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Book 3 in the New Thinking Allowed Dialogue Series is UFOs and UAP: Are We Really Alone? Now available on Amazon.
New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distance learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body, and spirit. The topics that we cover here, we are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at cihs.edu. You can now download a free PDF copy of issue number 8 of the New Thinking Allowed magazine or order a beautiful printed copy. Go to newthinkingallowed.org.
Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today, we'll be exploring the world of psychedelic entities. My guests are David J. Brown and Sara Phinn Huntley, who are the authors of *The Illustrated Field Guide to DMT Entities, Machine Elves, Tricksters, Teachers, and Other Interdimensional Beings*. David J. Brown is also author of many other related books, including *The New Science of Psychedelics at the Nexus of Culture, Consciousness, and Spirituality*, and also *Dreaming Wide Awake: Lucid Dreaming, Shamanic Healing, and Psychedelics*. David and Sara are located on the West Coast, and now I'll switch over to the internet video.
Welcome, Sara and David.
It is a pleasure to be with each of you. You've put together a magnificent book full of wonderful illustrations. I hope to show a number of those illustrations in the course of our interview. For the benefit of our viewers, I should say that it's very unusual for me to interview two people at the same time. In fact, it's so unusual it may be a little awkward at times. So, I'll begin with you, Sara. Welcome.
Thank you so much. It's really good to be here.
And David, welcome.
Thank you, Jeffrey. It's a great pleasure to be here with you both.
So, you've put together this magnificent book. It's full of illustrations, but you've also written about your own personal experiences. Each of you have done that. I know the book focuses on DMT, but obviously you both seem to have a lot of experience with psychedelics in general. So, maybe, David, we could start with you and you could fill in a little bit about your background with psychedelics. I've already, of course, let our viewers know about some of the many books you've written in this area.
Sure, I'd be delighted. Yeah, I have a long history with psychedelics. I'm in my early 60s now and I started doing psychedelics when I was a teenager, around the age of 16. I had my first LSD experience when I was 16 years old, and that got me interested in lucid dreaming. It got me interested in neuroscience and psychobiology, and I pretty much set the course for my life, but I've had hundreds, thousands of experiences with LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, DMT. It's hard to know how my life would have progressed differently had I not been experimenting with all these different ways to alter my consciousness over the years.
Sarah, you're the artist who created, I think, at least half of the illustrations, or about half of the illustrations in this book. I know you've written a wonderful section on what it's like to work with AI to create the artwork, but you're also an experienced person in the psychedelic world, so you bring both of those talents together in creating this book. Can you talk a little bit about the visionary experiences that you've had? I know, for example, you describe yourself as being aphantagic, which means that normally you don't have visual imagery, but under psychedelics I'm under the impression you have very vivid visual imagery.
It's true. It's actually kind of a quirk that I didn't know about myself until just a few years ago. I thought that everybody's mind sort of worked that way and that people who described hyper-visual experiences might be exaggerating a little bit, but no, I learned that I'm aphantagic. It's lacking a visual imagination when you close your eyes, so I still experience the idea itself, say like a red apple. I can sort of feel it spatially and I can evoke other aspects of its experience, but I don't actually see the image of a red apple in my mind's eye. As an artist and a visionary artist in particular, I definitely have really visual experiences under the influence of psychedelics, but I also have a really vivid dream life as well, so that's been a really big influence in my life. Like David, I started tripping as a younger person in my teens, so I have a couple decades of psychedelic experiences under my belt. Especially with such a powerful psychedelic as DMT, there's definitely a very powerful visual element that I'm still blessed to experience. That contrast has really been what drew me into the psychedelic experience.
In other words, it would seem as if there's something about the ordinary waking state of consciousness that prevents you from having vivid visual imagery, but when you're in an altered state of consciousness, that's not a problem.
That would be true to say, yes.
Okay, well, it'd be a curiosity of mine as to precisely what makes the difference. I'm sure many other people who are aphantagic would be interested in knowing as well. Do you have any hypotheses?
I think that it might just be sort of like a spectrum of experience for people. There's some people who are hyperphantagic. They can see things really vividly, almost like an AR display in their mind. Some people sort of are halfway there; they might get a vague imagery. I think it's just part of the natural spectrum of people's neurological landscape.
