AETHER
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DMT Portal

DMTx Breakthrough Panel Moderated by Graham Hancock, Dr Andrew Gallimore and Dr Rick Strassman

Panel discussion on psychedelic exploration. Curated by Noonautics, with writer and researcher Graham Hancock and renowned DMT expert, Dr. Andrew Gallimore hosting the panel, which consists of DMT research subjects at IImperial College London’s. The focus is the recent and groundbreaking extended DMT research: Carl Hayden Smith, Jack Allocca, Alexander Beiner, and Anton Bilton, who bring their personal narratives of traversing the extended DMT state. The focus of the discourse is on encounters with DMT entities and reevaluating preconceived notions of reality.

EXTRACT FROM PANEL TRANSCRIPT - Full video below.

Our current focus is Daniel McQueen’s DMTx project in Colorado. We are the fiscal sponsors and have just recently started accepting donations to fund the research to build a legal state of the art research institute that utilises this technology. We’re very excited to sponsor this panel today with the participants from Imperial College London’s groundbreaking new study on extended-state DMT, discussing their experiences while focusing specifically on DMT entity encounters. 

Here to help us moderate the discussion, we have special guests Graham Hancock, renowned psychedelic researcher and author, and Dr Andrew Gallimore, who developed the first model of extended-state DMT with Dr Rick Strassman. Thank you for your time and expertise gentlemen. We hope today will be one of many explorations into this fascinating research, and we look forward to more in the future. As a reminder, if you’re watching this live, there’ll be a Q&A session after the discussion – please comment and write in without further delay. Now, let’s get right into it. Thank you all again for joining us. First, we’re going to hand it over to Dr Gallimore.

Dr Gallimore: Just to kind of outline the structure of this event, I think it’s good that you get to know the people presenting today. First of all, it would make most sense to begin with the man that in a very real sense started it all those years ago. How many years ago now? Well, it’s getting on for 30 years, maybe, with some things like the man who did the large-scale DMT in humans. And that man is of course Dr. Rick Strassman. Would you like to speak, Rick?

Dr Rick Strassman: Yes, thank you, Andrew and the rest of the panelists and organisers. Let me say a few words about the whole idea. When I was performing the DMT work, one of the psychopharmacological questions that remained to be settled was whether it was possible to develop tolerance to DMT. It was impossible in lower animals – there was a cat study giving it every two hours for 21 days, and the cats continued responding normally, after even three weeks of repeated DMT dosing. There’s a human study at the NIMH giving it twice a day for five days or something intramuscularly, and there wasn’t any tolerance. So in our study, we decided it was important to see if tolerance could develop if it was a very closely spaced administration. And so we chose a half-hour interval, giving a full dose every half-hour four times in one morning, and there was no tolerance to the psychological effects. 

In the DMT book, The Spirit Molecule, towards the end of the book, I suggested a continuous infusion would maybe be a means by which the state can be studied more carefully and also have some therapeutic relevance, because you could turn up and turn down the state of intoxication depending on the need of the patient or client at that time. So then, a few years later, Andrew and I put the paper together, which came out in Frontiers. Andrew approached me and we divided the task. He came at it from the confusion, protocol perspective, and I included or contributed the clinical relevance in the paper, and so things have been taking off since then.

Dr Gallimore: Okay, thank you very much, Rick, for that background. Now I will introduce my co-moderator for this session – the incomparable inspiration, the insightful and the occasionally controversial Mr Graham Hancock.

Graham Hancock: Thank you, Andrew. Yes, it’s a pleasure to join you all. I am fascinated by the entity and counter-aspect of the DMT experience ever since an entity appeared to me during a series of Ayahuasca sessions and gave me the plot for an entire novel. Since then, I’ve found it fascinating and I’m really intrigued to hear what the volunteers have got to report.

Dr Gallimore: So as Rick said, we produced this module together back in 2016, the idea being to extend to stabilise the brain DMT levels over time using this target-controlled intravenous infusion technology. And we developed this kind of ‘proof of principle’ model for this really, but it was certainly never human-ready, so to speak. And fortunately for us, the pioneering Imperial College team in London, particularly, for the DMTx project led by Chris Timmerman and Lisa Luan PhD student actually headed this study. So while myself and Rick might have lit a spark, if you like, and piqued interest in the potential of DMTx, we can’t take credit for the work that’s been done by the Imperial team. So I think we should give them their due credit. But perhaps even more importantly than that are the interacted voyagers who volunteered for this kind of breakthrough technology. And there are four of the 11 total volunteers that we have here today. So I will begin with subject zero, the first person to receive the DMTx. So Carl, can you briefly introduce yourself.

Carl: I’ve been doing cognitive science for 25 years, so I am really interested in how we use technology to learn. That’s led me to all sorts of different areas of research, including perceptual science and neuroscience and looking at how we advance perception. I’m very much interested in the ways of technologies becoming available through substances like DMT. So lots of research in dissociative space as well looking at ketamine analogues, etc. But I’m very interested in the antigens as well.

Dr Gallimore: Thank you, Carl. And I don’t know if it is actually subject one or two, but Alexander Beiner, would you like to introduce yourself?

Alexander Beiner: I’m Alexander Beiner. I don’t know what subject number I was, but I am a writer and also a cultural commentator. I’m also one of the directors of Breaking Convention, which is Europe’s largest conference on psychedelic science and culture. So I suppose my interest has always been in terms of psychedelics, how we can gain information from those experiences and apply them directly to changing the world we live in. So the kind of original counterculture promise of the psychedelic ’60s is something I’m very drawn to, albeit in a new and different way – a bit more complex than we needed back then. So my interest in the trial was very much that question of what can happen as we go into different realities, whatever they may be, and come back with useful information. And so of course, the encounters with entities is perhaps with this kind of DMT experience, one of the main avenues where we might receive information, as Graham mentioned – whether that’s a whole novel or a different social system, or something deeply personal. So that was really my interest. And the trial certainly delivered on that in many different ways, as we shall see.

Dr Gallimore: Thank you very much, Alexander. Jack, can you speak next?

Jack: Hi there. I’m a pharmacologist, and an engineer. I’ve been involved in psychedelic pharmacology since 2008. I was giving animal labs, all sorts of psychedelics to see how that perturbed their sleep architecture, and then moved on from there to get a PhD, Melbourne, neuroscience. I’ve specialised in the study of consciousness, trying to cover as many verticals as possible from sleep science, academic pharmacology, and animals or wild species. And then all the way to artificial intelligence, because I also work a fair bit in the engineering of that. I have a small tech company that works in data analytics for consciousness research. They collaborate with many labs, including the Imperial College team, and they’ll help with the data analytics for the MDX. 

I’ve also always had a keen interest in experiencing all different types of altered states personally, as well. So I’ve split-tested dozens, if not close to 100 different psychoactive compounds and different altered-state modalities. And so for me, the MDX experiment has been a natural evolution of both my academic, industrial and personal explorations. And I’ve always been interested in seeing identity first and foremost, which is so overwhelming in the visual phenomenological aspect. I’ve tapped in and out a lot. I’ve also done a lot of different experimentations with different formulations of DMT, DMT salts as well. So this was not my first time with DMT fumarate. It’s very special to see how an extended state can equip the mind to become used to something as new and radical as DMT, which usually is so rapturous just for 5 to 10 or 15 minutes, where you are completely taken away. And so this was my interest in terms of DMTx and it’s definitely delivered beyond expectations. Very excited to be with you all to discuss it.

Dr Gallimore: Excellent. Thank you, Jack. And last, but certainly not least, Mr Anton Bilton.

Anton Bilton: Hello, I’m Anton Bilton. I'm the co-founder of the Turing Initiative, formed in 2015 to explore entheogenic entity encounters. I’m subsequently enthused by Rick and Andrew’s novel ideas with extended infusion. We have worked with Robin Carhart-Harris, Chris and Lisa in funding the experiments at Imperial. My interest personally lies in communion with the sentient other. And I’m hopeful that from the experiences we’ve had today, and as we progress, we will work into that field and seek guidance from these entities. Thank you.

Dr Gallimore: Thank you, Anton. Okay, so first of all, I will ask a few general questions about the DMTx process and experience, and then in the second half, Graham will take over and he will be probing, more specifically, entity experiences, which I think many of you are here to hear about. So analysts, avoid talking too much about entities in the first half – bring them up later if you could. Okay, so what I'd like to do is ask these questions logically, from the beginning of the experience prior to the beginning of these infusion sessions, and work forward towards the end, probing through, if you like, the experience from beginning to end. 

So the first thing I should ask you all is when you went into this DMTx suite at Imperial College, this is obviously a completely new way of doing DMT. You’re all experienced DMT users because that was a prerequisite to being part of the study. But this was completely new. So did any of you employ any kind of specific preparation or coping mechanisms or other techniques prior? Even during the actual extended-state experience? Maybe Ally, can you start with that?

Alexander Beiner: Yeah, sure. Just coping is important, but also thriving and being able to navigate the space well, so I would add that in. Personally, I really went for it. As soon as I signed up for the study, I stopped drinking, and I was working with a coach called Trish Blaine who specialises in navigating non-ordinary experiences and does weekly sessions. So I used a lot of different techniques. One of the mantras I had was Terence McKenna’s line where the entity said, “Don’t give way to amazement”. This, especially in the first few minutes of the experience, is very overwhelming. So that was a mantra I had. 

I’m going to try and use different techniques like meditation, breath work and intentional curiosity. It’s a kind of attitudinal technique, which I found very important in order to not give way to amazement, particularly in those first few minutes. I’m curious to hear everyone else’s experience. Certainly for me, they were as intense as vaporising DMT, and then it would level off. So there was coping for that. And then the levelling off as things became easier to navigate – it was more of a question of concentration, focus and discernment. I meditate anyway, but mindfulness meditation and concentration meditation is what I was doing, and I found that very useful, also remembering to breathe as well – that’s very important.

Dr Gallimore: Okay, thank you. Carl, do you have anything to add, anything you did?

Carl: Yeah, very similar to Ali. But I also realised it was a process of mutual exchange, and this idea of giving yourself over to them to be explored is kind of the price of admission. And by allowing them to explore me, I get to know them. Similar in terms of a diet – no drugs, no caffeine, no alcohol. Also, no orgasms for a month, just to see how that would actually affect the trip. And it radically ramped up the intensity. So I think the coping mechanism is very much treating it as a DMT Church for three months, and I think having done a lot of novel dissociatives really helped cope with this experience.

