Hey has anybody read Daniel Pinchbeck's DPT trip report from breaking open the head? It sounds like some kind of demonic rollercoaster ride into some manevolent realm, this stuff is pretty similiar to DMT structurally but the experience seems way different, here's the trip in question: I met Dave in Palenque. He had started a company selling experimental research chemicals that were labeled not for human consumption, although most of them could be found in the back pages of Sasha Shulgins books. Sitting by the pool one day, I heard Dave tell how he had studied to be a priest but dropped out to become a professional masseur. By some circuitous routea typical tangled American odysseyhe made his way from the Miami Beach yacht scene to psychedelics and the cutting edge of mind-expansion. In Palenque, Dave invited me to join his private research group, giving me free and low-priced introductions to some new chemicals, as well as his regular catalog of little-known and unscheduled compounds. (Fearing intensified government surveillance, he would close his company the day after the September 11 terrorist attacks, even though his business was not clearly illegal.) Back in New York, I ordered a few things from his catalog. They came to my home in plain envelopes labeled with intimidating chemical names. For $125, I bought one gram of a yellowish powder called DPT, dipropyltryptamine, a chemical cousin of DMT, substituting propyl for methyl. Propyl and methyl are simple carbon compounds, two of the building blocks of organic matter. There is, for example, methyl alcohol, wood alcohol, and propyl alcohol, rubbing alcohol. In gas form, there is propane and methane. The tryptamine molecule is the building block of many neurotransmitters, and of many psychoactive compounds. Serotonin is is a tryptamine. As far as I can ascertain, DPT, unlike DMT, does not occur in nature, which means it did not exist until it was synthesized in a laboratory a few decades ago. While DMT, an endogenous chemical inside the body, is recognized by MAO enzymes and immediately neutralized, DPT, a new concoction, is not. Therefore it crosses the blood-brain barrier through direct sniffing or swallowing. But the most astonishing aspect of the two chemicals is that, despite their similarity, they reveal completely different worlds. Why is this the case? In Shulgins book and on the Internet I found accounts of DPT trips. Some described the effects as terrifying: The whole universe falls apart, all colors in electrik air whirlpool into a mandala, eaten up forever. Thats it, the worlds over. Others felt, after smoking the drug, they entered, for the first time, the clear light of God. Another report was more narrative: I was being led by a wise old man who I know was God. . . . I was handed a Torah for me to carry as a sign that I had been accepted, and forgiven, and come home. Shulgin also mentioned a church in New York, Temple of the True Inner Light, which uses DPT as its sacrament. Clearly DPT was a serious mind-warper. I put the slim envelope of powder in the refrigerator, where it sat for months. am often caught between a desire for new and intense altered states and anxiety. When you pass through a doorway to what may actually be a different dimension, there is no guarantee that you will emerge as exactly the same person you were before. After your first serious LSD or mushroom or DMT trip, you really are never quite the sameyou have been given an alternate perspective on your psyche, you have been relativized. You may spend the rest of your life suppressing the memory, but it is still there inside of you. After DPT, I understood what Don Juan told Castaneda: We are men and our lot is to learn and to be hurled into inconceivable new worlds. Psychedelics are catalysts for transformation, and when you take them, you have to be ready to transform. Our society seems to be changing rapidly, but the psychedelic realms move with a tremendous velocity. They make the achievements of our present-day technology seem tragically antique. While these chemicals should not be demonized or trivialized, they also cannot be reduced to therapeutic tools. They are more powerful than our categories. Someday, they may help us establish a science of the spirit. At the moment, all we can say is that they should be treated with tremendous respect. It is good to be scientifically precise about dosages and reaction times, to know, as best as you can, what the chemical will do to you, and why you are taking it. Because I didnt know exactly what DPT was, or what I wanted from it, I bought it and then sheepishly left it alone. My cautious resistence to the DPT lure continued until one night, after a party. For the first time in months I was drunk. I was with two old friends, twin brothers, who were eager to try the DPT in my fridge. We each snorted a line, and for me it was an interesting disaster. I was both drunk and tripping. On the one hand, the world was a woozy mess; on the other hand, I was seeing it with a razor-edge precision and in the most