Now, with regard to your book, I noticed that you begin by looking at the kinds of reports of entities from people who've had UFO contact and UFO abduction. So, you start out with talking about extraterrestrial aliens, basically. For example, the mantids and the grays and the reptilians and so forth. Is there a reason why you put those right up front in your book?
Yeah, that was one of the main themes that we tried to address in the book, was the very interesting overlap between the alien abduction experience, UFO contact experience, and what people have encountered on their DMT journeys. There's interesting, as you mentioned, the reptilians, the gray aliens, the mantid beings are common in the reports of both the alien abduction phenomena and the DMT entity contact reports. I spoke to the Harvard psychiatric researcher, John Mack, about this years ago, and he also noticed it. Terence McKenna also pointed this out. It gives more credibility to the idea or the possibility that there could be some kind of genuine objective reality to this because it's encountered in both types of experiences, many of the same beings. It's just remarkable and fascinating that people report. Even just with DMT, that they report so many common entities during these experiences. You wouldn't expect it if it was just a hallucination, right?
Well, I'm very glad you brought up the late psychiatrist from Harvard University, John Mack, who was very interested in researching people who thought that they had been abducted. John Mack actually wrote the foreword to a book of mine that came out 20 years ago called *The PK Man* about a fellow named Ted Owens who believed that a mantid alien had operated on his brain and gave him unusual psychic abilities. I studied the fellow from 1976 until he died in 1987. He produced many, many demonstrations regarding the authenticity of his macro psychokinetic abilities that he attributed to these mantid-like beings. Now I have the privilege of interviewing an individual, for the first time really, who claims also to have had a mantid-like being operate on his brain.
Yeah, I had a mantid creature operate on my brain too.
I mean, it's fascinating that the mantid creatures are so common, but it's very rare that you hear about caterpillar people or grasshopper people or other insects. There's something about the mantids that are incredibly, incredibly frequent in these types of reports.
Well, why don't you describe in a little more detail what that experience was like?
The experience? My personal experience?
Yes, your personal experience. Where were you? You were ingesting a psychedelic substance? What was it?
Yeah, this was my very first experience with DMT, Dimethyltryptamine, when I was around 20, 21 years old. I was at a friend's house. It was something that I had really wanted to try. This was back in the early 80s when hardly anybody knew what DMT was back then. It was pretty much only known to psychedelic aficionados, the use of DMT. I managed to take three large tokes of this very disgusting-tasting substance that tasted like burning plastic when I was smoking it. After about the third hit, I was way higher than any experience I've ever had with LSD or any other psychedelic experience. Suddenly, I felt myself just burst like I was going through a membrane into another reality where I was able to see 360 degrees all at once simultaneously. I saw elf-like creatures diving into tubular-like machines. Within just a few seconds, this mantid-like creature noticed me and came over and pinned me to the ground and began what it was experimenting on me, experimenting on my brain or fine-tuning my brain or adjusting something in my brain. It was producing all these different intensities, synesthetic intensities that were like all of my senses going at once. It was measuring something and adjusting something as it was doing this. It was actually a terrifying experience. When I came back from that experience, absolutely dumbfounded about the reality of it. It seemed so incredibly real. The word people use is "realer than real" with these types of experiences. It left me with this incredibly staggering sense of, is there really a reality to this? A day has not gone by since I had that experience wondering about that. That was largely the motivation for doing the book. What the creature actually looked like, I think you asked. It was like a six-foot-tall praying mantis, a giant creature that had somewhat humanoid-type—it wasn't completely insectoid. There were some humanoid-quite aspects to it. The really weird thing about it was the face on the creature. It had the body of a praying mantis, pretty much, but it had my face. It was my own face on this creature. And in retrospect, when I thought about this over the years, I was doing neuroscience research at the time at NYU, and I was wondering if it was trying to show me from the perspective of the animal, the laboratory animal, what it was like to be experimented on. There was a personal message in that for me as well. It was basically a terrifying experience, but absolutely mind-blowing and compelling, nonetheless. Like I said, I have not gone a day without not thinking about that experience.
So it would seem as if it was a turning point in your life.