Dr Gallimore: Okay, thank you – a little bit too much detail perhaps! Jack?

Jack: I think I am actually lucky to be a corporal, in the sense that at least half of my sessions I was jet lagged and sleep-deprived, and not particularly prepped in any shape or form. Besides the fact that the decade and a half of experimentation definitely prepped me for something that was extremely intense. I can say that I definitely did a relatively good job at cleaning up my system in terms of daily substances, so I have not touched any caffeine in over three years now, and don't have any relationship with daily substance use of any type. So I could go into that space, not withdrawing from any substance, or having my mind tempted into thinking what would they be like if I was still engaging with the sedatives of, of mod? 

So this worked out for me in many other ways. Yeah, the body load can be pretty strong during the MDX. I have deployed a certain number of controlled breathing exercises to alleviate that. And I think also my knowledge of pharmacology and biochemistry, on a top-down level, helped me reassure myself that this was not a toxic thing I was doing to myself, because after a few minutes, knowing that you’re one of the very first people in the world ever to go through something like this brings some apprehension. And you’re like, “What am I doing to myself?” – like, at some point, even the cannulas start feeling very weird. And there’s a tingling, this burning, there’s pain and the mind can really go in any direction. Having both a deep prior relationship with DMT and adequate knowledge of physiology can help control some of the more disrupting fear and panic responses. So I didn't do anything idiosyncratic to DMTx in terms of preparation, just trying to lead the cleanest and most resilient day-to-day psychological standpoint, which is what I’ve done anyway for years.

Dr Gallimore: Okay. Thank you, Jack. So finally, Anton, do you have anything to add there? 

Anton: I’d like to echo that Ali and Carl’s abstinence is very relevant to me. I brought the same reverence to it, which is four to six weeks of no sex, no drugs, no alcohol, lots of meditation, effectively bringing a focused reverence and notion of sacredness to something that I see as mystical and important. So what I’ve always found with that is the greater your focus, the clearer the visions and the connection is. So I found that, although in the early stage, there was a lot of disassociation with the first minute or so, once I’d settled, it was a good experience. But I’ll come on to that when we talk about entities. Thank you. 

Dr Gallimore: Fabulous. Thank you, Anton. Okay. I think all of you prepared your body and your mind, you set your intent to remain calm, not give into your astonishment, I think is what Terence McKenna used to say, quite a lot. 

So let’s get straight into it then. So maybe you can talk us through compared to when everyone's kind of reasonably familiar, whether in first person or not subjectively or not, with a normal kind of bolus or smoked DMT experience? Can you kind of talk us through a typical DMT experience from beginning to end? So, did this kind of initial roller-coaster phase – did that end? Did it stabilise? Did the experience seem to evolve? Or did it reach a kind of set point over time? So if you just, briefly, but succinctly in detail, talk us through it? So maybe Carl, you can start since you were subject zero on this?

Carl: Yeah, thanks, Andrew. I think if anything, there was more movement than usual. And that was like you had to stabilise yourself inside that movement. And it was like a kaleidoscope of interfaces where I was being processed through and scanned through those layers, where I was kind of experiencing glimpses of alternate lives. And the most profound experience I had on the largest dose was being in a five-MEO DMT experience. So there was definitely a difference for me from the usual DMT experience to actually have it extended. It led to this experience where I was experiencing a disc at the bottom of the bed, and realising that there’s not the universe like a black hole, but it was like a unity space. I could recognise it as what I would normally experience in a five-MEO DMT experience, and the phenomenology of that you’re experiencing yourself as light, with an a non-dual experience where there’s no subject/object, I’m just experiencing this disc at the bottom of the bed, and I’m trying to understand how I can get into it. 

And then there was kind of a sort of takeover of the space – it felt like there was an alien invasion inside the DMT experience where the disc cracked apart, and suddenly, I’m like, “Oh, my God, what’s gonna happen now,” thinking that there might be something negative, but actually, what was revealed was a plurality of unities behind the disc. And for me, that was a real difference from the usual DMT experience. 

Dr Gallimore: So it seemed like it progressed, but rather than stopping in a bolus would the normal kind of DMT smoked, or whatever it felt like, it was pushing and pushing further and further the longer that you remained. That infusion. 

Carl: Yeah, exactly. It felt as if I was being shown much more of the secret knowledge that you would not normally experience in a standard DMT experience. And I was kind of bridging the dimensions inside this wild experience.

Dr Gallimore: So it makes you wonder, then, if you extended it to an hour or two, three, four or five hours, where you might end up? But that’s for the future. So how about you Ali? Would you like to describe your typical DMTx experience?

Ali: Yeah. So I would say that my biggest surprise, actually, from the experience was that it had a continuity to it through the experience of teachings and interpersonal lessons, as well as metaphysical experiences. That reminded me a lot, honestly, of Ayahuasca, but different as well. And maybe a little bit controversially, as in some traditions in the Amazon, the teacher is seen as the Banisteriopsis, the vine, and the DMT is kind of an admixture. Having done Ayahuasca maybe 50–60 times, and also having sat with by the Banisteriopsis Caapi, my experience is very much that what I interpret as the teaching, the lessons and the deep insights from Ayahuasca was very much what I experienced on DMT x, which was a huge surprise to me. I did not expect that at all. 

So there was a sense of when it came in, initially, those first two or three minutes were very similar to vaporising DMT – a kind of very intense rush. Consistently after that, I would find myself in the same place, which was a kind of geometric cavern, it was always the same, and weirdly, superimposed on that occasionally, was a playground like one I walked past with my cousin three months before that has no emotional resonance for me whatsoever, but it was always there. So there are kind of echoes I think of in Rick Strassman’s study of this sense of a nursery that was there, but there wasn’t a sense that anyone was in the nursery, it was almost experienced like a holding room. 

And then what would happen is I would break through that in some way, and then things would get extremely wild. And it would be extremely full of entities and full of encounters and full of different realms. That was what it felt like – I felt like there were often different portals to go through. However, the most striking thing was that my first experience was very much around an unresolved relationship in my life. And I’m really going into the depths of that, which is very healing and totally unsurprising. And the message was, “You don’t need to see aliens, you need to work on your stuff.” And that was kind of a theme throughout, even though there were a lot of encounters until the last dosing, which I won’t go into now, but was a very intense overview effect would be the mystical experience I would describe. So really a lot of biographical stuff. But it also had a kind of teaching – I call it the teaching presence – which I interpreted as a kind of back-and forth-dialogue with whatever it might be – me, the DMT, or something else. So that was quite a surprise. That’s not something I’ve ever experienced from vaporising DMT, but it might just be because you don’t have enough time to really land and make sense of what’s going on. But that was my sense of it.

Dr Gallimore: Thank you. So Jack, it seems from what they just said that it’s clear that there’s a huge multiplicity of fracture and realms within this space that you were perhaps able to explore more thoroughly within the DMTx experience with this extended infusion. Was that your experience too?

Jack: Well, there is a lot to say. But I think there’s really an imperative of understanding the context as well, because we’re trying to compare with a traditional DMT experience, where the traditional DMT experience may be in a festival, or in a room full of pillows and friends – but this really wasn’t like that in any shape or form, like how I like to describe the DMT set-up, in that in many ways, it’s almost like an alien abduction one on one. It’s almost like a bad-trip machine – you are literally being probed. And it’s not figurative, it’s literally you are being probed, blood is being taken out of you every few minutes, here in a bed surrounded by strangers in a clinic, you’re bound to have a different phenomenological experience. And that really needs to be stressed, because the context is intense in the DMT clinical setting. 

And for me, funnily enough, every single experience was quite different. There was some analogy between them, but they were very, very different. Echoing Ali, I also experienced a bit of a narrative. And also to me it compared well enough to some aspects of farm Ayahuasca, which I’ve experienced extensively as well. So depending on what monoamine oxidase inhibitor you use, you may tap into a similar space, whether it's phenazine or moclobemide . And, yeah, ingested crystal DMT can take you to a similar space for quite a few minutes, potentially even for the same amount of time as DMTx. So I’m starting to ponder whether an intravenous delivery is imperative or not. Although Ayahuasca can be absolutely debilitating, even for the body that is very strong in this experience, we may not necessarily need to go the intravenous route. 

And, yeah, if I have to go into details for me, funnily enough, the very first experience, the lowest dose, had the most distinct entity generation, while the other ones were a lot more chaotic than smoking DMT. And in some ways, it wasn’t even as strong as vaporising DMT, even at the highest dose, and now we know what the dosage is. And I think that the level of blood concentrations of DMT vaporised would still hit the receptors harder than the DMTx. We also need to take that into account. But, for me, it was a mix of cognitive and emotional developments and our life review that Ali also talked about – there was a lot of problem-solving, a lot of inquiry into my history, money problems, my traumas, my future opportunities. And the beauty of the DMTx, similar to Ayahuasca, is that it really gives you time to go past the initial ontological shock and really savour an actual real narrative within yourself. So that is definitely very special within the DMTx.

Dr Gallimore: Thank you very much, Jack. So Anton, it seems that with this extended protocol, it gives you more time – there is more of a narrative that can develop; there seems to be a greater opportunity to explore the various realms within the DMT space. Can you talk a little bit about that, Anton, whether it was the same for you compared to regular DMT?

Anton: Yeah, I’d like to start on the notion of the setting. There are two unusual things here: one being in a hospital with cannulas in your arms and life support crew nearby; and the other one, of course, is at the time of taking it, it is undisclosed. So whereas when you’re smoking it, when you’re going in here, you are lying there waiting for what felt like a very long wait. 

The thing that shocked me was that when it hit me, from the ends of my toes to the top of my head instantly, there was no force. And this wasn’t like having an injection in your arm where you get a warmth across your chest, or a taste of metal in your mouth. It was instant, everywhere. As if my energetic field was somehow being turned on, like a bulb. So I was very disorientated at the beginning because I didn’t know who I was, where I was, what I was. And of course, you lose time. It took some time to remember being in a taxi. Then I worked out I was in a taxi on Earth, a human being, where it was like going – “Oh, Imperial, oh, shit. I’m the guy in the experiment right now!” And then I fell down. And the sense of entities was about eight out of 10 entities around me instantly. And I’ll come on to those. 

