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>> Those who have navigated the rabbit hole of strange

experiences that psychedelic plants illicit have probably

asked themselves at one point, what is reality?

How do we know this world is real

and the strange world of psychedelics

is just a distortion?

And there is no better candidate to evoke this kind of response

than dimethyltryptamine, or more commonly known as DMT.

N, N-dimethyltryptamine was first

synthesized in 1931 by chemist Richard

Manske in Berlin, Germany.

The psychedelic effects and its connection

with Amazonian snuffs like yopo and beverages

like yage and ayahuasca were unknown at this time.

It would be another 25 years until Hungarian chemist

and psychiatrist Stephen Szara synthesized DMT in 1956,

because he couldn't get his hands

on psilocybin or mescaline.

He read a paper about South American

hallucinogens containing this compound

and wanted to see if this was, in fact,

the compound responsible for these strange visions.

Oral doses were administered to no avail.

But he intuited that another method might

provide different results.

So he injected himself N, N-dimethyltryptamine

and was the first to publicize this new psychedelic substance.

But was this the first time humanity

had discovered the visionary properties of this compound?

A quick look back into ancient Egyptian history

and their sacred tree of life might tell a different story.

>> You'll always find these acacias along the edge

of the stream beds that flood occasionally.

You won't see them halfway up the cliff.

Sometimes, they'll be a few feet above.

They've got to get those roots out into that stream bed

or they don't survive.

When it doesn't flood, sometimes as much as 10 years or more

I'm told, the tree will go dormant,

and it'll stand here as if it's dead.

Then suddenly years later, you get a flood,

and it'll come back to life.

>> Osiris was known to the ancient Egyptians as the god

of transition, rebirth, and regeneration.

The myth Osiris is that he was locked in a chest

and thrown into the Nile River by his jealous brother, Set.

The chest washed ashore in the city of Byblos,

where some say an acacia tree grew around it, housing

the spirit of Osiris, which his wife Isis eventually recovers.

If it is possible that the Egyptians discovered

the properties of the acacia tree,

then a psychedelic death-rebirth connection

might have come from the experience elicited

by one of its compounds.

>> If you look at families that are known to contain DMT

or tryptamines like acacias, for example,

some of the most potent sources of DMT known are acacias.

Well, there's about 1,200 species of acacias.

Probably 75% of those contain DMT.

So it's very common in nature.

It's not an exaggeration to say that nature is drenched in DMT.

>> Acacia trees were well known in ancient Egypt,

as well as in the Middle East.

If these civilizations were experimenters

with local botanicals, as the tribes of the Amazon were,

it is possible that one of the local MAOI-containing plants,

such as Syrian rue, which was common in the Middle East,

could have made it into an admixture with the acacia tree.

Even yohimbe bark known to contain MAOI,

originated from South and West Africa

and was probably imported to ancient Egypt.

There is no archaeological evidence

to support this specific ayahuasca-like concoction.

But it is long known that the ancient Egyptians experimented

with the psychoactive blue lilies for ceremony.

The acacia was supposedly used for the Ark of the Covenant,

insinuating that the wood embodies an arcane secret.

The Freemasons use the acacia in their symbolism

for the immortality of the soul.

As the master architect of King Solomon's temple,

Hiram Abiff was buried with a sprig of acacia

to mark the grave.

It is also said that the Hebrews planted acacia

at the head of a grave of a deceased partner or friend.

Across the ocean in South America,

the ayahuasca brew is also known as the vine of the dead or vine

of the soul, which the syncretic ayahuasca UDV Church claims

that King Solomon paid a little known visit to the Amazon

in antiquity and imparted the knowledge of ayahuasca

to the indigenous.

Though these myths remain circumstantial;

the veneration of these plants in ancient civilizations

tend to spring from their usefulness.

Any plant given spiritual attributes

is likely to have properties that

cause for higher visions of reality that

transcend the limits of birth, death,

and three-dimensional reality.

Today, DMT far exceeds this criteria.

So, what exactly are dimethyltryptamine's effects

on consciousness?

>> It begins very quickly.

You begin to feel different within a heartbeat or two

after the completion of the injection.

