I gave this lecture just a few days ago... presumed it might be of interest to many of you... thoughts welcome...

Part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_xb6-aKUjE

Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZnSJp2zsLY

This is excellent. You speak very well. Well done!

Thanks! It was well received. I was lucky to have Rupert Sheldrake in the audience and it was great to hear his recollections of smoking DMT with Terence McKenna afterwards...

that lecture was AWESOME!
thanks so much for posting it, and welcome to the nexus!!
looking forward to hearing more of your thoughts.

Thanks very much, glad you found it interesting...

Going for sure look at this!

This was fascinating! Thanks so much for sharing it!

This is certainly a very interesting lecture and has some development that I had not proviously considered regarding the concept of psychedelics as an important step in evolution. I think that DMT as a vestigial neurotransmitter is a very fascinating idea. I can certainly see how some of the 'inspiration' and radical thinking imposed by a DMT state could conceivably be an important stepping stone in the evolution of the psyche of modern man.

I, like some of the folks who enquired at the end of the video, am curious as to your thoughts on when such a trait may have become more vestigial and what might have triggered it. If it does provide such crucial insight and radical intellectual development, how would a burgeoning human society/environment in which success has largely been dependent on an ability to innovate be prohibitive to the further development of this mental system? Perhaps it is true that DMT production was a mutation based largely on evolution by chance and that our current state of dreaming and imagination is a more conservative version of this ideas mechanism which has been refined towards existence in this consensus reality.

I also found myself asking the question, "why did consensus reality win out?". If we had these two competing realities/systems present at some point in the past, why is it that we evolved with a preference toward cognizance of one reality vs. another?

Thanks a lot for sharing; all this is definitely interesting to think about, and as with most things DMT-related, I find that more and more thought means more and more questions!

I think it may be human stupidity that drove us to think this world is real. It's a cognitive disorder to focus plainly on consensus reality and ultimately it's been our thoughts/focus who stops us from being just as lucid in both worlds.

I also think that fortunately there are heaps of people who still got it or learn to lucid dream all on their own. This goes to show we can all reconnect so to speak and nothing is permanent.

Very nice presentation, Sir; I found the first part in particular to be really good.

IME, there seems to be a 'window' in which the breakthrough, with all that it entails, is made apparent to the DMT user; this is a usually a function of dose and rate of administration.Push the dose beyond this and the experience becomes qualitatively different and much more disordered/erratic/troubling.

The breakthrough with entities etc is akin to being subjectively transported to another reality which completely replaces the normal state, but this seems to break down at higher doses (45+ mg, IME).Not for the faint-hearted, and certainly not something that needs repeating often.At these levels Ive found that the experiential field becomes distinctly separated with a part retaining the flavor of the breakthrough, and other parts going beyond patterns and entities to reveal a medley of images which are essentially like the normal state.A bit like a HD film played too fast interspersed with flashes akin to a strobe-like effect with each lighting revealing a view which is unrelated to the flash before.And the bizarre thing IME is that each view is like a photograph ie that clear and 'non-psychedelic'.

To be honest, Ive no idea what to make of it.

"A bit like a HD film played too fast interspersed with flashes akin to a strobe-like effect with each lighting revealing a view which is unrelated to the flash before.And the bizarre thing IME is that each view is like a photograph ie that clear and 'non-psychedelic'."

Wholy crap dude..I have never heard anyone else describe this but I have experienced something like that a couple times on large doses where I overshot a little bit..it was confusing and almost like a a dream in how mundane these really quick picture like images were.

This is essentially what I think. I am not 100% convinced that the pineal gland is/was the site of DMT secretion, largely because the pharmacological peculiarities of DMT suggest it acted as a true neuromodulator (i.e. packed into synaptic vesicles and released by volume transmission in an analogous way to serotonin), rather than a hormone. However, it is enticing to note that melatonin is a tryptamine and thus relatively few mutations could have resulted in the abolition of DMT secretion and the initiation melatonin secretion, which somehow served to cement us more firmly in this reality, perhaps by improving the sleep state. This seems unlikely though, as melatonin seems to be a feature of mammals generally, rather than a purely human trait. I do think that some sort of decline in neural function might be to blame for the loss of DMT secretion. I have noticed in the last few years more and more individuals discussing the idea that humans have in some ways regressed neurologically in the last 50,000 years. This might explain why DMT is no longer secreted in psychedelic concentrations. However, it would retain it's ability, although perhaps with less fidelity, to shift the brain rapidly into the alien-reality-building mode.