In terms of assimilation, I think that’s what you’re talking about, Andrew? How do you assimilate? How do you get comfortable so that you can then become an explorer or navigate? I spent another two hours there because it was really, really good. I assimilated? Well, there was a swerve about halfway through when I went from eight to nine, because I shifted, I didn’t experience shifting from one place to another set of entities altogether, completely different. And that sort of upset me at that moment, because I couldn’t quite work out how or why it was shifting. But to answer your question, yeah, I think if you’re in there, and you know, you’re comfortable. You just wish you could stay longer. It was a good point and exploring well.

Dr Gallimore: Did you get the sense that you were able to, in some sense, intentionally navigate and explore, or were you simply carried or thrown around?

Anton: Mainly, not carried or thrown around? I mean, I find in terms of what’s regular for me, in terms of position, I’m usually on what seems to be the floor and probably bodiless. But the way the entities are looking at me, they’re looking down. And the analogy I give is the wounded pigeon in London – the little children come running out. “There’s a wounded pigeon!” and then the adults go, “No, no, no, leave it alone. We’re not sure if he’s dead, or whether he’s on DMT, let’s check.” But they are sort of around you. And you’re just sitting there and their world is going on around you. 

I’ve had other moments where you can navigate, you can move intentionally, but it’s not like walking – you sort of imply a movement forward and you move forward. So that was okay. 

Dr Gallimore: Thank you, Anton. So perhaps we are just jumping through the questions here. Because of time, but perhaps just one question – yes? 

Speaker: Yeah. So I was wondering if any of you with the effects. If the intensity tapered or if there was tolerance over the space of the infusion?

Dr Rick Strassman: Yeah, Carl, you want to answer that? 

Carl: I think it stayed pretty much a very… I mean, it’s only 30 minutes, right. So you’re not experiencing tolerance. See, I think it’s interesting. And the paper from Lisa actually acknowledged that the heart rate seems to stabilise, I think that’s true. I think the intensity, I mean, if I think about my experience, yeah, there’s definite phases to the experience. And you could argue that the end of the experience is a little bit less intense. I would say,

Rick.

Dr Gallimore: And while I’ve got you there, Carl, so many people have been sort of asking, and they said, “Well, you know, a three-minute DMT trip feels like 100 years; does a 30-minute DMT trip feel like 100,000 years? Or I know you told me that they actually told you, they were communicating with you about the time. So did you sense that this was a longer trip? Would you think you would have known or felt like this wasn’t good, the normal peak? If they hadn’t told you?

Carl: Yeah, even being told the time. I mean, you can’t really register time in the same way. And there’s certainly phases that you’re going through that seem to defy a sense of time, but in terms of my experience, I would have a world space where I'm very, very much in a different ontological experience. And then there’s a window on to that world space. 

And then as Ali was saying, there’s like a mirror space where you’re really just being shown your own life. And it’s very moral. It’s certainly not recreational. I think the message I was receiving is “Live well, you’ve won the jackpot being human, and it’s kind of revered in the whole cosmos. But it’s a super short experience, so don’t get caught up in trying to hoard stuff because you know, you’re literally in a dream state and you’re passing through. But get to know yourself as a light object or a light being so you can build the solar body to pass through death intact.” So very much the message of human equals jackpot/void equals norm. 

And yeah, in terms of time, it was very much I think there’s more time there because there’s more space there, you’re sort of being an unfolded into different types and different forms of space, different forms of consciousness, different ontologies of being, I think that what they are, if there’s a day, they have very different ontologies. On that side, the thinking/feeling/being what we consider our existence here, I think they have very different forms of that than this.

Dr Gallimore: Okay, thanks, Carl. So clearly, there’s this sense from all of you so far that you are receiving information, there’s certainty, whatever form that might take. The question, again, that a lot of people are asking is, many people really do struggle, as the information kind of floods through them at a great rate. And then when they get back, it’s all gone. Terence McKenna used to say it was like “liquid gold dripping through your fingers”, or something. You really struggle to hold on to and recall your trip. And I think many people, including myself, struggle with that. 

So perhaps, Ali, do you think that being in there longer – did that help or hinder your actual recall and your ability to actually bring information and recall the details of the experience when you came back?

Ali: Yeah, it did, it did definitely help. Because maybe this is more of a narrative, you know, there’s an actual process, and there’s different encounters. And one thing leads to another, sometimes in very unexpected ways. And so that’s why it’s quite memorable. 

Also, without giving too much detail about the study design, we did recount what happened very shortly afterwards. And that actually helps tremendously. I believe Chris Bache, who wrote LSD in the Mind of the Universe, who did like 70 LSD trips over 20 years or so, he used to do that – the next day, he would sit with the same music and the same position, and recount it. It’s incredibly effective at making sure that you remember what’s happened. So that was very useful. 

For me personally, by the fourth, sorry, the fifth dosing, which was the fourth one that wasn’t a placebo, but an actual dosing, I was already writing my book, which is coming out next month. And in it, I recount a lot of my dosings. And so I had this decentred mindset of I’m not paying attention to my experience in order to recount it. That was, though consistent for all of us in some way. Because like Carl said, we were being asked to rate in real time the DMTx experience. So what that does is it forces you to de-centre – to take a step back from the content of your experience, and watch it objectively. And that also helps a lot as well. Because if you’re asked, “Entities, yes or no?” and you go, “I’ll talk about that later”, that question becomes somewhat absurd at certain points. But for example, asking you to rate your anxiety from zero to 10, you have to check in with yourself and ask, “Okay, how am I doing right now? How am I feeling? What’s going on?” One time I gave a rating on an entity like four, and the interviewer was like, “Really? Four? Is that all?” And it was quite memorable. So basically, I would say it helped quite a bit to be there longer as well. It’s just stories unfolding.

Dr Gallimore: Yeah. It seems to me that out of the initial shock, also, it’s going to disrupt your ability to recall these things, whereas if you can form a narrative – because the brain likes stories, the brain likes narratives, rather than just lots and lots, a flood of information – it makes more sense. So that’s cool. That’s what we were hoping, that it would be a much better way for people to bring information back from the experience. So okay.

Anton Bilton: Yeah, I think there’s two different ways to look at this. And I think the DMTx both makes it easier to recall information and harder, because when you’re just smoking DMT in one bolus, you are given this very intense and dense experience. And then you come out. And you can riff on that. 

When you are in that experience for about an hour, sometimes you get saturated images and also somewhat exhausted, so that when you come out of it, you have all of these slides that are packed onto one another. And you may be able to recall some bits and pieces that were the most salient or intense. But it’s not that you can recall the whole hour, a lot of things kind of get them fused together and more often. And so I wouldn’t want to give the idea to the listeners that you can just go through a whole hour of DMT, just reviewing it, as a lot of things can get very, very confusing. And it’s a little bit like a dream recall as well. And sometimes the value of just having a pre-packaged, intense and short experience can actually help with recall. 

And in terms of the DMT tolerance, the DMTx protocol also has some nuanced limitations, in the sense that at the beginning, you’re given a big bolus, and then there is an infusion thereafter. So this actually discombobulates your ways to assess intensity. And so for me, the first two experiences, there was a tapering off – in fact, the very first time I had a pretty shocking burst surge that then would go down. And I would really struggle to see whether my system was actually adapting, or I received much more DMT during the bolus and during the infusion, which is totally possible. And on the highest doses, instead, there was no tapering whatsoever, it plateaued quite well. So I would definitely try to look at it under that lens. But yeah, I think it’s both easier and harder to recall. And at the level of time, it was time away all of the time. And yeah, that pinging every minute or so about the experience, of course anchors you even further. So until we have a true infusion with no external stimulus, we may not be able to tell really whether time distortion is really occurring or not. It’s pure speculation at this point.

Dr Gallimore: Yeah, it seems like as Timothy Leary attempted to do back in the ’60s, we need some way of real-time communication, some kind of system, perhaps with advances in things like AI and stuff, kind of thing might become possible, or a neural readout people are talking about, but I think we’re quite a long way from that kind of thing. 

Okay, I am cognisant of time, so I’m just going to kind of ask one final question before I will hand it over to Graham for the end. So at the end of your DMTx sessions, did any of you experience any kind of unexpected or unusual after-effects that you weren’t expecting? 

Okay, you're nodding your head there Ali. So maybe you just want to continue? Briefly?

Ali: Yeah, I’ll be brief because I didn’t get to answer the last one. Yeah, the after-effects, particularly between the first and the second dosing, are very intense synchronicity experiences. In fact, these were in some ways more intense and stranger than any of the dosings, except perhaps the last dosing, so I think this is something I’ve certainly heard people report particularly with Ayahuasca, so I don’t know if it’s a quality of the after-effect of DMT. 

But you could explain some of those experiences, as me being more heightened and seeing more connections in the world, sort of heightened, but I also had experiences where I thought I recognised someone and went over to the street, and it turned out not to be them. But the person I thought it was had killed themselves two days before, but I didn’t even know that – Like, wow, really weird stuff, really weird. So that was actually much harder to make sense of and to sort of stay agnostic about and practise the kind of internal science around that than a lot of the actual experiences. So I think there is an interesting research to be done around synchronous experiences and DMT, DMTx specifically, because I think the longer you’re in, perhaps it enhances it in some way. 

Dr Gallimore: Interesting. So, Carl, I know, you had a particularly strange after-effect, if I’m right. 

Carl: Yeah, well, many actually, I think would call them abilities more than effects. But one thing was definitely a sense of precognition inside the experience. So seeing my future mind state, having done a lot of interesting experiments with other substances very intentionally, but maybe pushing the boundaries a bit too far and seeing six months hence where that would take me – so really not understanding what what was being shown to me in the DMT experience, but then living it six months later, was super-fast. 

Then Jack actually came to me after one of his DMT infusions, and warned me about the experiments I was doing, that they may be taking me down the wrong path. So that was doubly interesting that he was also having some sort of maybe precognition as well. 

But other experiences, I would say, certainly a greater ability and telepathy was something that I experienced afterwards. I think one of the main things that happens is telepathic communication inside the DMT journeys with the entities – that seems to be the way they communicate with you. So that again was some sort of literacy that I developed. And I think that was enhanced because of the extended-state overview effects. I think having this kind of multiplicity understanding of consciousness and understanding that we live in one timeline, but maybe there are multiple timelines that were not not normally available, that aren’t normally available to our limited bandwidth. It’s also vision – having 360 vision when I was having that experience with the with the cracked five-MEO DMT experience revealing the multiplicity of unities. I was actually given a key inside the experience, and it was being delivered right through these or tentacles, in multiple places. I had to physically grab it from behind me, so I had 360 vision at that point. 