There's a feeling of acceleration

and inner-psychic tension that begins and builds quite

rapidly, almost overwhelmingly.

The visual image of the room, if you had your eyes open,

would start to break out in a pixelation kind of pattern.

If your eyes are closed at that stage,

it's a display of kaleidoscopic images.

Also during that time is a high pitch kind of sound.

Usually high pitch-- it could be oscillating "wa, wa, wa"

kind of sound.

Might be some crinkling kinds of sounds.

But it's increasing in intensity.

So it's crescendoing, which kind of

parallels the anxiety or the feeling of stimulation.

And then you just break out of your body.

It's as if the internal pressure just can't be held in the body

anymore, and your consciousness breaks loose.

And you know, that's kind of the plateau between two minutes

and seven minutes or so.

And then you start coming down.

And things slowly recongeal.

>> The rapidity, intensity, and conventional insanity

of the experience has caused word to reach the public

through the internet, as well as authors and researchers writing

and speaking on the matter.

Another hot topic is that DMT is an endogenous compound,

meaning it's produced naturally in the human body.

And yet no definitive explanation for this

has been discovered.

>> There is a huge amount of it in the lungs.

That's where most of is.

But it's throughout all the tissues in the body.

No one knows what it's doing in the lungs.

>> Interesting work is being done right now

on the endogenous functions.

There's a very interesting book just published

called, "Questions for the Lion Tamer."

It's about endogenous DMT.

And it's relating that to all these

other rather interesting what you

might call physiological states, which

have to do with gamma-wave activation in the brain,

and which DMT can reliably do this.

>> The gamma-brain-wave state is associated with high-level

cognitive function and peak concentration,

as seen in studies with meditating monks and nuns.

Gamma waves originate in the thalamus

and move back and forth through the three lobes of the brain

about 40 times per second.

Therefore, it is credited with integrative processing,

the flow state that athletes and musicians experience,

and improves memory, mood, and seems

to optimize many natural functions of the brain.

>> And what I see is happening is that as a consequence

of the destabilization of this central control center

that's linked to the prefrontal cortex and our egoic thinking

in the top down management of the brain.

And so what's happening is that the kind of material

that is normally left in the unconscious or the subconscious

is now being forced up into the front of the brain.

So, it's as if these deep parts of the brain,

these ancient aspects and are called

the reptilian brain and the paleomammalian brain

are being liberated and integrated

into our conscious awareness.

>> This high-level integrative processing of ancient neural

functions might account for the deeply profound visions

and feelings of experiencing and conquering death.

But this still doesn't answer what

DMT's function is in the body.

Many believe it's an ancestral neurotransmitter that

used to be more prominent in our lineage

before modern diets and lifestyles diminished

its effectiveness.

Others have suggested that DMT might

be a prenatal neurotransmitter that

builds the perception of the pre-birth world,

then gets replaced by serotonin shortly after birth

to create the consensus world that we all perceive.

Both compounds cause the brain to generate distinctly

different models of reality.

But what is a model of reality?

Isn't there only one?

The neurobiologist and chemical pharmacologist Andrew Gallimore

has been studying this exact theory.

>> Seeing a world is not a passive process.

It's always an active process.

The brain is a world-builder.

You can separate the information, if you like,

into two parts--

the information generated by a brain and all the information

being generated by whatever's outside your brain.

You can call it the external world, if you like.

Your brain is an information-generator.

And your world is built from the information generated

by your brain.

And this applies under all circumstances.

So whether you are in normal waking life,

when you descend into REM sleep at night when you dream,

but also if you're on the peak of a high-power DMT experience.

The world is always built from information.

So, the idea that one world is real and another world

is unreal--

the idea that this waking world is real

and yet the DMT state is not real is not really supported.

Most people, when they hear about these strange worlds,

will say this is a distortion of reality.

This is, perhaps, a breakdown of the brain's ability

to construct the correct model of reality.

But there is no true model of reality.

People always have this assumption, perhaps,

that the world they inhabit is the real one.

And that's really important to them.

What psychedelics do is they break down

the kind of the boundary between the real and the unreal.

And they show you actually that the world is much more fluid.

>> The notion that what we perceive is merely the way we

and our neurochemistry causes the information around

and within us to build our world is mirrored by stand-up

comedian and psychedelic researcher Shane Mauss.

