Greetings, filthy animals! This is Porco Dio. You're going to have a little bit of a diversion from your regularly scheduled thrashings of people for their ideology and have a little bit of personal you and me time. And we're going to talk about DMT.

Now, disclaimer - I don't recommend that anyone does anything illegal in your nation of residence. It can get you into a lot of trouble but, you know, if you don't give a fuck about laws, I'm not your man, don't blame me if you go to jail, alright? Cool. So, let's begin.

I'm not going to talk to you about what I've seen through the infuence of DMT or what the experience itself was like. As much as I'd like to try and put that into words, I don't think I'm able to and there are many accounts of it online already. I go into great detail on the nature of so-called 'hyperspace'.

If you want to know more about what DMT is, I'd say - Google it, there's lots of resources out there by far more learned and experience folks than little old me.

I'm not going to talk about these things as I feel they are highly subjective experiences, although the common themes and visions that present themselves, and are reported by multiple users, point me to presume either that there are incredible similarities in the way DMT is interpreted by the human brain regardless of that individuals background, education, experiences or beliefs, or that there exists a wondrously strange universe that exists and is currently outside the range of our experience, understanding or measurement, at least by this writer and anyone else as far as I'm aware.

I honestly don't know which is true, or if there necessarily is a true and false duality in play, or of course I could be missing the mark completely and just be goofing myself off! Who knows? It's for this reason, then, that I'd rather talk about the subjective truth of the effect of DMT on my own self and my life. I'd like to attempt to try and convey what changes I've noticed since smoking DMT for the first time, which by this point is some point in 2012.

Firstly, a little bit of background about the subject. I'm now thirty-six, male and British. I'm not a scientist or an ecologist or a philosopher. I've been a very average musician, a decent cook owing to several years working in kitchens pretending to be a chef. I'm reasonably well-read, although I will happily admit that the really high-brow stuff is a bit over my head. I've never read Proust or Dante's Inferno, though I think I might like it. I have been intelligent enough to have spent many years crippled with self-doubt, self-loathing, struggling with procrastination - I'm definitely still working on that one - and I've covered all of the above with a weird kind of show-off arrogance that led me to mess up jobs and relationships and is kind of embarrasing in hindsight. Oh, and I have in the past been beset by the nagging, creeping horror that I'm slowly turning into my father - your pretty standard set of neuroses and useless hangups, then. And working-class British, to boot. Blimey.

So, there's a rough sketch of my silly little life.

By the time I took DMT in late 2012 I had tried most of the common garden-variety party drugs, and of course the psychedelic oddness of psilocybin and LSD and Salvia, so I felt that I was fairly experienced in the places the brain goes - or at least my brain. I felt that I knew my mind, messed up place that it was - or is. There were some drugs that I like and some drugs that I liked less and the illegal status of these things never bothered me in the slightest, but of course there are ethical concerns with the so-called 'War on Drugs' regarding the criminal elements the drug trade attracts and the unpleasant means of production of drugs like cocaine, but those things I feel are a consequence of the prohibition as opposed to the drugs themselves. Suffice to say, I've tried a fair amount and never been arrested and never been beaten by evil, scary drug-dealers.

I'd heard and read a little about DMT and had a very vague idea of what it was. It seemed like a hard thing for people to describe. I asked friends who had tried it: "Is it like acid?" "No," they would say. "No - is it like mushrooms, then?" "No, well, not really," "Is it like Salvia, then?" "No." "So, what is DMT like?" "Dude," they'd say, "you're just gonna have to try it yourself!" so, I did and like I said at the top, I'm not going to tell you what happened on my first trip or any other. This isn't through any reticence on my part although you might consider me a bit of a crazy person if I did tell you (which I may well be) or even the desire to keep it private to myself. If we ever meet, I'll be more than happy to talk your ears off about the ins-and-outs of going into hyperspace.

I do feel, though, that the DMT experience is something that I can't prove to you so I feel that talking about this lucid dreaming state would be kind of redundant and a little bit boring. I can't show you empirically that it happened anywhere except inside my own head, and it may as well be therefore all a dream or a hallucination. I've hallucinated a lot under the influences of other substances and while there are some similarities, I don't feel that it was a hallucination on DMT. I can't say for sure. I have seen the words, now, 'reset' and 'cleanse' used when referring to the effect of DMT on the human mind and they're good words, better than what I could come up with initially on my own.

After my own DMT breakthrough, it felt like I had been mathematically cubed - me to the power of myself. I had access to new and incredible mental superpowers. That was a pretty cool conceit, but I think I was wrong and why I came to see 'reset' and 'cleanse' as far better descriptions of the effect than my clunky, mathematical analogy. The mental super powers I experienced were merely the euphoria of being released from an invisible chain around my throat and mind on the end of which I'd been carrying around three decades of fears, self-loathing, pain, shame, regrets and self-doubt, and there was a surprisingly large amount of all of them - far more than I had actually understood I had been bearing.