Yeah. It's harder for me to articulate, but there was some type of change that occurred. I didn't quite see the world in the same way. It was almost like whatever adjustments or fine-tuning it did, it made me see the world differently. I have a harder time putting that into words, exactly what it did, but I somehow just feel like when certain things happen in my life, it just suddenly brings me back to that moment. I feel like it was due to what seemed like the fine-tuning or the adjustments that were being done in my brain at the time.
The person I studied, Ted Owens, claimed that after he had this experience himself of his brain being operated on, he developed unusual psychokinetic abilities, able to control hurricanes, volcanoes, tornadoes, earthquakes, droughts, hot weather, cold weather, and he became a healer, things of that sort. Have you found any sort of paranormal abilities associated with that change that occurred so many years ago?
It's so funny that you just said that, because I actually had an experience fairly recently where during a very profound psychedelic experience, there was a rainstorm going on. We experienced a tornado, which in my area of northern California has never happened. It happened literally within one block of my house, this tornado. It happened during the peak of the psychedelic experience. I don't think that I caused it, but I feel like I was in touch with something, some type of energy that was affecting the possibility of a tornado and my brain at the same time. It's funny that you say that because I never really thought that I was influencing the weather, but there was that uncanny experience. I've certainly had my share of synchronicities. I have incredible synchronicities all the time. I have premonitions that have come true. I have a lot of dreams where I experience things that end up happening. I'm not sure. It's like I've said, I started doing psychedelics and I had this experience with DMT when I was so young. It's hard to know how I would have evolved differently had I not had that type of experience. But it certainly is conceivable that I have these types of psychic and synchronistic experiences, maybe as a result of that DMT encounter when my brain was fine-tuned.
Well, of course, it's not everybody's path to have enormous psychokinetic abilities. I think a lot of people would say it's more trouble than it's worth, actually. But it also seems to be the case that people who use psychedelics are in general more open-minded about all of these realms of consciousness.
Oh, yeah. It's hard to say which came first, the chicken or the egg kind of thing, because people that are open-minded tend to be attracted to psychedelics. At the same time, it seems like psychedelics make you more open-minded. So, hard to say which comes first. But there's no question in my mind that my use of psychedelics has made me far more open to the possibility that reality is much bigger than I thought it was.
Well, a large part of your book addresses the question of, are these entities real? You quote many authors who have written about that very question. What is the ontological status of these entities? And you have some people who say, well, at base they're pure mental projections, and then there are other people who say, I think they're real. I'm under the impression that what your book ultimately suggests is that we human beings are interconnected with a vast range of realities. You could say we're interconnected at the quantum level, or you could say based on the mystical tradition, you know, we're one with everything. So, the question of whether these entities are within us or without us almost becomes irrelevant.
Yeah, I mean, I like to think of it, you know, this way. That's the big question. I mean, we ask so many people, and actually it's very rare for somebody who has had a breakthrough experience, a full-blown experience, to come back and say, oh, that was just a hallucination. There are some people who do say that, and I've encountered a few, but it's rare. Most people who have the experience come back and say, you know, it's as real as talking to you right now, Jeffrey. I mean, but then again, how do I know that you're real? I mean, at the same time, I mean, there's no real measure of consciousness. You know, I'm just inferring it and assuming it. You know, I like to think of it this way, that these things are all in my mind, but my mind is much bigger than my brain. So, my mind extends out—the universe is basically a mind, a universe, and encountering these beings, I think there's clearly a mental element to it in the sense that, you know, that your cultural background, your expectations certainly play a role in the type of beings. Beings can sometimes transform from demonic to angelic, you know, depending on your particular state of mind, what you attract into the experience. So, there's certainly, there's clearly a strong mental element involved in this. But whether they have an objective, independent reality, I mean, that's the big question. That's why we're so excited about the research they're doing at Imperial College and elsewhere where they're putting people under for extended duration. So, perhaps if we can gain more information from these entities, we can get more insight into whether they're actually real or not.
Well, it seems to me that whether they're real or not is almost a question of definition. That if you take the viewpoint that William James took in his book *Radical Empiricism*, any human experience is real. It's the most real thing that there can be, is simply an experience of consciousness.
Yeah, and that's all we really know. That's all that you can really know for sure is that you yourself exist and that you're having an experience. Those are the only things that you can be completely sure of—everybody else’s consciousness is an assumption, right? So, we may never know if anybody else is conscious, but the only conscious we know is that… the only consciousness that we know for sure is our own.