And the final one was kind of this double consciousness where I’m having to relay to Chris and Lisa the intensity ratings, and I’m hearing my voice in the physical space in a very different kind of way than I’m experiencing it in the DMT space.

Dr Gallimore: Fascinating. So it seems like you’re developing this almost ascension – you are developing into a spiritual being in a kind of way. While you’re getting closer to that through this DMTx, it’s almost like a training period for your consciousness. It’s kind of fascinating, I had no idea that these sorts of things would be experienced at all. 

So perhaps before I hand over to Graham, Anton, did you notice any, any after-effects? A lot of people are talking about effects on dreaming – did you experience changes in your dreams after DMTx or any other after effects?

Anton: Yeah. A little bit. What I found, as I find with that commitment to Ayahuasca, is that synchronicities seem to start from the moment you make the decision to attend. And I’ve noticed that with your book in an Ayahuasca retreat or session, two, three months ahead, the moment you’ve made the intentional decision to be there, something starts happening. And I very much found this when I committed to partake in the experiment. And then of course, it’s almost as if the molecule knows you’re coming and working with you, guiding you, bringing you along. So I found that it was very strong. 

And then the other thing the entities showed me – they had like little iPads, and they were trying to show me these images. I’m very excited about these images. And I kept saying, “What are they?” I couldn't understand them at all, but they were geometric shapes and like hieroglyphs, and they seemed to think I should know, but I didn’t know. But I kept seeing these things for the next two or three weeks. I’d see that imagery, whether it was in nature or whether it was in pictures or whatever. I have seen that was the thing they were showing. So there was some sort of language going on in that.

Dr Gallimore: Are you going to try and draw these images? I do.

Anton: Yeah, I’ve got the drawings and there was a shuddering moment. So a few days later, when somebody was showing us at a conference these alchemical sorts of descriptions, and it looked like two or three of those, and in fact, were there. And it was, “Oh, my goodness.” 

And then the other thing was, I woke very, very early the following morning with really beautiful clarity of mind, a connection – sort of what Carl was saying, I felt connected to everything, and I sat down and actually had much more of a memory recall at 5:30am, rather than when I got home that evening, I think I was just exhausted, because it’s a very long day. But yeah, that was it.

Dr Gallimore: Wonderful. Okay, so thank you, everyone. So I think we get a really good picture now of what the DMTx experience was like for the panel, kind of the general form and structure and progression of this extended-state infusion. But of course, we’re all interested, particularly, in, it’s not so much where you go, when you take DMT, but who you meet there. I think we’ll all agree with that. So I think we’d really like to get on to talking about the entities now. So I think we should move swiftly on to Sir Graham of Hancock, who will lead the discussion from here.

Graham Hancock: Look, I’d like to begin not so much with the question, but with a philosophical point, which might develop into a question. We’re all in this conversation, people who have experienced DMT and experienced the effects of DMT. 

In my case, I’ve not had the opportunity for the extended-state DMT. But I’ve had plenty of experiences of smoked vaporised DMT. And of course, Ayahuasca is the active ingredient, being DMT. The philosophical point I want to make is there are certain common or shared experiences and the question then becomes for me: “Are we opening a doorway, in some way, onto a seamlessly convincing parallel universe inhabited by intelligent entities?” In other words, is our experience an experience of something real? And that raises questions as to what real is and what reality is – or is it? Is it some kind of archive, which is stored in our DNA? And we’re just gaining access to it in the altered state of consciousness? Or is it none of the above? Is it just our brains on drugs, coming up with these fantastical experiences? 

And where I find myself, as opposed to the notion that it’s just our brains on drugs, is that I don’t see how evolution would have created a brain module that would be activated in this situation. I don't see the utility of it. For example, an example I often give is intuitive physics. We all have intuitive physics, we all can deflect an object thrown at us, even though a very complicated mathematical calculation is there, and you can understand in evolutionary terms why that’s there. But why would there be a brain module for seeing entities that are part-animal, part-human – information that communicate with us telepathically? This, to me, suggests more that we’re entering something real and separate and free-standing. And so that’s the first question I’d like to ask all the volunteers, one at a time, your what’s your hunch? What’s your guess that you’re interfacing with when you enter this experience? Whatever we call it, I’ll start with you, Carl.

Carl: Thanks, Graham. Great question. Wow. I think it’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I think whether we are or are not experiencing a parallel reality, even if it is just our imaginations, that just proves the magnificence of our imaginations. My hunch, having done the DMT extended state for three months – and what a privilege it was to be invited to do so – I think is that that’s a mystery school, that there’s certainly something going on and there do seem to be these reliable portals that are that are available for us. Whether that is something – because what I experienced is something that’s super-holographic; it looks digital it looks like virtual reality – so that to a certain extent, and what I what I persistently see, is this language that’s there at the core of my vision, whether it’s on DMT or DMTx extended, I’m seeing entities made of this language. 

And what I would have loved to have done was actually draw while in the experience. And I think that that idea that we do remain intact, and we do remain in ourselves, essentially, where we do have the ability to sketch and potentially do other things, I think that that's the promise of DMT extended, that we can investigate, we can become investigators on to consciousness onto these phenomenologies that that could well be, whether it’s ourselves in the future, whether it is a parallel reality. 

I think that what DMTx offers is an opportunity to really inject, right – I mean, there are other ways of extending the state and with other medicines, etc – but I think that DMTx seems to me to be an interesting space, but not for the faint-hearted. I would add. I think that these things are very much for those just like the Greek Mystery Schools – it wasn’t about how much money you had, whether you got into the school; it was how emotionally available, how mature you are to actually be part of this.

Graham Hancock: Anton, turning to you, is it a parallel universe? Is it an archive, stored somewhere in our brains? Or is it just our brains on drugs?

Anton: I don’t think it is our brains on drugs. It’s just where the drugs are taking us, you know – what key they are to a certain portal? I’m personally convinced it’s not the God imagination. And you know, people would sometimes say, Is it Jungian archetypes? What, are you doing archetypes?” I think this is a portal to another realm of existence. These entities seem to have a message for us. 

Who are they? Are they the realm of the dead? Are they the realm of us in the future, not made of matter, organic form? And now communicating with us? 

The thing I like most about it is the military notion of KISS: keep it simple, stupid. There exists this compound on Earth. It is ubiquitous, it’s in us – it’s in plants, it’s everywhere. And the only thing we know that it does is take people to an extraordinary other place. Only assume, therefore, that some type of creative force – whether that's Cosmic Mind, God, advanced aliens, or the computer programmer for this simulation – has put it here to allow us to communicate in some way with it, or its mysteries. 

So I think this is an extraordinary communication device, which is why the experiments are so exciting. And you know, that might be spending billions sending rockets to space, what we’re doing in this little experiment is probably far greater in terms of understanding of the nature of our existence. 

Ali: Yeah, probably, all of us wrestled a lot with it. But I think, well, I think it’s both, but I actually think it was certainly where it brought me was to asking the question, “Okay, well, is the universe made of stuff matter? Or is it made of mind?” And like many people, there’s actually research by Chris Timmerman, from a different project, looking at the fact that people shift to a more panpsychist or idealist view, and more of a view of the world being made of mind, after taking psychedelics unless they’re staunch materialists to begin with, in which case, they don’t shift very much. But then also, you know, Johns Hopkins has read more recently, but it wouldn’t be. ..

Graham Hancock: Picking you up at that point, it would be fascinating if Richard Dawkins would undertake a DMTx experience.

Ali: That would be amazing. Let’s get on that. So, yeah, basically, I do think we are entering a – I’m going to say, distinct reality. That was very much my experience, I was very much my intuition. I do think we overlay a lot onto it to make sense of it. So I actually had a few experiences in DMTx and also elsewhere of having a sense that the way I was interpreting what I was seeing was a lot of my own projection onto something, and there was even a moment in the DMT. 

Graham Hancock: Because that’s true of all experiences, isn’t it? Yeah. The experience is mediated by DMT. Or not construe it in terms of our own frame of reference.

Ali: Exactly. Yeah. So if we both went to Paris and we came back with different stories and someone asked us is Paris real? Paris is real, but we have different Parises as well, but there is a Paris there. So I think there is something there. Yeah, for sure.

Graham Hancock: How about you, Jack? What’s your view on this mystery?

Jack: Well, I like to be devil’s advocate in every direction. I have seen a lot in my life. And I have been privileged to see entities in altered states other than DMT as well. There’s other substances that can create complex entities; they are far more technical and somewhat dangerous. But I have seen entities as complex and coherent and incredible, as with DMT, both with them, but also in the realm of dreaming – like I’ve always been a lucid dreamer since I was a child. And even to date, some of my more radical lucid dreams appear even more magical and incredible than DMT. 

So then that poses the question, “Are we naturally equipped to travel to alternative realities through different modalities? Or is this simply our brain desperate to generate meaning out of the overwhelming amount of information we are presented with?” And we know that, as humans, we can only really tune into lesson 0.1 of all information there is, and then we have to extract constructs out of it, we have to make sense of it, we have to generate autonomous entities within our mind to interact with. And having experienced this through so many different channels, and especially during dreaming, I personally don’t know. And I really keep my mind as agnostic as possible, even for the sake of my own sanity. Because for me, encountering entities is quite frequent. And it’s not just relegated to DMT. And I don’t really know what to do about it, it  can be really overwhelming. And it can be so consistent, so coherent, so precise. 

And especially if one is stuck in a lucid dream for a long time, the level of interaction, the level of responsiveness, the level of line… in one of my most recent lucid dreams, I could operate my phone and select the apps and the apps would operate exactly like the characters would be all weird. They were a mixture of like Latin and Hebrew, or just predator-like, like symbols. And there was no drug involved at that point. But it was just so pure and so stable, like I could stare at the details for minutes on end. And I could move my head around, and the whole dreamscape would just stay stable, interactive and alive. So I really don’t know. I have been both a materialist and an idealist, and I tried to stay context-dependent. And I tried to focus more on what’s useful than what’s true. 

