The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (44 page)

And yet, looking back on that interlude, I have to wonder: Was there more to it than mere pathological delusion? Were any of the apparent paranormal phenomena “real”—that is, objectively verifiable? Who was the Teacher and why were its lessons such a strain on credulity and yet so insistent? Subsequent analysis has shown many of our ideas to be outlandish and implausible, but not all of them: a few appear to have been gems of actual insight. For example, research has shown that tryptamines and beta-carbolines, among other compounds,
can
intercalate into DNA, at least in the test tube. And while no one has proven that DNA and other macromolecules might behave like superconductors under certain conditions, the concept has not been disproven, let alone entirely dismissed. Both issues have been taken seriously in the years since La Chorrera, though neither was even suspected before then. (For example, on DNA as a superconductor, see Lakhno and Sultanov 2011, and Kasumov et al. 2001.)

As for Terence’s timewave, it may not be an accurate map of time, much less a tool for predicting some final event, but it does embody genuine insights, including his discovery of an ancient calendrical function to the
I Ching
that modern scholars had apparently not detected. Like the Book of Changes, the timewave may be a useful divinatory tool in itself, if one is willing to see divination as basically the discernment of correspondences between inner and outer states. In that sense, the timewave works, much as astrology and other such methods work—just don’t expect scientific proof or quantifiable verification.

When I reflect on what led us to undertake our quixotic journey, I’m led back to the years in Berkeley and Boulder when we first encountered and puzzled over DMT. As I’ve suggested, this substance wasn’t just the most astonishing drug we’d ever encountered, it was the most astonishing thing—and as such it was surely worthy of investigation. Given our intellectual path until that point, it wasn’t in us to say, “Oh, that’s interesting,” and then move on. A major reason for our fascination could be attributed to our lifelong immersion in science fiction, aliens, other dimensions, and related topics. As Terence eloquently put it, the DMT experience is “an audience with the alien nuncio.” Taken under the right circumstances—high doses, darkness, and paying close attention—DMT and psilocybin seem to emerge straight from a mash-up of Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick. One sees cartoon-like, multicolored, 3-D visions, urgently presented by elfish or clownish beings who may seem amusing but who, it is clear, desperately want the “viewer” to understand what is being presented. Whether one is seeing architectures, or landscapes, or machines, or organisms, is not entirely clear. The visions partake of the quality of all of these and more, but what they are, exactly, remains inexplicable. What is clear is that they are fascinating to contemplate, and their contemplation evokes ecstasy. Terence and I were convinced that DMT had some connection to aliens long before we ever considered going to La Chorrera. We thought that DMT bore a message of some kind, either from another dimension or another civilization elsewhere in our universe.

Is it possible that we were right? I still believe it might be so. Most “sober” discussions about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, presume that contact with aliens will first occur via radio signals we’ll eventually detect if we build ever-better radio telescopes and search many bandwidths in all parts of the sky. Any other interpretation or scenario is immediately dismissed. For instance, what about the notion that crop circles are messages from alien intelligences? This isn’t seriously discussed; yet crop circles remain a real mystery, a phenomenon that certainly appears to be the handiwork of intelligence even if we have no other clue as to what they actually mean. And I’m sorry, but to explain away crop circles as hoaxes perpetrated by midnight revelers after the pubs close doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. That may be true of the crudest and smallest examples, but the gigantic, geometrically complex circles that appear overnight are not the work of drunken hooligans stumbling about in the dark.

So, in crop circles we have solid, physical evidence of a phenomenon that indubitably exists, that is completely beyond human understanding and abilities, and that almost certainly originates from a non-human intelligence. And yet the response of the “respectable” SETI community is a big ho-hum; crop circles do not sit well with their assumptions that extraterrestrial contact, when and if it comes, will arrive in the form of an electromagnetic signal visible to our detectors. This notion seems almost laughably absurd. A galaxy-spanning civilization tens of thousands or even millions of years ahead of our own is not going to use a crude, nineteenth-century invention like a radio transmitter to contact us. Such pedestrian thinking is the reason why conventional approaches to SETI are doomed to fail; they are pre-programmed to focus on a single technology that most technological civilizations will have only utilized for a tiny fraction of their history, if at all. Signs of alien intelligence that fall outside this model are ignored.