Sarah, you've created so many wonderful, amazing images for this book. I have the feeling that many of your images appear toward the end of the book. They deal with angels, they deal with fairies. Were you drawn more to certain of these entities than to others?
That's a good question. I feel like in general throughout my DMT experiences I've seen a couple different variety of entities. Fairly early on I interpreted them as jesters, and I found that kind of funny personally because I had a fear of clowns growing up, and so that was kind of like a novel twist on it, but it was also in a way an invitation to take it on as kind of an ambassadorship. And so a lot of my exploration of art and visionary art with DMT has been relating to the other and sort of exploring the nature of what that communication is. And a lot of that has moved from clowning and actually attending clown school and becoming a clown to nature spirits and more ritual-based performance art and things like that. There's a few pieces of my art that are from earlier parts of my catalog throughout my life, and then there's the work that I made exclusively for the book. But I would say that there's quite a bit of sort of like a... I'm drawn to the fairy-like and angelic and feminine aspects when I relate to DMT entities and want to express them in the world in my art. But as far as my personal experiences, sometimes they tend to be a little bit more strange or abstract. I've encountered octopus entities on spaceships. I've encountered machine elves and clowns, and in my experience working on the book, I couldn't help but feel like they're almost a spectrum and that they're outside of our ability to easily categorize them. And so sometimes the different qualities that we experience in the trip will sort of meta-tag with a word. We might experience an entity that looks humanoid but is imbued with fractals, and somebody might think those fractals look more harlequin-like, somebody might think they look more machine-like. And so I think that dovetailing what David said earlier that it's colored in a way by people's cultural orientation, and I think that my personal relationship to how I interpret that experience has changed over the years. And that's kind of reflected in the variety of work that I created for the book.
I was particularly intrigued by the idea that's expressed in some of your artwork that the visionary experience may begin with a pattern. It could be like a mathematical pattern in the background, and that out of that pattern will emerge at times a figure that seems to have a personality. But sometimes it's just the pattern itself that is speaking.
That's been a very predominant hallmark, at least in my own personal experiences, as well as a lot of the art I've seen from people in the visionary art community. Just earlier today, David shared a piece with me that remarkably like my first few DMT trips, and it was really validating to be able to see that together the community is creating this cartography of the landscape. We're sort of creating the map by which we can identify these different archetypes and sort of understand the underlying communication that might be happening through them. Whether that's a reflection of our own mind or something outside of it, that there is that really unique continuity.
You also talk about, for example, animal spirits and the shamanistic kinds of…typically, I think shamans work with spirits associated with animals. But I don't suppose that a machine elf that seems almost mechanical is necessarily any different from an eagle or a bear spirit.
In my personal opinion, as sophisticated as human beings become, I still think that nature is the most sophisticated technology on the planet. Just the mechanisms of RNA in and of itself being more durable in the way they're constructed than any geological formation on the planet. That little factoid lives in my mind rent-free for years just because it's such a great example of the majesty that we're only just beginning to understand, and so when I think of technology… there was a great quote by a computer scientist that I came across just the other day where he was describing that consciousness isn't a construct. It's not invention. It's not something that we invented, whereas computation is. Consciousness is the substrate that we emerge from before we even get to theorizing anything. I kind of think of DMT as a technology of consciousness. And even some of my earliest trips, I remember seeing these amazing sort of Mesoamerican hieroglyphics, little pictographs, and they in and of themselves, their angular quality, had an almost technological aspect to it. So that kind of ancient futurism is definitely something woven throughout many people's interpretations of DMT art. And yet you have the famous phrase, I guess pronounced initially by Terence McKenna, a fellow I've had the pleasure of interviewing a number of times while he was alive. Why the machine-like quality to…
Some of these images? I think that I'm going to, I want to go back to a Philip K. Dick quote I really like, and I think that he might have even been paraphrasing somebody else, but any kind of sophisticated enough technology is going to look like magic. And so in a way, we're seeing these structures and things that we can't quite wrap our head around, and it looks sophisticated to us. And I think that that quality is the thing that keeps me coming back with that ontological question, is it real? Because it's something so fantastic and outside of my imagination's ability to create, you know, I could never imagine some of the things that I've seen on DMT with the kind of detail and fractal and sophistication and even geometric stuff, just that the math alone is amazing.