And in terms of making the most of the DMT for personal growth and inspiration and quality of life and, or extracting just information, yeah, we are faced with a very powerful modality that is really informing us a lot about what we are capable of as biological processing units, or antennas, or whatever it is that we want to talk about. But yeah, I personally don’t know. And I could resonate with all answers, really, and find 1,000 different rationalisations for all of them.

Graham Hancock: Yeah. Do you guys compare notes after the session? I mean, after our Ayahuasca sessions, it’s typical to have a sharing. Do you have something similar with the DMTx? Or do you talk to each other once you’re out of the experimental setting about what you've experienced? Start with you, Jack. 

Jack: In terms of sharing, yeah, I mean, we were not really allowed to talk much publicly about what we went through for a while, because of the rules of the study. Yeah, of course, behind closed doors, we shared bits and pieces, and we found resonance, whether there was an actual connection between us or not, I’m not sure – like, as Carl mentioned, I did have him in one of my visions and had a premonition or a simulation that maybe some of what he was going through triggered me and scared me, so then I felt compelled to communicate with him about it. 

And there was some meaning, there was some salient exchange about the contexts that we were talking about. Whether this is just the fact that we are good friends and we interact with each other more than the next person, or there was an actual portal open, it’s hard to say,

Graham Hancock: I suppose the reason I’m asking the question, just to move on, is I want to ask you each specifically an entity question, but is it possible that your experiences communicated with one another have had an influence upon you? Has person A’s experience of an entity had an influence on person B’s experience of an entity, if you share these experiences? Let me put that question to Carl, because we talked about it for a moment.

Carl: Thanks, Graham. So you’re asking whether there’s some sort of stability with entity encounters between us? 

Graham Hancock: Yeah, I’d like to come to that. But first of all, I want to know whether you’ve shared among yourselves the entity encounters that you’ve had, and whether there’s any risk that this would influence the empathy encounters of the person you're sharing with?

Carl: Yeah, so as Jack said, we’re sort of sworn to secrecy around this stuff, not just between ourselves, but to the wider world. And obviously, there’s great interest in this experiment. So it was very difficult to not talk about it, but we will manage to keep it. And this is like the first time we've been able to talk about it publicly. So definitely, yeah, it’s a great question. I think, you know, priming, if we were to talk about the, I mean, you can see why we weren’t allowed to talk about depression. Lisa, the Imperial team, didn’t want people primed. I mean, Terence McKenna is probably the worst example, isn’t it? The self-dribbling elves? If you don’t get self-dribbling elves after listening to terrorists, and you think you’re not tripping? Yeah.

Graham Hancock: So the next question I have is, ask each one of you what, and I’ll start with you, Carl, since I’m on you at the moment, if you could pick from the range of entity encounters that you’ve had – I assume there’s been a range? Wha’'s the single most powerful encounter that you had? What describes that entity?

Carl: I think there was certainly a greater resolution of entities as you’re going through the dosing sessions. But for me, it was very much the alien – it wasn’t one entity, it was this alien, it felt like a co-opting of the space by foreign entities. And whether that was just because I was being sort of taken out of the traditional DMT space into a bridging between the DMT and five-MEO DMT space and then actually being taken beyond the white room of the five-MEO DMT space and shown that there’s not just one type of unity, but there’s a multiplicity of unities. And maybe that points towards the multiverse or whatever. 

But yeah, I think it's tribes of entities, rather than single entities that I’m always experiencing. I never, apart from when I’m given a key by this sort of locked octopus, like, with all the tentacles, I think that it’s much more about tribes. And just one experience was this idea of interspecies splicing. So I felt like I had morphed into a sort of a dinosaur shape. And, and then on the other side, it may be I’m interspecies splicing with an actual animal type. 

They are also consuming DMT, maybe on a different planet, and we’re literally swapping bodies. So suddenly that animal gets to see inside the hospital.

 

Graham Hancock: Yeah. And Anton, would you describe your most powerful entity experience during this series of experiments?

Anton: Yes. I mean, it hasn’t been the most powerful experience that I’ve ever had with DMT, particularly with Ayahuasca, and I would describe this experience as bounding into 90 minutes after the beginning when I was in a session. You’re just suddenly there at the strongest moment, and it’s that assimilation that’s very tricky to get. 

I remember with the automated voice saying “Entities, yes or no?” And I’ve been saying “No, no, no.” And suddenly, I’m surrounded by them. My little voice was “yes”, it was like suddenly somebody saying, “Are there tigers.” “Yeah, there.” And you go, “Yes, but please be quiet. Don’t want them to know because they’re all around.” What I found, and I follow the same notion of the tribe, that I what I tend to see very regularly is this group of humanoid forms that don’t really fit into the Terence McKenna sort of description. They’re almost gingerbread men – like they are indistinguishable from each other. But the noses are flat, the eyes don’t really open. But somehow they’re seeing. There are children and adults. And it’s a grouping. And you seem to have just arrived at their place, their home, their village, whatever. 

And I refer back to that comment about being the wounded pigeon, you evaluate yourself, because the children look down at you, as do the adults. And then the adults push the children back and say, “Leave it alone,’ and usually two male adults will come across. And they always seem to look at the back of me when I can’t work it out because I don’t have a neck or arms or legs. But my guess is they’re looking to see if a cord or a connection has been severed. And I can only guess into this, because it’s so regular, that they’re sort of assessing, has this essence – this soul, the spirit, whatever it might be, this consciousness – has it died and left organic Earth or left the realm of matter and arrived in the realm of light? Or is it just a tourist passing through on DMT or the like? And they sort of, if, as they see it, the cord must be there, they tend to sit on either side and watch what I’m looking at, almost like guardians or protectors in some strange way. 

So that’s the sort of regular thing that happens. What swerved with me on this one was I had them and they were very keen to show me these tablets with all this information. And you get a little bit frustrated, because you can’t download. And they’re so excited to share. And you keep saying, “What is it? What does it mean? What does it mean?” And they’re just grinning at you and you know, you can’t grasp it. But it’s obviously very important. And then I swerved, which took me up to nine out of 10 in intensity, and arrived in this very beautiful pastoral environment where there were 10-foot-tall, sort of Mr Zeus, orang-utangy, airy-type entities with their children with what looked like trees and waterfalls, but weren’t. And it was beautifully pastoral. It was sort of like one of those Attenborough documentaries when they arrived in a village or in a group of monkeys. And the monkeys or the villagers are aware that the camera man’s there, the tourist is there, but they’re not interested. They’re just in bliss. And it was the sort of download I got then that this was primal being – this is how we should be, just being in this existence in beauty and nature connected. Yeah, so that was it for that experience.

Graham Hancock: Jack, you made a point earlier that, in a way, what’s more important to you is what’s useful than what’s true. Or than establishing what is true. Could you describe your most powerful entity encounter and what was useful about it for you?

Jack: Well, during the DMTx, these were harder to pinpoint. They were all around me, it was an ecosystem of them, a jungle of them. There was a distinctive, matrix-like, robotic ensemble of tentacles, cables, cogs all around me, just interwoven in the individual aspect. Funnily enough, the most distinct entities for me that I could just look at and see for what they were, were at the very lowest dose, which is very strange, where I just got shocked for the first 10 minutes by some of the most distinct entities. And one I can remember was like some kind of elfish creature, humanoid with quite delicate features – they are very clean-faced and a petite kind of structure, and they were operating or reshuffling some kind of material or equipment in front of it, in front of me. 

And so there was not much acknowledgement of me. I am rarely acknowledged by the entities. It does happen occasionally where they would be showing me the world or welcoming me into it, but that’s rare – they’re usually doing their thing. And I’m just witnessing. And this was very much the case for me during the DMTx as well. And that was particularly aesthetic and, and impressive, as usual. But in the level of making use of it, it’s not easy. These are very much like films that I’m watching that have some kind of autonomous entity doing their thing in their own world abiding to their own narratives, their own motives, and I very rarely manage to make a connection to the mundane, the mundane day-to-day data. Maybe living in my human experience, like some, the most meaningful things are usually emotional, where I am reminded that a lot of my problems, and a lot of my worries and fears, but now in the grand scheme of things, they are telling me that there is a deeper cosmic purpose to all of us, that channel can be consolidated through a DMT experience, whether that’s the DMTx or Ayahuasca. It may not matter. 

In fact, for me, the afterglow, or the repercussions afterwards that I did not discuss prior is a relative sense of wellness and afterglow that would persist for a few days afterwards, in which I felt that I was reminded of some intrinsic purpose in life. And I could connect with that, at a personal level, in a way that transcends what I perceive to be my problems and my shortcomings. And so by the end of it all, I could feel like I could do DMTx even once a month as almost in the way someone would do an IV therapy session with vitamins, but using DMT instead, like a certain type of check-in. And yeah, a reboot in terms of value systems, value attribution, in terms of what’s useful on a day to day.

Graham Hancock: Now, going back to the question of the reality status of all of this, I’ve tried to establish whether there’s been a lot of chatter between you volunteers afterwards. But the question I want to ask, and this I’ll ask to Carl first, the question I want to ask is, “Have any of you experienced the same or similar entities? Or is each person’s experience isolated to themselves with no common points with the other experiences? Carl, what’s your thoughts?

Carl: Yes, it’s a great question. I think having this discussion today is super, super useful. And even though Jacqueline and Allie and I have spoken with Anton hosting a session at the Turing Initiative recently, this is much more in depth. I think that maybe we’re not experiencing the same entities, but we’re certainly experiencing the same phenomenologies. And I think that that's super interesting. And yeah, I think ultimately, we will benefit from having much more of a deep dive. This is why I think that drawing things immediately afterwards would be a benefit. And even during I think that the ability to draw this stuff out and to then identify these entities. For me, it’s very hard to, as I mentioned, to identify individual identities of entities there – there’s  vast quantities, much more than you would normally imagine could fit in a space. And they always come in multiples for me, so it’s difficult to identify them.

Graham Hancock: You mentioned that you had developed some new abilities, including telepathy, and this is a question I’d like to put to all of the volunteers. Has novelty emerged from these experiences? You, Carl, have already answered this question in the sense that you felt that your telepathic abilities – of course that’s something that materialist science would sneer at immediately, but we’re hopefully beyond that very narrow mindset here – that your experience was the telepathic contact increased following this experience. I would regard that as novelty – something new that came into your life – and I want to ask the other volunteers, starting with Jack, has novelty come out of this for you? Have you learned something new that you didn’t know before or that you couldn’t possibly have known before?