Imagine, then, the wonder that I felt to have trapped myself in an invisible cage of my own devising for all these years, self-sabotaging and making terrible decisions and grabbing onto the consequences of those decisions as a drowning man might grab an anchor when all hope is lost, feeling that I deserved them somehow, even the ones that I had eventually rationalised in my own head, like the childhood divorce of my birth parents and so on. I had been shown that the pain and suffering I'd caused others over the course of my life I believed I should then push up life's mountain like Sisyphus with his boulder in the underworld, waiting to reach the peak and then allow the weight of this guilt to drag me back down into oblivion - again and again. That any happiness at the peak should be punished. Pretty bleak, then, right?

Unlike some occasions with LSD, which to me is a magnification of what is in your mind already, DMT showed me these things without fear and with total objectivity - and then I was released. My release did not mean that I forgot about these things or trivialised them at all, or their causes, which is usually myself. In fact it was like I became more aware of these burdens and having become more aware of them - fully - instead of keeping them in them shadows of shame and in the blackness of the mind where I futilely hoped to hide them for all time from myself and everyone else, I was allowed to see them and allowed to let them go - cleansed and reset - absolved, you might say, if you were of a religious mind.

The sensation was very much one of, "You don't need these any more, there's nothing you can do about these things in the past - but you can alter your future and you won't do that if you're killing yourself with the past." It seems like I was also given a set of instructions for future conduct, which I have followed to the best of my abilities. Primarily amongst these instructions was to tell others about this healing experience, so - hi! Here it is!

In the months that passed since the first experience I have revisited DMT several times. It's not exactly a recreational experience. It's certainly not a party drug or anything of the sort. Naturally, with a substance as esoteric and wrapped in myth as DMT, I don't know what happened to me and many others like me.

DMT is not habit-forming - I feel no compulsion to go to that place again, which is not to say that I am not both excited and a little scared of what I have been shown and will be shown again. Some folks say it's like being enlightened but I can't say that I have been and then again I wouldn't know what enlightenment was. I would say, though, I have become more altruistic, kinder in mind and more confident about pursuing what I want. This essay, for example, is a direct consequence of the deciding that I would quit most of my regular pursuits to be a writer and in the two years since I wrote this original piece I have done so. It's something that I was toying with for years but never really gotten off my backside to do it and I believe that my success in this field has been a direct consequence of the DMT experience.

Now, do I sound like a crazy person yet? I'm not sure myself. I know that I was crazy prior to DMT without truly knowing it. Having what feels like a thousand years of counselling from alien beings that may or may not have been creations of my own mind, crammed into about ten minutes and then being popped out of the other side, I'm not sure if I'm crazy now but it is better, that's for sure.

Now, here's a thing that keeps me thinking: there are things that I experienced on DMT that feel so wildly real I feel sure that they cannot have come from my own mind. The logical part of me tells me that it is so, that it's a grand lucid dream with some funky hallucinations in it, that the entities I meet and interact with are creations of my own self, reflections of my subconscious that obviously have my best interests at heart, as we both have to ride around inside my body. But there's a kicker. I have known things that I could not possibly have known. I have seen things and been told things that I have never seen before and could not imagine and I am not unique by any stretch of the imagination. I am not some kind of DMT messiah - this is a common experience.

So, is it that our minds are so infinitely powerful that, with the introduction of a very small amount of a chemical derived from a plant that grows in the Amazon, we are able to create this entirely new reality, replete with aspects of ourselves possessed of incredible love and wisdom, able to witness the way that dimensions are put together even for the briefest amount of times, proving everything Huxley said in [the] Doors of Perception to be true - or is it something else? It feels like we physically go somewhere else - physically in this sense being your mind alone - your body stays quite motionless. Somewhen else, perhaps, and we are spoken to by something else. I don't know. I don't know if it's something that I'm even capable of understanding, but that's ok.

The upshot is that I'm generally agnostic about everything and I'm able to see points of view opposing to my own much more easily as I don't know anything myself. Is there a god? Did I speak to it? Is that not supreme arrogance? Is it all a head trip and we're just jerking off? I dunno. The one thing I do know is that it's totally ok not to know anything - it's the basis of Socratic thinking, after all. It makes everything interesting in the learning. The search for personal truth is something that I thought I was aiming for but, in hindsight, I couldn't begin the search as I did not know myself.

Subsequently forgiven by myself for myself - and if that isn't a product of Judaeo-christian culture I don't know what is - the search for subjective truth could finally begin. I have no regrets except that I was not found by this plant sooner in my life but then, maybe it found me when I was ready to listen.

Thanks for listening folks. [...]

But there is a kicker.

hey Porco Dio

downwardsfromzero, wow, how did you do that? Sentence by sentence? When we quick-scanned the text-block-entangle, One(1) thing got stuck in the outta-richness-of-the-corner-eye. It was:



a Kikker?

[..] there is also something else..