose? It’s especially in the frontal cortex; is it a reality thermostat? Is the purpose to keep us in a consensus range?”
“If DMT stimulates the imagination… can it access the active intellect? The sum of all past, present and future knowledge?”
“Less whimsical, and more on the practical or metaphysical side, grounding in the problems we are facing as individuals and societies.
“The set-up is not user-friendly. We can improve it with systems used for insulin, pumps that mean you’re not bed bound. Then we can look at operating in the 3D world while breaking through, quantified self approaches and interpersonal communication during the experience.”
Follow me on Twitter for live reports on the most mind-blowing talks
Strassman and Andrew Gallimore’s seemingly lunatic plans for a ‘DMaTrix’ have become reality. If you can still call it that.