Jack: For me, novelty came mostly as a result of developing a new skill. As I discussed, I’ve been through entities and extended the DMTx in various forms before, but during the DMTx experience, by I would say the third session, I had developed a skill that I did not know was quite available. When I would say by the middle point of the third session, I returned into my body. So, during smoked DMT, it’s usually a pretty overwhelming and debilitating experience, in which you’re surrounded by very strong vision, but you’re semi-paralysed, and you can’t quite operate, you’re almost, like, kidnapped by the experience. And that was very much my experience forever. Even though you asked about it, it can be quite crippling in many ways and soils, farming Ayahuasca, but by DMTx the third session, I returned into my body. And all of a sudden, I could experience a full breakthrough with all of the entities around me. And absolutely overwhelming visions. But I could move, I could raise my head, I could look left and right. And by the fourth session, I knew that I could have even stood and walked around if I wanted to. I became in full control over my body. So I could now operate.

Graham Hancock: You could have walked around in this realm in your body, while continuing to experience the DMT realm if that’s what we’re going to call it

Jack: Exactly, like I could have never possibly imagined that the body could have learned to navigate like stabilisers on a bike, let’s say, when by my third session, I felt I could remove the the stabilisers. And I could have simply treated the breakthrough as augmented reality. And that, for me, was an absolute breakthrough.

Graham Hancock: And do you think this new ability is something that you could cultivate further? And if you did, what would be the benefits of doing so?

Jack: 100%, like that was a certain level of my body becoming capable of reactivating systems that evolution usually suspends in times of critical crisis. So this parallels my experience with skydiving. I’m a professional skydiver, or at least I have my own rig. I’ve done it hundreds of times. And then at the beginning, you’re mostly just floating and trying to keep it together and, and deploy the parachute, not die. But after many dozens of flights, your body comes back and you start savouring the movements between your arms – you can flip, you can fly in the terminal directions, you can think about your life, the richness of the integration between all of the different aspects of you, as a human, become available. And I experienced exactly this after my third session of the DMTx in a way that then I could simply gain access to more parts of me in a meaningful and coherent manner. 

So that seems to me extremely useful in different contexts, and I have experienced even more recently where I’ve had a breakthrough of DMT smoked. And I felt that for some reason, my bladder was going to explode, and I managed to run towards the bathroom, and have a leak in a full breakthrough. So problem-solving, managing my bodily functions, not making a mess of any bathroom while being surrounded by entities. So that to me is something that I could have never possibly imagined possible, and it is possible, and the DMTx experience seems the cleanest way to be guided towards learning that kind of ability that is very, very precise, very clean. That’s

not whimsical, that novelty.

Image: Kaleidoscope Of Interfaces by Jemma Foster → @mamaxanadu  

This image was created with Stable Diffusion, using prompts from the DMT panel of Carl's description of his DMT experience.

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27

DMT Portal

DMTx Breakthrough Panel Moderated by Graham Hancock, Dr Andrew Gallimore and Dr Rick Strassman

Panel discussion on psychedelic exploration. Curated by Noonautics, with writer and researcher Graham Hancock and renowned DMT expert, Dr. Andrew Gallimore hosting the panel, which consists of DMT research subjects at IImperial College London’s. The focus is the recent and groundbreaking extended DMT research: Carl Hayden Smith, Jack Allocca, Alexander Beiner, and Anton Bilton, who bring their personal narratives of traversing the extended DMT state. The focus of the discourse is on encounters with DMT entities and reevaluating preconceived notions of reality.

EXTRACT FROM PANEL TRANSCRIPT - Full video below.

Our current focus is Daniel McQueen’s DMTx project in Colorado. We are the fiscal sponsors and have just recently started accepting donations to fund the research to build a legal state of the art research institute that utilises this technology. We’re very excited to sponsor this panel today with the participants from Imperial College London’s groundbreaking new study on extended-state DMT, discussing their experiences while focusing specifically on DMT entity encounters. 

Here to help us moderate the discussion, we have special guests Graham Hancock, renowned psychedelic researcher and author, and Dr Andrew Gallimore, who developed the first model of extended-state DMT with Dr Rick Strassman. Thank you for your time and expertise gentlemen. We hope today will be one of many explorations into this fascinating research, and we look forward to more in the future. As a reminder, if you’re watching this live, there’ll be a Q&A session after the discussion – please comment and write in without further delay. Now, let’s get right into it. Thank you all again for joining us. First, we’re going to hand it over to Dr Gallimore.

Dr Gallimore: Just to kind of outline the structure of this event, I think it’s good that you get to know the people presenting today. First of all, it would make most sense to begin with the man that in a very real sense started it all those years ago. How many years ago now? Well, it’s getting on for 30 years, maybe, with some things like the man who did the large-scale DMT in humans. And that man is of course Dr. Rick Strassman. Would you like to speak, Rick?

Dr Rick Strassman: Yes, thank you, Andrew and the rest of the panelists and organisers. Let me say a few words about the whole idea. When I was performing the DMT work, one of the psychopharmacological questions that remained to be settled was whether it was possible to develop tolerance to DMT. It was impossible in lower animals – there was a cat study giving it every two hours for 21 days, and the cats continued responding normally, after even three weeks of repeated DMT dosing. There’s a human study at the NIMH giving it twice a day for five days or something intramuscularly, and there wasn’t any tolerance. So in our study, we decided it was important to see if tolerance could develop if it was a very closely spaced administration. And so we chose a half-hour interval, giving a full dose every half-hour four times in one morning, and there was no tolerance to the psychological effects. 

In the DMT book, The Spirit Molecule, towards the end of the book, I suggested a continuous infusion would maybe be a means by which the state can be studied more carefully and also have some therapeutic relevance, because you could turn up and turn down the state of intoxication depending on the need of the patient or client at that time. So then, a few years later, Andrew and I put the paper together, which came out in Frontiers. Andrew approached me and we divided the task. He came at it from the confusion, protocol perspective, and I included or contributed the clinical relevance in the paper, and so things have been taking off since then.

Dr Gallimore: Okay, thank you very much, Rick, for that background. Now I will introduce my co-moderator for this session – the incomparable inspiration, the insightful and the occasionally controversial Mr Graham Hancock.

Graham Hancock: Thank you, Andrew. Yes, it’s a pleasure to join you all. I am fascinated by the entity and counter-aspect of the DMT experience ever since an entity appeared to me during a series of Ayahuasca sessions and gave me the plot for an entire novel. Since then, I’ve found it fascinating and I’m really intrigued to hear what the volunteers have got to report.

Dr Gallimore: So as Rick said, we produced this module together back in 2016, the idea being to extend to stabilise the brain DMT levels over time using this target-controlled intravenous infusion technology. And we developed this kind of ‘proof of principle’ model for this really, but it was certainly never human-ready, so to speak. And fortunately for us, the pioneering Imperial College team in London, particularly, for the DMTx project led by Chris Timmerman and Lisa Luan PhD student actually headed this study. So while myself and Rick might have lit a spark, if you like, and piqued interest in the potential of DMTx, we can’t take credit for the work that’s been done by the Imperial team. So I think we should give them their due credit. But perhaps even more importantly than that are the interacted voyagers who volunteered for this kind of breakthrough technology. And there are four of the 11 total volunteers that we have here today. So I will begin with subject zero, the first person to receive the DMTx. So Carl, can you briefly introduce yourself.

Carl: I’ve been doing cognitive science for 25 years, so I am really interested in how we use technology to learn. That’s led me to all sorts of different areas of research, including perceptual science and neuroscience and looking at how we advance perception. I’m very much interested in the ways of technologies becoming available through substances like DMT. So lots of research in dissociative space as well looking at ketamine analogues, etc. But I’m very interested in the antigens as well.

Dr Gallimore: Thank you, Carl. And I don’t know if it is actually subject one or two, but Alexander Beiner, would you like to introduce yourself?

Alexander Beiner: I’m Alexander Beiner. I don’t know what subject number I was, but I am a writer and also a cultural commentator. I’m also one of the directors of Breaking Convention, which is Europe’s largest conference on psychedelic science and culture. So I suppose my interest has always been in terms of psychedelics, how we can gain information from those experiences and apply them directly to changing the world we live in. So the kind of original counterculture promise of the psychedelic ’60s is something I’m very drawn to, albeit in a new and different way – a bit more complex than we needed back then. So my interest in the trial was very much that question of what can happen as we go into different realities, whatever they may be, and come back with useful information. And so of course, the encounters with entities is perhaps with this kind of DMT experience, one of the main avenues where we might receive information, as Graham mentioned – whether that’s a whole novel or a different social system, or something deeply personal. So that was really my interest. And the trial certainly delivered on that in many different ways, as we shall see.

Dr Gallimore: Thank you very much, Alexander. Jack, can you speak next?

Jack: Hi there. I’m a pharmacologist, and an engineer. I’ve been involved in psychedelic pharmacology since 2008. I was giving animal labs, all sorts of psychedelics to see how that perturbed their sleep architecture, and then moved on from there to get a PhD, Melbourne, neuroscience. I’ve specialised in the study of consciousness, trying to cover as many verticals as possible from sleep science, academic pharmacology, and animals or wild species. And then all the way to artificial intelligence, because I also work a fair bit in the engineering of that. I have a small tech company that works in data analytics for consciousness research. They collaborate with many labs, including the Imperial College team, and they’ll help with the data analytics for the MDX. 

I’ve also always had a keen interest in experiencing all different types of altered states personally, as well. So I’ve split-tested dozens, if not close to 100 different psychoactive compounds and different altered-state modalities. And so for me, the MDX experiment has been a natural evolution of both my academic, industrial and personal explorations. And I’ve always been interested in seeing identity first and foremost, which is so overwhelming in the visual phenomenological aspect. I’ve tapped in and out a lot. I’ve also done a lot of different experimentations with different formulations of DMT, DMT salts as well. So this was not my first time with DMT fumarate. It’s very special to see how an extended state can equip the mind to become used to something as new and radical as DMT, which usually is so rapturous just for 5 to 10 or 15 minutes, where you are completely taken away. And so this was my interest in terms of DMTx and it’s definitely delivered beyond expectations. Very excited to be with you all to discuss it.