vibrant colors. When I closed my eyes, I saw muticolored three-dimensional triangles rotating in deep space. I realized later that I had foolishly used alcohol to overcome my fear of DPT the way I used to drink for the courage to talk to girls at bars. I didnt like DPT. The DPT realm seemed icy, annihilating. I told my friends over and over again, This is evil. This is not to be explored. This is the wrong doorway. In retrospect, I dont think I was exploring the DPT realm on that trip. I think, instead, the DPT realm was beginning its exploration of me. Because this is a story not just about chemicals but about occult correspondences and psychic events, I will note that later that night we went out to a bar and started talking to the people next to us. For some reason I talked about the end times and 2012, the Hopi and Mayan prophecies. One of our neighbors described a vivid dream she had when she was a teenager that had stayed with her ever since: I was in a spaceship full of people. We were lifting off from Earth. I looked back at the Earth and there was brown crust where the land had been. We shot into space and went a long way. Then an angel appeared to us. He said that God had decided to rejuvenate the Earth, even though we had ruined it. He was going to start again, do it all over from scratch. For the time being we were going to have to wait in limbo. And he pointed to a vast gray space where many people were already waiting. We had to leave the spaceship to go there. It was another few months before I tried DPT again. In the meantime, another new friend from Palenque accepted my invitation and came to New York. This was Charity the fire dancer. Twenty-four years old, skilled at Tarot and ceremonial magic, a professional stripper, she was the fearless and pixielike embodiment of the new culture I had found at Burning Man. In Mexico, I told her I could find her a free place to stay in New York, and she hitchhiked all the way from Palenque with her cat, Prometheus, catching rides from truckers at truck stops. Unlike me, Charity had no fear of new psychedelics. She kept a list of all the drugs she had tried, and the number was up to forty-three. I told her I had this DPT stuff around, and of course she wanted to try it. Charity and I took DPT at my house one nightonce again, I had to overcome an intense initial reluctance. Finally I put some of the yellowish powder into a pill and swallowed it, but got no effect. She sniffed a line, and almost instantly went into a trance. When her trip was over, she told me I had to try sniffing it. She had seen incredible things. Sometimes, when you trip, it seems that all of the psychic matter, swirling around in the hours and days beforehand, gathers together, like particles galvanized by a magnet, and pushes the journey in a certain direction. These influences can seem like the karmic trace of some larger pattern or subconscious intention. Earlier that night Charity had told me about the psychic vampires who roamed the streets of San Francisco, some of them homeless hippies, who would pick up vibrations from strangers, talk to them, and suck their energy away. I laughed at this. We also talked about the books of Zecharia Sitchin, whose scholarly research convinced him that a race of extraterrestrial giants had created human beings, long ago, to serve them as slavesa variation on the concept of the Archons from Gnosticism. According to Sitchin, the magnificent cruelty of the alien race that created us was beyond our imagining. Charity cut two big lines of the DPT on the table, and I snorted one. The powder burned my nasal passages. Bitter residue dripped down the back of my throat. I stretched out on the couch. I closed my eyes and entered the DPT realm. We were listening to moody techno music. With each change in beat, with each skitter of sampled noise, I saw a brand-new and extremely detailed demonic realm swirl before me in cobalt, scarlet, purple gossamer hues. At moments there seemed to be some incredibly elegant yet violently orgiastic party taking place with beautiful females in evening gowns and men in Edwardian topcoats in the spacious parlors of a huge and opulent mansion. At other times there seemed to be bat or butterfly-winged creatureslong and quivering antennaes, velvet coats and emerald eyes, stiletto talonsrising into otherworldly skies, wandering futuristic cities. I I had an impression of tremendous vanity. I was being used as a mirror for the DPT beings to admire themselves. But their realm was far beyond what can be expressed in ordinary language in its speed of transmutation, its shivering quicksilver beauty. The worlds revealed were like endless facets of a twirling diamondI felt the real possibility of being trapped inside any of those facets, a kind of soul-prison, for eternity. That was the terror of it. As with smoking Salvia, I had the sense that some part of me had always been stuck in this Gothic DPT prison, trapped there eternally. I somehow understood that this was not my first visit, nor my last. For a