Any civilization that wants to communicate with us (or wants us to be aware of its existence) is apt to proceed cautiously and use unanticipated means to make contact. Considered in this light, the notion that DMT, psilocybin, and the other psychoactive tryptamines are the calling cards of an advanced civilization is not so far-fetched. This explanation certainly seems to be the message that many people take away from their experiences with high doses of DMT or mushrooms. It was the message that was downloaded to us at La Chorrera in 1971 and regularly reaffirmed in subsequent encounters.

One important difference between then and now is that many more people have taken mushrooms and, to a lesser extent, DMT. What’s more, growing numbers have shared the sense of alien contact, the sci-fi tinged ideations, the quasi-techno quality of the bizarre machine-like objects that we first experienced at La Chorrera (and many times since). The consensus suggests that these visions are intrinsic to the experience rather than to the personalities of two nerdy brothers. People who have never heard of us, and who aren’t science-fiction enthusiasts, nevertheless commonly report experiences permeated with a sense of the alien “other.”

Such reports have even entered into the scientific literature, as in the experiences documented by Rick Strassman, M.D., in his FDA-approved study using high doses of pure, injected DMT. Many of the experiences reported by his subjects bore an uncanny resemblance to classic descriptions of UFO close encounters, even to the extent of being enclosed in a dome-like space, surrounded by seen or sensed alien entities, and undergoing a medical examination of some kind. As Strassman recounts in his 2001 book
DMT: The Spirit Molecule
, those stories were impossible to stuff into any kind of explanatory framework acceptable to conventional science. “I chose to disregard reports I had heard about contact with beings on DMT and was unprepared for dealing with their frequency in our work,” he writes. That and other factors, including the inadequacies of the biomedical model upon which he’d been required to conduct his study, eventually led him to discontinue it and return his clinical-grade DMT to the granting agency.

So here we have a phenomenon: There exists in nature a family of related metabolites widespread in plants, fungi, even in animals, including ourselves, that are close chemical relatives of the oldest known neurotransmitter, serotonin, and that are two or three trivial biosynthetic steps away from tryptophan, an amino acid found in all earthly organisms. When these metabolites are consumed by a certain class of omnivorous primates with complex nervous systems and hypertrophied cerebral cortices, the substances regularly, though not always, reveal the existence of what appear to be other dimensions, or other places, objects, and images like nothing seen in ordinary waking consciousness. The substances, once ingested, are often associated with a sense of the presence of other entities or forms of consciousness, which commonly seem to be proffering a message or lesson of some kind, or at least suggesting that the aforementioned big-brained primate pay attention and “get it.” Moreover, there is often a good deal of congruency between what is seen and experienced by different individuals; though the experiences are difficult to articulate, there is enough similarity that those who have had such experiences can share information, and make sense to each other, though not necessarily to those who have not had them. The experiences have a quality of consensual reality that is at least as clear and communicable as most experiences of ordinary reality. So what is going on?

Possibility number one is that there actually are other dimensions, parallel realities that these substances render accessible by temporarily altering our neurochemistry and perceptual apparatus. According to this model, there really are entities that want to communicate with us, or at least don’t spurn communication, when we poke our heads into their dimension. This is very close to the understanding of reality that prevails in most shamanic worldviews.

Possibility number two is the more parsimonious explanation, but it is almost as bizarre: For some reason, our brains have evolved the innate capability to generate three-dimensional visions of indescribable complexity and beauty, and that in psilocybin or other tryptamine states are presented to our inner perception accompanied by a sense of great emotional and intellectual import, and often seem to be narrated by a helpful entity, or entities, that are perceived as distinct from the self.

