THE DMT EXPERIENCE

An excerpt from "Food Of The Gods"
by Terence McKenna

pp. 257-260

What can be said of DMT as an experience and in relation to our own
spiritual emptiness? Does it offer us answers? Do the short-acting
tryptamines offer an analogy to the ecstasy of the partnership society
before Eden became a memory? And if they do, then what can we say about
it?
What has impressed me repeatedly during my many glimpses into the
world of the hallucinogenic indoles, and what seems generally to have
escaped comment, is the transformation of narrative and language. The
experience that engulfs one's entire being as one slips beneath the
surface of the DMT ecstasy feels like the penetration of a membrane. The
mind and the self literally unfold before one's eyes. There is a sense
that one is made new, yet unchanged, as if one were made of gold and had
just been recast in the furnace of one's birth. Breathing is normal,
heartbeat steady, the mind clear and observing. But what of the world?
What of incoming sensory data?
Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian labyrinth,
a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood
the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the sense of a
reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience. There is a sense
of other times, and of one's own infancy, and of wonder, wonder and more
wonder. It is an audience with the alien nuncio. In the midst of this
experience, apparently at the end of human history, guarding gates that
seem surely to open on the howling maelstrom of the unspeakable emptiness
between the stars, is the Aeon.
The Aeon, as Heraclitus presciently observed, is a child at play
with colored balls. Many diminutive beings are present there--the tykes,
the self-transforming machine elves of hyperspace. Are they the children
destined to be father to the man? One has the impression of entering
into an ecology of souls that lies beyond the portals of what we naively
call death. I do not know. Are they the synesthetic embodiment of
ourselves as the Other, or of the Other as ourselves? Are they the elves
lost to us since the fading of the magic light of childhood? Here is a
tremendum barely to be told, an epiphany beyond our wildest dreams. Here
is the realm of that which is stranger than we can suppose. here is the
mystery, alive, unscathed, still as new for us as when our ancestors
lived it fifteen thousand summers ago. The tryptamine entities offer the
gift of new language, they sing in pearly voices that rain down as
colored petals and flow through the air like hot metal to become toys and
such gifts as gods would give their children. The sense of emotional
connection is terrifying and intense. The Mysteries revealed are real
and if ever fully told will leave no stone upon another in the small
world we have gone so ill in.
This is not the mercurial world of the UFO, to be invoked from
lonely hilltops; this is not the siren song of lost Atlantis wailing
through the trailer courts of crack-crazed America. DMT is not one of
our irrational illusions. What we experience in the presence of DMT is
real news. It is a nearby dimension-- frightening, transformative, and
beyond our powers to imagine, and yet to be explored in the usual way.
We must send fearless experts, whatever that may come to mean, to explore
and to report on what they find.