>> A lot of what we consciously see we take as fact.

This is a metaphor for our perception in general.

I don't think we should trust any of our perception.

I think all of our perceptions are fickle and subjective.

And I think we should be really questioning all of them.

This life is a trip.

This life is just as trippy as any psychedelic experience

you could ever have.

It's just we spend so much time in this world

that we are bored by this trip that we're on.

And a psychedelic journey is such a short amount of time.

And it's so intense, so novel, so salient.

The brain loves latching onto stuff like that.

That's why it seems so true.

>> If it is true that perceptions are merely the way

we decode information around us, and those perceptions are

subject to personal and cultural biases,

the question still remains--

why would psychedelics have the seemingly primary function

of altering our perception?

And do all psychedelic substances

alter us in the same way?

>> The LSD, psilocybin, mescaline--

they change the world to be novel, more fluid,

more unpredictable.

But they seem to change this world.

It seems to be an alternate version of the consensus world.

Whereas DMT is different.

DMT changes the information generated

by the brain in such a profound way

that it is essentially what Terence McKenna used

to call a 100% reality switch.

It switches the brain very, very rapidly

within 30 seconds from constructing the consensus

world to constructing this bizarre, highly-complex alien

reality.

And it does it with great efficiency.

>> Psychiatrist Rick Strassman, who did the first DMT studies

in the early 1990s after the prohibition,

published the reports in his book titled, "DMT:

The Spirit Molecule."

This was the point where many case reports started

showing very similar phenomena happening

under the influence of DMT.

>> Well, one of the things that's unique about DMT is that

it seems to get one into a state where there is an intelligence.

And so there's been a lot of speculation

as to what that might be.

Might it be extra-dimensional beings?

Or might just be activation of certain areas

of the brain or something in between,

like psychological processes?

So that's a unique property of DMT.

And we ought to not necessarily limit

our scope of it investigating what it might be.

>> DMT is in a class of its own.

It takes us into a reality that both feels

more real than this one and is inhabited

by entities that feel more real than this world as well.

So, coming out of an experience like that where

whether or not it's true, it feels true.

And it creates an opportunity to reassess your entire worldview,

your spiritual, religious, and materialistic worldview.

It brings everything into question.

>> The hot topic that has emerged from DMT studies is

the recurring theme of the well-ordered structure

of the place it seems to send people and the feelings

of entities inhabiting this space.

There are accounts of this happening

through the DMT-containing brew ayahuasca, as well.

There are sparse accounts of other psychedelic plants

transporting people's minds to other places

to visit other-worldly beings.

Even psychological illness has been

known to show similar traits.

However, it is the sheer amount of reports from DMT alone

and the peculiar realness of this space and the beings

that cause for a deeper interest in this compound's effects

on consciousness.

Author and psychedelic researcher Graham Hancock

has pored over the DMT trip reports

and found correlations with shamanic reports

of altered or expanded states.

>> They experience encounters with supernatural beings,

as they construe them.

Those supernatural beings may communicate with them

telepathically.

This is very common in the shamanistic trance.

They may give them teachings.

And very often, they'll have a therianthropic appearance.

They'd be part animal and part human.

>> Sometimes they were malevolent and frightening,

scary, threatening.

They hurt people.

Yeah.

Other times, the beings, or those things

they encountered that they called beings, were beneficent.

They did healing.

They gave advice.

Some predicted or showed volunteers the future.

Some were examining the volunteers.

Some were putting things in their bodies.

But one of the hallmarks of the interaction

was the strength of those beings.

>> The experiences seemed to be so life changing that

maintaining the memory and yet returning to the consensus

world amongst people who can't conceive of what just happened

to you is a quality that calls for community counseling

and bonding among others who've shared the experience.

Over 50% of Strassman's volunteers

reported beings that felt distinctly

individual from the volunteer and indescribably real.

Out of 300 of Phillip Meyer's trip reports, roughly 66%

of them claimed encountering intelligent creatures.

Report number 213 said, "I did see

intelligent insect-alien god beings who

explained that they had created us and were us in the future.

But that this was all taking place outside of linear time."