Dr Gallimore: Excellent. Thank you, Jack. And last, but certainly not least, Mr Anton Bilton.

Anton Bilton: Hello, I’m Anton Bilton. I'm the co-founder of the Turing Initiative, formed in 2015 to explore entheogenic entity encounters. I’m subsequently enthused by Rick and Andrew’s novel ideas with extended infusion. We have worked with Robin Carhart-Harris, Chris and Lisa in funding the experiments at Imperial. My interest personally lies in communion with the sentient other. And I’m hopeful that from the experiences we’ve had today, and as we progress, we will work into that field and seek guidance from these entities. Thank you.

Dr Gallimore: Thank you, Anton. Okay, so first of all, I will ask a few general questions about the DMTx process and experience, and then in the second half, Graham will take over and he will be probing, more specifically, entity experiences, which I think many of you are here to hear about. So analysts, avoid talking too much about entities in the first half – bring them up later if you could. Okay, so what I'd like to do is ask these questions logically, from the beginning of the experience prior to the beginning of these infusion sessions, and work forward towards the end, probing through, if you like, the experience from beginning to end. 

So the first thing I should ask you all is when you went into this DMTx suite at Imperial College, this is obviously a completely new way of doing DMT. You’re all experienced DMT users because that was a prerequisite to being part of the study. But this was completely new. So did any of you employ any kind of specific preparation or coping mechanisms or other techniques prior? Even during the actual extended-state experience? Maybe Ally, can you start with that?

Alexander Beiner: Yeah, sure. Just coping is important, but also thriving and being able to navigate the space well, so I would add that in. Personally, I really went for it. As soon as I signed up for the study, I stopped drinking, and I was working with a coach called Trish Blaine who specialises in navigating non-ordinary experiences and does weekly sessions. So I used a lot of different techniques. One of the mantras I had was Terence McKenna’s line where the entity said, “Don’t give way to amazement”. This, especially in the first few minutes of the experience, is very overwhelming. So that was a mantra I had. 

I’m going to try and use different techniques like meditation, breath work and intentional curiosity. It’s a kind of attitudinal technique, which I found very important in order to not give way to amazement, particularly in those first few minutes. I’m curious to hear everyone else’s experience. Certainly for me, they were as intense as vaporising DMT, and then it would level off. So there was coping for that. And then the levelling off as things became easier to navigate – it was more of a question of concentration, focus and discernment. I meditate anyway, but mindfulness meditation and concentration meditation is what I was doing, and I found that very useful, also remembering to breathe as well – that’s very important.

Dr Gallimore: Okay, thank you. Carl, do you have anything to add, anything you did?

Carl: Yeah, very similar to Ali. But I also realised it was a process of mutual exchange, and this idea of giving yourself over to them to be explored is kind of the price of admission. And by allowing them to explore me, I get to know them. Similar in terms of a diet – no drugs, no caffeine, no alcohol. Also, no orgasms for a month, just to see how that would actually affect the trip. And it radically ramped up the intensity. So I think the coping mechanism is very much treating it as a DMT Church for three months, and I think having done a lot of novel dissociatives really helped cope with this experience.

Dr Gallimore: Okay, thank you – a little bit too much detail perhaps! Jack?

Jack: I think I am actually lucky to be a corporal, in the sense that at least half of my sessions I was jet lagged and sleep-deprived, and not particularly prepped in any shape or form. Besides the fact that the decade and a half of experimentation definitely prepped me for something that was extremely intense. I can say that I definitely did a relatively good job at cleaning up my system in terms of daily substances, so I have not touched any caffeine in over three years now, and don't have any relationship with daily substance use of any type. So I could go into that space, not withdrawing from any substance, or having my mind tempted into thinking what would they be like if I was still engaging with the sedatives of, of mod? 

So this worked out for me in many other ways. Yeah, the body load can be pretty strong during the MDX. I have deployed a certain number of controlled breathing exercises to alleviate that. And I think also my knowledge of pharmacology and biochemistry, on a top-down level, helped me reassure myself that this was not a toxic thing I was doing to myself, because after a few minutes, knowing that you’re one of the very first people in the world ever to go through something like this brings some apprehension. And you’re like, “What am I doing to myself?” – like, at some point, even the cannulas start feeling very weird. And there’s a tingling, this burning, there’s pain and the mind can really go in any direction. Having both a deep prior relationship with DMT and adequate knowledge of physiology can help control some of the more disrupting fear and panic responses. So I didn't do anything idiosyncratic to DMTx in terms of preparation, just trying to lead the cleanest and most resilient day-to-day psychological standpoint, which is what I’ve done anyway for years.

Dr Gallimore: Okay. Thank you, Jack. So finally, Anton, do you have anything to add there? 

Anton: I’d like to echo that Ali and Carl’s abstinence is very relevant to me. I brought the same reverence to it, which is four to six weeks of no sex, no drugs, no alcohol, lots of meditation, effectively bringing a focused reverence and notion of sacredness to something that I see as mystical and important. So what I’ve always found with that is the greater your focus, the clearer the visions and the connection is. So I found that, although in the early stage, there was a lot of disassociation with the first minute or so, once I’d settled, it was a good experience. But I’ll come on to that when we talk about entities. Thank you. 

Dr Gallimore: Fabulous. Thank you, Anton. Okay. I think all of you prepared your body and your mind, you set your intent to remain calm, not give into your astonishment, I think is what Terence McKenna used to say, quite a lot. 

So let’s get straight into it then. So maybe you can talk us through compared to when everyone's kind of reasonably familiar, whether in first person or not subjectively or not, with a normal kind of bolus or smoked DMT experience? Can you kind of talk us through a typical DMT experience from beginning to end? So, did this kind of initial roller-coaster phase – did that end? Did it stabilise? Did the experience seem to evolve? Or did it reach a kind of set point over time? So if you just, briefly, but succinctly in detail, talk us through it? So maybe Carl, you can start since you were subject zero on this?

Carl: Yeah, thanks, Andrew. I think if anything, there was more movement than usual. And that was like you had to stabilise yourself inside that movement. And it was like a kaleidoscope of interfaces where I was being processed through and scanned through those layers, where I was kind of experiencing glimpses of alternate lives. And the most profound experience I had on the largest dose was being in a five-MEO DMT experience. So there was definitely a difference for me from the usual DMT experience to actually have it extended. It led to this experience where I was experiencing a disc at the bottom of the bed, and realising that there’s not the universe like a black hole, but it was like a unity space. I could recognise it as what I would normally experience in a five-MEO DMT experience, and the phenomenology of that you’re experiencing yourself as light, with an a non-dual experience where there’s no subject/object, I’m just experiencing this disc at the bottom of the bed, and I’m trying to understand how I can get into it. 

And then there was kind of a sort of takeover of the space – it felt like there was an alien invasion inside the DMT experience where the disc cracked apart, and suddenly, I’m like, “Oh, my God, what’s gonna happen now,” thinking that there might be something negative, but actually, what was revealed was a plurality of unities behind the disc. And for me, that was a real difference from the usual DMT experience. 

Dr Gallimore: So it seemed like it progressed, but rather than stopping in a bolus would the normal kind of DMT smoked, or whatever it felt like, it was pushing and pushing further and further the longer that you remained. That infusion. 

Carl: Yeah, exactly. It felt as if I was being shown much more of the secret knowledge that you would not normally experience in a standard DMT experience. And I was kind of bridging the dimensions inside this wild experience.

Dr Gallimore: So it makes you wonder, then, if you extended it to an hour or two, three, four or five hours, where you might end up? But that’s for the future. So how about you Ali? Would you like to describe your typical DMTx experience?

Ali: Yeah. So I would say that my biggest surprise, actually, from the experience was that it had a continuity to it through the experience of teachings and interpersonal lessons, as well as metaphysical experiences. That reminded me a lot, honestly, of Ayahuasca, but different as well. And maybe a little bit controversially, as in some traditions in the Amazon, the teacher is seen as the Banisteriopsis, the vine, and the DMT is kind of an admixture. Having done Ayahuasca maybe 50–60 times, and also having sat with by the Banisteriopsis Caapi, my experience is very much that what I interpret as the teaching, the lessons and the deep insights from Ayahuasca was very much what I experienced on DMT x, which was a huge surprise to me. I did not expect that at all. 

So there was a sense of when it came in, initially, those first two or three minutes were very similar to vaporising DMT – a kind of very intense rush. Consistently after that, I would find myself in the same place, which was a kind of geometric cavern, it was always the same, and weirdly, superimposed on that occasionally, was a playground like one I walked past with my cousin three months before that has no emotional resonance for me whatsoever, but it was always there. So there are kind of echoes I think of in Rick Strassman’s study of this sense of a nursery that was there, but there wasn’t a sense that anyone was in the nursery, it was almost experienced like a holding room. 

And then what would happen is I would break through that in some way, and then things would get extremely wild. And it would be extremely full of entities and full of encounters and full of different realms. That was what it felt like – I felt like there were often different portals to go through. However, the most striking thing was that my first experience was very much around an unresolved relationship in my life. And I’m really going into the depths of that, which is very healing and totally unsurprising. And the message was, “You don’t need to see aliens, you need to work on your stuff.” And that was kind of a theme throughout, even though there were a lot of encounters until the last dosing, which I won’t go into now, but was a very intense overview effect would be the mystical experience I would describe. So really a lot of biographical stuff. But it also had a kind of teaching – I call it the teaching presence – which I interpreted as a kind of back-and forth-dialogue with whatever it might be – me, the DMT, or something else. So that was quite a surprise. That’s not something I’ve ever experienced from vaporising DMT, but it might just be because you don’t have enough time to really land and make sense of what’s going on. But that was my sense of it.

Dr Gallimore: Thank you. So Jack, it seems from what they just said that it’s clear that there’s a huge multiplicity of fracture and realms within this space that you were perhaps able to explore more thoroughly within the DMTx experience with this extended infusion. Was that your experience too?

Jack: Well, there is a lot to say. But I think there’s really an imperative of understanding the context as well, because we’re trying to compare with a traditional DMT experience, where the traditional DMT experience may be in a festival, or in a room full of pillows and friends – but this really wasn’t like that in any shape or form, like how I like to describe the DMT set-up, in that in many ways, it’s almost like an alien abduction one on one. It’s almost like a bad-trip machine – you are literally being probed. And it’s not figurative, it’s literally you are being probed, blood is being taken out of you every few minutes, here in a bed surrounded by strangers in a clinic, you’re bound to have a different phenomenological experience. And that really needs to be stressed, because the context is intense in the DMT clinical setting. 