That's one of the reasons why I'm so excited about the new research that's coming out with brain imaging and the DMTx studies, is we might still have an opportunity to find math forms that we've never been able to tap into in this dimension, but we might be able to bring them back with some of the new technology we're getting access to. Well, I think that could be a very important line of research.
I wonder, in the images that you created using various AI systems, they are incredibly detailed, and you point out that if you were to try and duplicate those manually with all the fine detail, almost infinite it would seem, like a fractal. You could just keep going deeper and deeper and the patterns would keep expanding. It would have taken you months, I suppose, to create some of those images if you had to do them manually. Honestly, we've thought about this project for a number of years. We came up with this idea almost maybe a little over a decade ago, and you could spend a lifetime painting these things by hand, and even with digital art giving you a bit of an edge on it prior to AI, it would have taken an enormous amount of time and effort.
One of the cool things about using a limited language model, which is the backbone of what people call AI image generation, is that you're sort of tapping into this collective consciousness where people, in a way, are creating these aggregates of symbolism and what everybody agrees a fairy looks like. Everybody agrees an elf or a clown or a jester or a mantis, but then also tapping into, in a way, these fractal forms and these AI hallucinations that sort of go beyond what any one individual would imbue in an art piece. In a way, when I took on this project, I really wanted to be a paintbrush for the collective mind and not impose so much of my own personal experience, but still be inspired by it, more as a curator. I like to think of myself as a gallery curator of the collective consciousness in using those technologies rather than being a sole creator.
It was so much fun to explore these things. People sometimes think that you just plug in a prompt and you get an amazing image that pops out. Some of these images did take weeks and months to find the right blend of prompt as well as mixing images and feeding it back into the system and creating all kinds of recursive iterations just to sort of get it to push its own limits. Then from there, using upscaling technology where machine learning looks at the image and then makes it bigger in and of itself and feeds more into that fractal and detail.
It sounds, from your description, like a total left-brain process, maybe almost the opposite of actually having a DMT or an LSD experience. I think that the technical aspect is definitely left-brain, but the curation and the appreciation of the beauty and the forms and the composition and the colors, it was very easy for my brain to say, oh, I like this one over that one, or like, oh, that's the right track, and sort of just be, in a way, for lack of a better word, it felt like art was a bit of a divine guide in pointing me in the right direction, which images were going to be more faithful to that collective consciousness. It was kind of a collaboration with the universe and being taken on a wild ride. While there was that technical aspect of interfacing with the technology, that part was also fun, but then the reward in getting to see these beautiful images come together was definitely the carrot at the end of the stick that kept me going through the technical aspects.
Now, I think you've both been very careful in writing the book to go through the psychedelic literature and present experiences that people had on psychedelics with each of these particular entities. So, as a result, for example, well, you have gnomes and dwarfs, but they're, well, they're almost like the ones that might appear in a Disney film, but they're different. I feel like a lot of those aspects come out of the pre-established visual iconography of human culture, because in essence, these limited language models are looking at data that's already been shared online. Countless artists, renditions, photography, painting, films, illustrations, costumes, all kinds of things. And there's definitely some aesthetics that tend to, in what you would say in AI terms, have a higher weight in an algorithm. And so they have more of a presence when the language model goes to search for, oh, what does she mean by gnome? What does she mean by elf? Mantis. And so that kind of curation is when it comes into play where I had to sort of make artistic choices. What was going to be just weird enough, just psychedelic enough for people to be like, oh, yeah, that's trippy. But at the same time, universal enough that we all agree that that's a fairy or that's a goddess or that's a therianthrope, you know, or that might look like a demon or that's an angel, that sort of thing.
I would imagine that some of the images would be very hard to create, even with AI, like, for example, a being of light.