Report number 19 said, "A gaggle of elf-like creatures

in standard-issue Irish elf costumes

were doing strange things with strange objects that

seemed to be a weird hybrid between crystals and machines."

And well-known psychedelic psychonaut Terence McKenna

was very vocal about the possibilities of what

stories like this might mean.

As an avid psychedelic psychonaut and philosopher,

Terence half-jokingly mentions global population

and ecological concerns that may call

for outside-the-box solutions, such as shrinking

the size of humans to the size of fruit flies

or even exploring societal functions within realms

of the imagination to perform future tasks

rather than depleting terrestrial resources.

He also lucidly acknowledges the incredible leap

that the modern mind must make to accept solutions

that technology and modern science today

is not capable of thinking.

Yet, balances this by emphasizing that these problems

do need to be resolved.

And even Albert Einstein said, problems cannot be solved

by the same level of thinking that created them.

Can DMT be a physiological key to unlock higher-level problem

solving?

>> I sincerely believe DMT is pointing us into an area

of reality that has not had enough attention.

And that is the higher-dimensional nature

of reality.

We can try to perceive or imagine

what more than four dimensions is like.

But it's not possible in our current and normal waking

state.

Whereas dimethyltryptamine gives us an opportunity

to perceive higher dimensionally,

to actually look at something either internally or externally

and see it from a space that contains more than four

dimensions.

>> For space, time, and form-related problems N,

N-dimethyltryptamine might be a revolutionary tool in future

generations.

when major problems need to be resolved

in a short amount of time.

This specific compound is commonly known

to generate unique geometric visuals and interactions

with strange beings.

However, there is another form of DMT

that has been used by the indigenous of the Amazon

in ayahuasca-like brews called yage.

5-methoxy, or 5-MeO-DMT, is quite a bit more potent than

and N, N-DMT.

And mixing these common doses could cause respiratory arrest,

among other issues on 5-MeO.

However, in the right amount and under the proper supervision

with a well-trained sitter, it is

said that the experience of 5-MeO-DMT

brings the user to a place beyond time, space, and form.

>> 5-MeO-DMT is 5-methoxy dimethyltryptamine.

So it's slightly different chemically.

But in terms of its effects, 5-MeO versus N, N-DMT

are often referred to as the power and the glory.

5-MeO-DMT is the power.

Whereas N, N-DMT is the glory.

N, N-DMT is the highly-visual experience.

Whereas 5-methoxy is often completely non-visual.

But often-- a friend once described to me--

said that, DMT is like the fifth dimension,

and 5-methoxy DMT is like the 12th dimension.

It almost takes you beyond these worlds and into oneness

into the white light, as it's often described.

Often much more terrifying with complete destruction

of the ego, the complete destruction of the self.

>> Australian researcher and journalist Rak Razam has

studied Amazonian indigenous uses and myths of DMT.

>> So, it seems to me that the indigenous cultures say that

there's a way to navigate the tryptamine dimensionality.

And the way to do that is to become

empowered by rejoining the light.

Now, the Sequoia tribe in Ecuador--

they call their brew yage.

Right?

It's their word for ayahuasca.

They say that the secret of yage was given to them

by the star people or the heavenly beings which

live in the light.

Many cultures across Peru say that they

were told to make ayahuasca by the plants or different entity

beings, and how they connect.

The difference with how they are is

it contains wambisa, which has 5-MeO-DMT, not the N,

N-DMT in most other brews in South America.

So, when you drink their brew, they go to the light.

>> The beta-Carbolines in the ayahuasca vine are

phytoreactive, meaning they attack the bacterial, fungal,

parasitic, and viral infections when exposed to light.

It has also been suggested by Nick Sand

that he discovered DMT's piezoluminescent qualities.

Alexander Shulgin confirmed this by saying, "A totally

pure salt, when dry and when shaken in the dark,

will emit small flashes of white light."

Although it might seem likely that all ceremonies containing

DMT would be done during the day,

many Amazonian tribes will only conduct the ayahuasca

ceremonies in total darkness.

Although accredited scientific research is scarce,

authors Ross Heaven and Simon Buxton

write in the book, "Darkness Visible,"

that in total darkness, melatonin is produced.

