This was dimethyltryptamine, DMT, and I smoked it and I saw,
I had a feeling of slight anaesthesia in my body, I saw a swirling,
floral mandorla form behind my closed eyelids, and as I moved toward
this mandorla, I realised I was going to penetrate beyond it, and I
burst through into a kind of other-dimensional superspace, and I
had expected a kind of instant psychoanalysis or perhaps swirling
colours or moving geometric plains of light, perhaps a dancing canary
or little candies doing two steps in a row - this is what's called
hypnogogia in the medical literature, and it is essentially trivial
hallucination. Instead, what happened was there was an encounter with
what can only be described as an elf hive, a colony of self-transforming,
hyperdimensional machine creatures that came bounding forward with joyful
squeaks to dribble themselves like self-transforming jewelled basketballs
on the floor in front of me, and I was dumbstruck with amazement.
Occasionally people ask me "Is DMT dangerous?", and I think the honest
answer is "only if you fear death by astonishment." Well, I was astonished,
I mean, I was an intellectual of the Hegel/Camus crowd when I went through
that violet scintillating doorway, and I came out a true believer, because
these creatures in this place are filled with a kind of zany, affectionate,
reckless humour and a desire to communicate with human beings, or at
least with me in that moment, and what they were doing and how they
were communicating was by generating, through their songs, objects, so
that what I was surrounded by was a crowd of diminutive, self-transforming
blobs of intentionalised ectoplasmic material, and they were producing out
of their bodies objects which looked like Faberge eggs or exquisitely tooled
machines made of ivory glass and gemstone that were themselves undergoing
some kind of transformation, emitting musical sounds, condensing liquid
metal out of the air and causing it to rain down on us.
Well, my reaction to this was to go into a kind of shock of amazement
and, you know, it raises fairly profound questions, like number one,
"Surely I must be dead, surely no-one can have this experience and return
intact." I mean, because, you see, it exceeds imagining, it is beyond your
imagining - even when you're looking at it, you attempt to pour the
salutory waters of description over these transdimensional objects and
it runs, language runs off them like water off a duck's back. And the
emotional content of this kind of encounter is tremendously intense.
These things are attempting to communicate a new dispensation of the
logos. They are holding out the possibility that language need not be
processed by the ears, that language can become, under certain radical
situations of neurological perturbation, visible, that literally
the word condenses into visible space, and they were urging me to do this.
They were urging me to experiment with my voice and I discovered years
later, taking Ayahuasca in the Amazon jungles, tribes of Indians that have
actually mastered this art, and that saturate their bodies with DMT
and harmaline, and then sing. But for them this singing is not a
musical exercise, it's a pictorial exercise. They see what they
intend. This is a kind of telepathy. Well, it's humbling, it's
transformative, it's astonishing to realise that Shamans all over the
world for time uncountable have been accessing this appalling, complex,
ontologically challenging, scientifically impossible, reality. This
means that culturally we are living out some kind of schizophrenic
delusion, because we live our lives totally ignorant of these
possibilities, or perhaps only glimpsing them at the edge of
anaesthesia, or something like that, unless, of course, we have the
courage to be counter-cultural heads, but even then many people
confine themselves in the private world of their own reflection
because social pressure and, indeed, social legislation make it very
touchy to talk about these things. But I say to you, this is part of
the human birthright. This is as much a part of the game as birth, sex
and dying.
From the Camden Center Talk
deoxy » chemical experiences of a hyperspatial nature