Yes, most definitely. Some of them were incredibly challenging. In particular, I think I probably spent an entire month working on the self-transforming machine elves. And I went through so many incredible iterations that were beautiful and that I definitely kept in my personal catalog. And that will definitely have, you know, their own life as pieces of art at some point. But there's also a lot of what we call in the industry, compositing. So a lot of these images were essentially variants of themselves. And there would be one or two features that I would key in on and say that that's indispensable. That's a really important part of this image. But there would be other images that were similar in composition and form, but there would be another element. And so a lot of these things were collaged together to create these crazy multi-dimensional beings. And so whether it was another one that was really challenging, oddly enough, was the goblins. Goblins were very hard for me. I think because on some level, I really wanted something that felt goblin-like but unique. And, you know, some cultural iconography is just really powerful, whether it's Brian Froud's work, creating goblins and gnomes and things like that. And so there's a lot of that imagery in the broader culture, or even the influence of something like Yoda. You know, he's kind of a space goblin. And so he has a really big presence in the collective imagination. And so just finding that sort of the crest of that wave and figuring out where it leads. But at the same time, letting it be trippy enough. And machine elves were also really challenging just because of that mechanistic quality. Because everybody in the visionary art field, even though our visions look similar, they're all very unique to our own style. And that's something that without using an artist's name, which is something that I ethically made a high priority not to do in the prompting with respect to my colleagues, as well as the genres in general. It was really interesting that the more established an archetype was in human culture, the easier it was for the limited language model to know what I was talking about. And the more fringe or newer a concept would be, like trans-mechanist hikes or machine elves, the more challenging it was to find a sort of aggregate for us to all key in on and recognize it as the same thing.
I thought, for example, and I suppose it's kind of ironic that one of your most beautiful images was, I think it was the devil or at least a demon.
The demonic seems to have a special beauty in the art you've created. There's a few in that chapter, but I think I know exactly which one you're talking about. And it was pretty mind-blowing to see that generated. And that came out of a number of iterations as well. But it's very biomechanical. It's very fractal and very rainbow, very mysterious, and definitely haunting. It has a quality where you're frightened of it, but you don't really want to look away right away. Because it's very intriguing. But yeah, that a lot of these images on some level were spooky to generate because it felt like I was peeking into something that not many people in, I mean, even with as many AI artists as there are, not many people have tackled that particular angle yet. So it had a spooky quality.
Well, it gives me a sense in speaking to you, Sarah, that for you at least, these images are very potent, potent to the point where you might as well say they are autonomous and alive. I feel like they are artifacts of an experience. I feel like in a way that they are kind of like compressed or crunched down hyperdimensional objects in a way. Their ability to evoke memories for people, their ability to, you know, intrigue curiosity, and just the emotional response that I experienced while creating them was very potent. And it's pretty life-changing to be able to interface with the technology like that. And it's been endlessly inspiring, you know, to the rest of my art practice in general.
You know, we were talking earlier about the DMT reports are kind of parallel with the alien abduction reports. The other line of reports that we used for the book were fairy sightings, and the fairy kidnappings, and the reports that people have had that, you know, prior to the whole alien abduction phenomena for centuries of being abducted by fairies. So that was the other line of research that we incorporated into the book.
Well, let me ask you this question, David. What was your goal in creating this book? I know Sarah was pretty clear about the process for her of creating the artwork, but what was your vision that this book would accomplish?
Well, the original vision, the original inspiration that we had when Sarah and I first came up with this idea around, I guess around a decade ago, was, you know, when I was a kid, I used to love those Golden Guide Nature field guides to 1000 amphibians, to non-flowering plants, to different types of animals and different species of plants. I collected them all, and I used to just love those books. And, you know, the original inspiration for this book was to create a book that was based upon that particular type of field guide, because we were just so astonished that there was such interesting continuity between all the different reports that people were seeing so many of the same types of beings.
In other words, it's sort of like the Audubon Guide to realms of consciousness.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, or the Golden Guide to interdimensional entities. You use the term hyperspace quite a bit to refer to these psychedelic, well, I'll call them spaces or realms that people have, as if you take an entheogen, you close your eyes, and all of a sudden you're somewhere else.
Yeah, well, by hyperspace I mean a spatial domain that has more than three dimensions. And it's very hard to put this into words because our entire language is based upon a three-dimensional reality. But almost everybody comes back from a breakthrough DMT experience with this. There's being able to see, you know, multiple sides of an object at once, seeing 360 degrees at once, and there's this kind of general feeling that you're seeing things in a hyperdimensional way. And this is really something separate. The DMT breakthrough experience is unique to doing a significant dose of DMT. The other psychedelics kind of hinted at this when you close your eyes, and there's kind of an overlap between realities. But when you do enough DMT, what Terence McKenna would call three big hits, you literally break through where your entire visual field is replaced by being in this other environment.