But after three to five days, it gets

converted to pinoline, which is an endogenous MAOI secreted

by the pineal gland.

It is suggested that the secretion of pinoline

triggers the production of endogenous DMT, which

would match the critical ingredients of ayahuasca.

Unfortunately, scientific testing

has not been done to confirm or deny this claim.

The modern confusion revolving around DMT

and its peculiar effects has to do

with the newness of the substance

in the modern materialist worldview,

as well as the subjectivity of the experience that

springs forth after ingestion.

Does endogenous DMT play a crucial yet forgotten role

in the human body?

Are the visionary effects simply the mind malfunctioning?

Or are they glimpses beyond the veil

of limited human perception?

Rick Strassman, in his new book "DMT: The Soul of Prophecy",

takes a new look at the common yet mysterious realm

of imagination.

>> You know, the importance of the prophetic state to studying

psychedelics, to learning about them,

to figuring out what they're good for, how best to use them,

we need to have as full an account as possible.

We can't limit ourselves.

That's why I think there's been a lot more resulting

from the psychedelic experience in our culture

through the arts as opposed to through the sciences.

Because it's the imagination which is being stimulated,

as opposed to the intellect primarily.

You know, the intellect being stimulated requires education.

Maybe the imagination is the point

at which psychedelics act.

>> At present, the imagination is so scarcely understood that

people are either left to the conventional reductionist view

that it's generated by the brain or to mystical

and philosophical explanations.

To know for certain whether the DMT world actually

exists, perhaps in another dimension

or in a future holding space of potentiality

called the imagination, is beyond all conception,

except to those who dare to enter that space.

>> Whether DMT is a different dimension,

or you're accessing this world inside of your head that you

don't normally have access to, or you're seeing God,

or whatever, the different possibilities that there are

are all pretty incredible and are all pretty important

and all worth looking into.

And definitely we do need to get down to the bottom of it

and learn more.

>> In order to learn more, there seems to be two distinct

methods.

Firstly is to dive headfirst into the experience

by ingesting the psychedelic substance.

Secondly is to study the effects the substance has

upon the body and the brain, whether the substance is

taken or produced endogenously.

The issue with the second approach

is that even with the amount of research that

has been conducted, the data still

must be interpreted by limited human minds.

Most humble researchers will admit

that there is no solid explanation as to what

the DMT world is and why DMT is produced in the body.

>> The suggestion is in rats in the last year

or so, there's been confirmation that DMT is produced

in the pineal gland in rats.

But we do know in general it's produced in the lungs,

in the spinal fluid, in different parts of our body.

And then it accumulates and comes up.

So the pineal gland is this almost mythical organ

in the body.

They call it the third eye.

The third eye appears in Egyptian culture, the Eye of Ra

in the mystical sort of glyphs they have.

It's all through sort of--

well, all through different historical cultures

the past that really revered this idea of the third eye

as the gateway.

>> The romantic obsession with the pineal gland among mystics

and psychedelic psychonauts may have a neurophysiological

basis, but is currently still subject to debate.

Therefore, the contention that the Eye of Ra or Eye

of Horus in the Egyptian culture represented the pineal gland

can only be seen with a metaphorical leap.

Some suggest that the connection lies

in the myth where Horus gives his eye to Osiris

in the underworld.

Osiris ate the eye and was resurrected,

which could fit with the Eleusinian kykeon, Persian

haoma, Vedic soma, Amazonian ayahuasca; even

the Mazatec mushroom rituals, which regularly included

death and rebirth experiences.

But at present, only speculations can be made.

Perhaps our ancestors with cleaner diets

and more nature-based lifestyles produced larger amounts.

Perhaps the answer is lost to history.

Perhaps the DMT world inhabited by beings

that appear to be more real than real

can only be explored by ingesting exogenous sources.

But one thing seems certain.

Romantics may preach about the possibilities,

and the skeptics may scoff at the gaps.

But the fact that a psychedelic compound that

causes the most mysterious of effects

is produced inside each and every one of us

is worthy of serious investigation.

Up next, join us as we dive into the mysterious and ancient

origins of psilocybin mushrooms and the scientific research

showing how they're revolutionizing

psychotherapy and psychoneurotic exploration.