Thanks for your comments. I think that it is understandable that there will be an optimal concentration in the brain that most closely reflects the ancestral endogenous levels. Undershooting to overshooting this might cause a breakdown of the connectivity patterns and cause disintegration of the state, resulting in a more erratic experience. It is important to note that when smoking DMT you are actually mixing two very powerful psychedelic drugs, serotonin and DMT - if DMT was an ancestral neuromodulator, my diurnal cycling model suggests it would be secreted when serotonin levels were very low (i.e. REM sleep). So, if you want a pure DMT flash, one might plug oneself into an EEG and have an assistant administer DMT BY IV at the point at which you enter REM sleep... now there's an idea...

great lecture , some excellent solid information mixed with some great provocative concepts.

I resonate with the concept of it being an old thing thats been around perhaps before people .
IN fact I received a message once from it when I was face to face with it . I asked what it was, the message I got was : TIme before people

I never forgot that moment.

thank you for your work

I can honestly say that undershooting has never been as erratic, for me, as the experiences I allude to.

And Jamie, Im really glad someone knows what Im gibbering on about.You used the word mundane and that is so apt!!

I think I may be on the same page as well. There are some experiences where I see certain things, mundane things, and I wonder what in the hell could they be doing "there". For example, I've seen a child's bedroom on multiple occasions. There are children's books on the shelves (don't ask me how I know they're children books) of a bookcase with toys like plastic ducks and cars strewn on the floor, and a bed by a window. The bed has pillows and a fluffy comforter and looks well-made. There's definitely that HD clarity component to it as well where it's just laid before you as plain as day.

I can also relate to things breaking down at very high doses. This usually happens to me when I smoke DMT at the peak of an ayahuasca experience where all logic and order break down and it's just a tornado of glitching and chaos.

Great presentation laughingcat, I hope you continue to share your research with us.

And corpus callosum; you have just hit it out of the park for me with your description:

"A bit like a HD film played too fast interspersed with flashes akin to a strobe-like effect with each lighting revealing a view which is unrelated to the flash before..."

I could not even begin to fathom a description of this state, as you have just so eloquently done!

I appreciate all of your positive comments... there is a 25+ page paper that the lecture was based on... all going well, this will be published shortly and I will be sure to post here with details... trying to get all the information into a condensed 20 minute lecture was always going to be a challenge - I hope you all managed to make sense of it! I agree that we are only scratching the surface of the depths of the DMT experience... Having spoken to Rupert Sheldrake on the issue, I am looking to carry out a more formal phenomenological study of the DMT experience, as I think it would be interesting and extremely informative to examine parallels in the experience between individuals. Rick Strassman feels that similarities in experiences (i.e. hypertechnological advanced intelligences) suggest an extrinsic component outside of the human brain. I lean in that direction but need to look at this more formally. It would be interesting to see how experiences differ between racial groups, especially between those living in advanced western societies and those not. There are inherent difficulties in this of course, as the study would most easily be carried out online, but this of course biases the study towards people with computers and access to the internet (i.e. westerners). I'd be interested in whether any of you think that our technological society and exposure to ideas about alien visitors influences the appearance of hypertechnological advanced intelligences in the DMT world - trip reports containing alien intelligences living in hypertechnological cities are extremely enticing... in my experience, the level of intelligence and advancement in the DMT world seems impossible to ignore and is extremely compelling, although it is often hard for me to describe in words - I just get the impression that these beings are EXTREMELY powerful and intelligent....

It is very interesting. Something to note is that let's say a person in a "primitive" society with no technological ties to the Western world smokes DMT. Part of the conundrum in ascertaining what they experienced is that they are likely to be lacking in the specific vocabulary to properly describe what it is that they saw. What we describe as "hypertechnological", they may describe another way or may simply be as ineffable to talk about as some other elements of the experience are for us to due to our own lacking in descriptive words that pertain to the experience.

Now having said that, I would venture that such a person would in fact behold the hypertechnological visions that we have. I've had a handful of experiences in which I witnessed mythological scenes being played out with information (via the visions themselves) that I could not have had access to from prior experience, and was able to validate afterward. I will include two of them below. It often occurs that we encounter bizarrely unique elements of the experience of which we were completely unaware were possible within the experience, yet that others have experienced as well.

Symbolic Egyptian Solstice Experience

Eerie Integration

Your comments are extremely interesting. I agree that a particularly difficult issue when comparing experiences from people of different cultures is that a "primitive" culture may not have the vocabulary to describe what we would call "hypertechnological" - perhaps even our word for it is somewhat lacking... they might certainly describe it differently...

"It's interesting and gratifying to think that in some of these experiences, we may actually be living out or witnessing a representation of age-old ancient mythology." Your experience with the beings playing catch is notable, as is your interpretation of it... if DMT is indeed an ancestral neuromodulator, as I suggested in the lecture, then it is feasible that these ancient mythologies may have their roots in endogenous DMT secretion and thus, just as you suggested, it is perhaps unsurprising that similar visions are seen by modern DMT smokers...