flicker of forever, I was imprisoned in a postmodern bar surrounded by gleaming mirrors with a hyperslick lounge lizard wearing a white mohawk and synthetic fabrics. He was sitting at the bar, drinking a highball. There were no doors or windows in this room, no escape possible. The graphics of this vision were high-res and hyperperfect. Other shards of the DPT realm shared this sci-fi quality. DPT was a postmodern demonic MTV psychedelic. The sleek, rhythmical mesh of the music seemed woven into the lurid fabric of the darkness, the revelation of sinister forces coming to life behind my eyelids. Like DMT, the level of visual organization of the DPT realm was far beyond anything that the synaptical wiring of my brain could createit was, in its own peacock-feathery way, not just as real as this reality, but far more real, crackling with power. I felt from the entities exploring my mind a kind of contempt, a disdain for human beings trapped in our pitifully unsophisticated domain, our meat realm. They seemed somewhere between bemused and enraged that we had trespassed. In shamanic cultures, the taking of entheogenic substances is always surrounded by ritual. A circle of protection is created, the four directions invoked, the spirits asked for their blessing through an offering of tobacco and prayer. Because we were sniffing a chemical powder in a modern New York apartment, a chemical without a long history of human use, it didnt even occur to us to take such precautions. I was jealous of Charity because she managed to get to the kitchen sink and throw up. She vomited four or five times in a rowlater she said she saw a male entity in the sink with a kind of device or machine that he was using to soak up the energy she was expulsing, jeering at her as he did it. The demon told her his name but she couldnt recall it. I couldnt throw up. I suspected that I had finally, and completely, managed to destroy myself. I was convinced I would never recover from this onslaught. I staggered to the CD player and changed the music to Bach, which helped a little. With my eyes opened, transformational energy seemed to be crawling over everything, flickering and receding like waves of sentient powervampiric electricity. My hands looked and felt like claws made out of wires. When I opened my eyes on ayahuasca, I also felt and saw energy passing like a wave form, but it was more human somehow. Here the speed of the waves was much faster and more brutal than the yag flares. The experience was unmammalian, futuristic, inhuman. Not only was it suddenly obvious that there was such a thing as a soul, it was also clear that I was in danger of losing mine permanently. I somehow understood that the DPT realm had evolved over an incredibly long periodmillions of years, if time has the same kind of meaning to its inhabitants as it does to us. I realized there are diabolical hierarchies, secret cabals, vast libraries of wickedness to be studied over millennia. It was obvious that we little human beings have absolutely no idea what is going on in the cosmos. The word baroque doesnt even begin to describe the jaded emptiness and sublime beauty of that evanescent empire. A little bit like soft candle-flimmer worlds one sees on hash and opium, but etched in perfect solid-state realitymore than photographic. The sleekness of the DPT dimension was beyond belief. About half an hour into the trip, past three A.M., I called my friend Tony. This is total magic, total sorcery. I am watching endless Gothic demon universes mirroring each other, I babbled. If someone could be at home here, learn to control things here, they could gain such power they could just walk right through the walls of the White House, do anything, but it wouldnt matter, because they would already be part of such an ancient conspiracy. I had begun to pace around the house, and as I paced, I found that I was moving my arms in the air, making passes like the shamanic gestures described in Castanedas work. These gestures came to me intuitively. They helped control the overwhelming sense of assault. Daniel, dont be taken in by it. Its just samsara, Tony said. His voice was a soothing lifeline. He laughed at me. He tried to convince me that the trip would end soon, that I wasnt permanently fried. He told me I should have known what I was doing, since I had called DPT evil after my first attempt. Whats that music youre playing in the background? he asked. Bach, I told him. Its the only thing thats keeping me together. Perhaps thats why they are here; the demons are attracted to the music. They are crowding in here to be close to it. Well, thats nice, he said. Theres nothing nice about that! I screeched at him. They are totally defiant. They dont give a shit about us; we are their puppets. But at this point the trip was starting to wind down. In a few minutes Charity and I were back in that miraculous illusion of stability we call reality once again. I felt incredibly relieved. Wow, I cant believe it, I said to Tony. Reality . . . this is is definitely a good thing!