You asked earlier why there's so much technological and machine-like elements to these creatures. It's because this environment appears to be highly technological. I mean, you seem like you're in some kind of laboratory where there's machines, these futuristic machines, and there's this feeling of everything having kind of like a digital quality to it. So by hyperspace, I basically mean the environment that you break through on a significant dose of DMT where, you know, you look around and you're really there. I mean, for the duration of the experience, you are in a completely another world that's consistent and, as we know, is populated with beings that are hyper-intelligent.
Well, I think another major theme in your book are the religious entities. People believe that they're in contact with various deities, sometimes with God Almighty, the Creator, sometimes with Jesus Christ, sometimes with other demigods, and so on. That seems to be at least as prevalent as the mathematical machine-like experiences.
It's very common. I want to just distinguish those types of experiences where people are encountering Jesus or the Virgin Mary or Celtic deities or Hindu deities, that those experiences are different than the mystical experience where somebody, say, on a 5-MeO-DMT experience or on a high dose of LSD where they feel like they, you know, become the universe or they feel like they unify with God. Those types of experiences are different where you're actually encountering these beings that are entities that you have an I-Thou relationship with, that you're able to dialogue with. What's so interesting about these experiences, you know, I mentioned earlier how cultural expectations play a role, and sometimes people encounter deities like, you know, my ex-girlfriend had experiences with Kali, for example, and she didn't even know who Kali was at the time. It had yet to show her in the book, and she said, oh, that's the being that I saw during my Changa experience, you know. So it's sometimes people encounter these deities that have no cultural reference for, and it's not until they, you know, they see them in a book later or they describe them to somebody else that they realize that there's a whole cultural background to these types of beings.
Well, David and Sarah, this has been a wonderful experience for me to share with you. I'm probably not as experienced as you are in the realm of psychedelics. I've had a pure DMT experience. I've had ayahuasca once. For me, it was a very deep experience, actually, of the deity of Horus, of the ancient Egyptian god. For some reason during my ayahuasca trip, I felt like I was in an ancient Egyptian temple singing the praises of Horus as the most beautiful of gods.
Yeah, that's beautiful. Yeah, ayahuasca is definitely DMT, and there's a lot of overlap between the ayahuasca experience and the pure DMT experience, but they are different. The experience that I talked about earlier where when you do a large enough dose, you break through to another reality. With ayahuasca, you generally still have at least one foot in this reality, and one foot in another, like you're straddling two different realities. I've also noticed there seems to be a difference in the types of entities that people experience with ayahuasca. With ayahuasca, when they add the harmaline to it, there's something about the ancestor spirits come up more, earthbound spirits like plant spirits and nature spirits and animal spirits are really common with ayahuasca. With pure DMT, it tends to become more cosmic and extraterrestrial, strange creatures from other universes tend to be more common.
Well, let me ask you one final question just out of curiosity. I know in the parapsychological world when people go into altered states of consciousness, they often encounter deceased friends and relatives. Of course, each one would be a unique individual and may be hard to put in a book like yours. I don't know if there's a generic way to express a deceased person, but in your review of the literature, did you come upon that, people contacting the deceased?
Oh yeah, we have a section on ancestor spirits in the book, and I got quite a few reports about that. Not only from ayahuasca experiences especially, it's very common that people report reconciliations with people who have passed on. Also, I did a book on lucid dreaming recently, and that was also a very common encounter during lucid dreams for people who encounter somebody who just passed away and feel like they're able to have this final reconciliation that helps… helped to satisfy their feeling and making one final connection.
Well, I want to thank both of you very much for your time and the wonderful contributions you're making to bringing this material more to the forefront of our culture. It has been a great joy and I will follow your future work with considerable interest. Thank you so much for being with me.
Thank you very much, Jeffrey. This has been a great pleasure.
Thank you.
Indeed, thank you. It's been a wonderful pleasure for me. I want to encourage our viewers to take a good look at your book. It's a fabulous book. It would be a great addition to anybody's collection. And for those of you who are watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here.
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