Metaphorically, DMT is like an intellectual black hole in that once one knows about it, it is very hard for others to understand what one is talking about. One cannot be heard. The more one is able to articulate what it is, the less others are able to understand. This is why I think people who attain enlightenment, if we may for a moment comap these two, are silent. They are silent because we cannot understand them. Why the phenomenon of tryptamine ecstasy has not been looked at by scientists, thrill seekers, or anyone else, I am not sure, but I recommend it to your attention.

~ Terence McKenna

Any attempts to begin to describe the DMT experience is fraught with the immediate dangers of either over-simplification or a swift flight into metaphor since it is almost impossible to describe with words alone the fantastic swirling multi-faceted gateway visions that are only the beginning of the DMT experience. Intrepid travelers report that past these jeweled-gates can be found mechanical-Elves, Aliens, Egyptian Gods, temples, pyramids, and palaces of pulsating light, and some would say, the entire possible population of the Collective Unconsciousness. A magical place where the totality of phenomenal existence can be experienced in an often terrifying transpersonal flash. No two DMT experiences are alike, and no two people should expect any similarity in their individual experiences. (Unless, in one of the many mysteries of the DMT zone, two experiences are indeed shared as One!) It is commonly said that DMT causes far many more questions than it does answers; for it is a flowerbed for all the mystery in the Universe. Mystery is an increasingly difficult thing to find in our Fact-or-Fiction society but the on-going mapping of this tryptamine accessed Inter-Zone may ultimately lead to the birth of powerful new spiritual metaphors for Mankind, and a new Mythology great enough to both resonate within us and encompass the incredible Universe we all occupy. So in this section, you will find collated here a number of DMT accounts as recounted by different psychonauts over the last 40 years, each one mapping out a small piece of this mysterious 8th continent of the Mind. http://www.dmtsite.com/d...tions_of_experience.html

There's a tendency in the New Age to deny death. We have people pursuing physical immortality and freezing their heads until the fifth millennium, when they can be thawed out. All of this indicates a lack of balance or equilibrium -TM

ND: You have said that an important part of the mystical quest is to face up to death and recognize it as a rhythm of life. Would you like to enlarge on your view on the implications of the dying process?

TM: I take seriously the notion that these psychedelic states are an anticipation of the dying process-or, as the Tibetans refer to it, the Bardo level beyond physical death. It seems likely that our physical lives are a type of launching pad for the soul. As the esoteric traditions say, life is an opportunity to prepare for death, and we should learn to recognize the signposts along the way, so that when death comes, we can make the transition smoothly. I think the psychedelics show you the transcendental nature of reality. It would be hard to die gracefully as an atheist or existentialist. Why should you? Why not rage against the dying of the light? But if in fact this is not the dying of the light but the Dawning of the Great Light, then one should certainly not rage against that. There's a tendency in the New Age to deny death. We have people pursuing physical immortality and freezing their heads until the fifth millennium, when they can be thawed out. All of this indicates a lack of balance or equilibrium. The Tao flows through the realms of life and nonlife with equal ease. -terence McKenna

We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism.

At death, the thing that casts the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases. Material form breaks down; it ceases to be a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustained against entropy by cycling material in, extracting energy, and expelling waste. But the form that ordered it is not affected. These declarative statements are made from the point of view of the shamanic tradition, which touches all higher religions. Both the psychedelic dream state and the waking psychedelic state acquire great import because they reveal to life a task: to become familiar with this dimension that is causing being, in order to be familiar with it at the moment of passing from life.

The metaphor of a vehicle--an after-death vehicle, an astral body--is used by several traditions. Shamanism and certain yogas, including Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose of life is to familiarize oneself with this after-death body so that the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. One will recognize what is happening. One will know what to do and one will make a clean break. Yet there does seem to be the possibility of a problem in dying. It is not the case that one is condemned to eternal life. One can muff it through ignorance.
Apparently at the moment of death there is a kind of separation, like birth--the metaphor is trivial, but perfect. There is a possibility of damage or of incorrect activity. The English poet-mystic William Blake said that as one starts into the spiral there is the possibility of falling from the golden track into eternal death. Yet it is only a crisis of a moment--a crisis of passage--and the whole purpose of shamanism and of life correctly lived is to strengthen the soul and to strengthen the ego's relationship to the soul so that this passage can be cleanly made. This is the traditional position...
What psychedelics encourage, and where I hope attention will focus once hallucinogens are culturally integrated to the point where large groups of people can plan research programs without fear of persecution, is the modeling of the after-death state. Psychedelics may do more than model this state; they may reveal the nature of it. Psychedelics will show us that the modalities of appearance and understanding can be shifted so that we can know mind within the context of the One Mind. The One Mind contains all experiences of the Other. There is no dichotomy between the Newtonian universe, deployed throughout light-years of three-dimensional space, and the interior mental universe. They are adumbrations of the same thing. -terence McKenna

When consciousness is finally understood, it will mean that the absence of consciousness will be understood. The study of consciousness leads, inevitably, to the study of death. Death is both a historical and an individual phenomenon about which we, as monkeys, have great anxiety. But what the psychedelic experience seems to be pointing out is that actually the reductionist view of death has missed the point and that there is something more. Death isn't simple extinction. The universe does not build up such complex forms as ourselves without conserving them in some astonishing and surprising way that relates to the intuitions that we have from the psychedelic experience." Terence McKenna

The reason it's so confounding is because its impact is on the language-forming capacity itself. So the reason it's so confounding is because the thing that is trying to look at the DMT is infected by it—by the process of inspection. So DMT does not provide an experience that you analyze. Nothing so tidy goes on. The syntactical machinery of description undergoes some sort of hyper-dimensional inflation instantly, and then, you know, you cannot tell yourself what it is that you understand. In other words, what DMT does can't be downloaded into as low-dimensional a language as English. -terence McKenna

his eventuality, because you are so amazed. Amazement seems to be the emotion that has torn loose and swamped everything else - I mean astounded? When was the last time you were genuinely 'ASTOUNDED'? I mean, I think you can go your whole damned life without being 'ASTOUNDED'... and this is astonishment, you know, raised to the N-th degree to the point that your jaw hangs...
I mean you're like this:

And it raises issues: like you say, "Jesus, ah, huhh ... I must be dead!" And you, and the weird thing about DMT is it does not effect what we ordinarily call the mind. The part that you call "you" - nothing happens to it. You're just like you were before, but the World has been radically replaced - 100% - it's all gone, and you're sitting there, and you're saying, "Jesus, a minute ago I was in a room with some people, and they were pushing some weird drug on me, and, and now, what's happened? Is this the Drug? Did we do it? Is this it?" -TM

So is it possible that at the end of the 20th century, at the end of 500 years of materialism, reductionism, positivism, what we're about to discover is probably the least likely denouement any of us expected out of our dilemma—what we're about to discover is that death has no sting. -terence McKenna