Whether the first or second postulate is true, the conclusions from either are rather earth-shattering. If the first is true, then we are forced to reject, or at least radically revise, everything we think we know about reality. It makes our current models hopelessly obsolete and incomplete. All of human knowledge, all of our science and religion, must be reexamined in the light of the understanding that our cosmic neighborhood just “over there” is of a completely different ontological order, and moreover, an order that is inhabited by entities as intelligent as we are or many times more intelligent, but that share with us the quality of consciousness, of mindedness. And they are entities that want to share their reality with us, their wisdom and knowledge, perhaps even form a symbiotic partnership or some sort of diplomatic relationship. Whatever “they” are, they do not seem to be hostile, and they appear to take a compassionate interest in our species, much as an adult might want to love and nurture a child.

On the other hand, if the second case is true, then the question stares us in the face: Why? Why, in the course of neural evolutionary history, has the brain developed the neural architecture and systems to sustain such experiences? What is the point of it all? Perhaps it is a side effect of the evolutionary events that resulted in cognition, language, and our ability to discern meaning in abstractions and symbols. Those familiar with psychedelic states will be aware that psychedelics, especially mushrooms and other tryptamines, often trigger synesthesia, the translation of one sensory modality into another. Anyone familiar with the psychedelic experience will probably have experienced synesthesia at some point; it is the “hearing” of colors, or the “seeing of sounds” though these are only the most trivial examples. Some people have a genetic propensity for synesthesia and experience the phenomenon routinely. Other people only experience it under the influence of psychedelics, and even then it can be rare. There are many kinds of synesthesia, and often they are associated with the perception of numbers, letters, or words. For example, in grapheme-color synesthesia, individual numbers or letters are tinged with colors. In sound-color synesthesia, music or other sounds can induce firework-like displays, or can change the color, scintillation, or directional movement of a perceived color. Even more bizarre forms of synesthesia are known, including “ordinal linguistic personification,” in which ordered sequences of numbers, words, or letters seem to have personalities; or the rarer lexical-gustatory synesthesia in which words or phonemes evoke gustatory sensations.

Synesthesia is a fascinating but real phenomenon, and it has only recently re-attracted the attention of modern neuroscience. The connection between genetic or inherent synesthesia and psychedelic synesthesia has either been largely overlooked or deliberately ignored. I suspect the latter is true, but I’m puzzled by science’s failure to understand that psychedelics could be important research tools in our efforts to understand synesthesia, and by extension, cognition and consciousness itself.

For years I’ve argued in lectures and writings that psychedelics, probably mushrooms, accidentally or deliberately ingested by early primates, triggered synesthetic experiences that formed the critical foundations of human language and cognition, the association of inherently meaningless sounds or images with inherently meaningful symbols and ideas. Spoken or written language is a synesthetic activity that takes place effortlessly and automatically in the process of understanding a language. In speaking, the vocal apparatus produces “small mouth noises,” small puffs or explosions of air that are inherently meaningless. But because we have learned the language, we all participate in the consensus that certain meaningless noises are associated with inner, visualized images or symbols that, as cognitive constructs, are imbued with meaning. These images and symbols, seen by the mind’s eye and associated with symbolic import, supply the “meaning” to various vocal expressions. In reading, the process is similar, except that a written symbol or word evokes an inner perception of the sound that is associated with the written word or symbol, and this, in turn, evokes an inner visualization of the meaningful symbol or word associated with that sound. Is this not also synesthesia?

What I’m suggesting, in effect, is that early on in the evolution of the human neural apparatus, the ingestion of psychedelics triggered the invention of language. I am not arguing here that psychedelics somehow affected our genes, at least not directly; rather, that they are teaching tools. Creating and using language is an acquired skill, dependent on an ability to discern meaning—significance—in images, sounds, and symbols. Psychedelics taught us how to do that; and, they are still teaching us! Once a small group or primates had acquired that skill, it could be easily taught to others, especially with the aid of the psychedelic teaching tools.