And for me, funnily enough, every single experience was quite different. There was some analogy between them, but they were very, very different. Echoing Ali, I also experienced a bit of a narrative. And also to me it compared well enough to some aspects of farm Ayahuasca, which I’ve experienced extensively as well. So depending on what monoamine oxidase inhibitor you use, you may tap into a similar space, whether it's phenazine or moclobemide . And, yeah, ingested crystal DMT can take you to a similar space for quite a few minutes, potentially even for the same amount of time as DMTx. So I’m starting to ponder whether an intravenous delivery is imperative or not. Although Ayahuasca can be absolutely debilitating, even for the body that is very strong in this experience, we may not necessarily need to go the intravenous route. 

And, yeah, if I have to go into details for me, funnily enough, the very first experience, the lowest dose, had the most distinct entity generation, while the other ones were a lot more chaotic than smoking DMT. And in some ways, it wasn’t even as strong as vaporising DMT, even at the highest dose, and now we know what the dosage is. And I think that the level of blood concentrations of DMT vaporised would still hit the receptors harder than the DMTx. We also need to take that into account. But, for me, it was a mix of cognitive and emotional developments and our life review that Ali also talked about – there was a lot of problem-solving, a lot of inquiry into my history, money problems, my traumas, my future opportunities. And the beauty of the DMTx, similar to Ayahuasca, is that it really gives you time to go past the initial ontological shock and really savour an actual real narrative within yourself. So that is definitely very special within the DMTx.

Dr Gallimore: Thank you very much, Jack. So Anton, it seems that with this extended protocol, it gives you more time – there is more of a narrative that can develop; there seems to be a greater opportunity to explore the various realms within the DMT space. Can you talk a little bit about that, Anton, whether it was the same for you compared to regular DMT?

Anton: Yeah, I’d like to start on the notion of the setting. There are two unusual things here: one being in a hospital with cannulas in your arms and life support crew nearby; and the other one, of course, is at the time of taking it, it is undisclosed. So whereas when you’re smoking it, when you’re going in here, you are lying there waiting for what felt like a very long wait. 

The thing that shocked me was that when it hit me, from the ends of my toes to the top of my head instantly, there was no force. And this wasn’t like having an injection in your arm where you get a warmth across your chest, or a taste of metal in your mouth. It was instant, everywhere. As if my energetic field was somehow being turned on, like a bulb. So I was very disorientated at the beginning because I didn’t know who I was, where I was, what I was. And of course, you lose time. It took some time to remember being in a taxi. Then I worked out I was in a taxi on Earth, a human being, where it was like going – “Oh, Imperial, oh, shit. I’m the guy in the experiment right now!” And then I fell down. And the sense of entities was about eight out of 10 entities around me instantly. And I’ll come on to those. 

In terms of assimilation, I think that’s what you’re talking about, Andrew? How do you assimilate? How do you get comfortable so that you can then become an explorer or navigate? I spent another two hours there because it was really, really good. I assimilated? Well, there was a swerve about halfway through when I went from eight to nine, because I shifted, I didn’t experience shifting from one place to another set of entities altogether, completely different. And that sort of upset me at that moment, because I couldn’t quite work out how or why it was shifting. But to answer your question, yeah, I think if you’re in there, and you know, you’re comfortable. You just wish you could stay longer. It was a good point and exploring well.

Dr Gallimore: Did you get the sense that you were able to, in some sense, intentionally navigate and explore, or were you simply carried or thrown around?

Anton: Mainly, not carried or thrown around? I mean, I find in terms of what’s regular for me, in terms of position, I’m usually on what seems to be the floor and probably bodiless. But the way the entities are looking at me, they’re looking down. And the analogy I give is the wounded pigeon in London – the little children come running out. “There’s a wounded pigeon!” and then the adults go, “No, no, no, leave it alone. We’re not sure if he’s dead, or whether he’s on DMT, let’s check.” But they are sort of around you. And you’re just sitting there and their world is going on around you. 

I’ve had other moments where you can navigate, you can move intentionally, but it’s not like walking – you sort of imply a movement forward and you move forward. So that was okay. 

Dr Gallimore: Thank you, Anton. So perhaps we are just jumping through the questions here. Because of time, but perhaps just one question – yes? 

Speaker: Yeah. So I was wondering if any of you with the effects. If the intensity tapered or if there was tolerance over the space of the infusion?

Dr Rick Strassman: Yeah, Carl, you want to answer that? 

Carl: I think it stayed pretty much a very… I mean, it’s only 30 minutes, right. So you’re not experiencing tolerance. See, I think it’s interesting. And the paper from Lisa actually acknowledged that the heart rate seems to stabilise, I think that’s true. I think the intensity, I mean, if I think about my experience, yeah, there’s definite phases to the experience. And you could argue that the end of the experience is a little bit less intense. I would say,

Rick.

Dr Gallimore: And while I’ve got you there, Carl, so many people have been sort of asking, and they said, “Well, you know, a three-minute DMT trip feels like 100 years; does a 30-minute DMT trip feel like 100,000 years? Or I know you told me that they actually told you, they were communicating with you about the time. So did you sense that this was a longer trip? Would you think you would have known or felt like this wasn’t good, the normal peak? If they hadn’t told you?

Carl: Yeah, even being told the time. I mean, you can’t really register time in the same way. And there’s certainly phases that you’re going through that seem to defy a sense of time, but in terms of my experience, I would have a world space where I'm very, very much in a different ontological experience. And then there’s a window on to that world space. 

And then as Ali was saying, there’s like a mirror space where you’re really just being shown your own life. And it’s very moral. It’s certainly not recreational. I think the message I was receiving is “Live well, you’ve won the jackpot being human, and it’s kind of revered in the whole cosmos. But it’s a super short experience, so don’t get caught up in trying to hoard stuff because you know, you’re literally in a dream state and you’re passing through. But get to know yourself as a light object or a light being so you can build the solar body to pass through death intact.” So very much the message of human equals jackpot/void equals norm. 

And yeah, in terms of time, it was very much I think there’s more time there because there’s more space there, you’re sort of being an unfolded into different types and different forms of space, different forms of consciousness, different ontologies of being, I think that what they are, if there’s a day, they have very different ontologies. On that side, the thinking/feeling/being what we consider our existence here, I think they have very different forms of that than this.

Dr Gallimore: Okay, thanks, Carl. So clearly, there’s this sense from all of you so far that you are receiving information, there’s certainty, whatever form that might take. The question, again, that a lot of people are asking is, many people really do struggle, as the information kind of floods through them at a great rate. And then when they get back, it’s all gone. Terence McKenna used to say it was like “liquid gold dripping through your fingers”, or something. You really struggle to hold on to and recall your trip. And I think many people, including myself, struggle with that. 

So perhaps, Ali, do you think that being in there longer – did that help or hinder your actual recall and your ability to actually bring information and recall the details of the experience when you came back?

Ali: Yeah, it did, it did definitely help. Because maybe this is more of a narrative, you know, there’s an actual process, and there’s different encounters. And one thing leads to another, sometimes in very unexpected ways. And so that’s why it’s quite memorable. 

Also, without giving too much detail about the study design, we did recount what happened very shortly afterwards. And that actually helps tremendously. I believe Chris Bache, who wrote LSD in the Mind of the Universe, who did like 70 LSD trips over 20 years or so, he used to do that – the next day, he would sit with the same music and the same position, and recount it. It’s incredibly effective at making sure that you remember what’s happened. So that was very useful. 

For me personally, by the fourth, sorry, the fifth dosing, which was the fourth one that wasn’t a placebo, but an actual dosing, I was already writing my book, which is coming out next month. And in it, I recount a lot of my dosings. And so I had this decentred mindset of I’m not paying attention to my experience in order to recount it. That was, though consistent for all of us in some way. Because like Carl said, we were being asked to rate in real time the DMTx experience. So what that does is it forces you to de-centre – to take a step back from the content of your experience, and watch it objectively. And that also helps a lot as well. Because if you’re asked, “Entities, yes or no?” and you go, “I’ll talk about that later”, that question becomes somewhat absurd at certain points. But for example, asking you to rate your anxiety from zero to 10, you have to check in with yourself and ask, “Okay, how am I doing right now? How am I feeling? What’s going on?” One time I gave a rating on an entity like four, and the interviewer was like, “Really? Four? Is that all?” And it was quite memorable. So basically, I would say it helped quite a bit to be there longer as well. It’s just stories unfolding.

Dr Gallimore: Yeah. It seems to me that out of the initial shock, also, it’s going to disrupt your ability to recall these things, whereas if you can form a narrative – because the brain likes stories, the brain likes narratives, rather than just lots and lots, a flood of information – it makes more sense. So that’s cool. That’s what we were hoping, that it would be a much better way for people to bring information back from the experience. So okay.

Anton Bilton: Yeah, I think there’s two different ways to look at this. And I think the DMTx both makes it easier to recall information and harder, because when you’re just smoking DMT in one bolus, you are given this very intense and dense experience. And then you come out. And you can riff on that. 

When you are in that experience for about an hour, sometimes you get saturated images and also somewhat exhausted, so that when you come out of it, you have all of these slides that are packed onto one another. And you may be able to recall some bits and pieces that were the most salient or intense. But it’s not that you can recall the whole hour, a lot of things kind of get them fused together and more often. And so I wouldn’t want to give the idea to the listeners that you can just go through a whole hour of DMT, just reviewing it, as a lot of things can get very, very confusing. And it’s a little bit like a dream recall as well. And sometimes the value of just having a pre-packaged, intense and short experience can actually help with recall. 

And in terms of the DMT tolerance, the DMTx protocol also has some nuanced limitations, in the sense that at the beginning, you’re given a big bolus, and then there is an infusion thereafter. So this actually discombobulates your ways to assess intensity. And so for me, the first two experiences, there was a tapering off – in fact, the very first time I had a pretty shocking burst surge that then would go down. And I would really struggle to see whether my system was actually adapting, or I received much more DMT during the bolus and during the infusion, which is totally possible. And on the highest doses, instead, there was no tapering whatsoever, it plateaued quite well. So I would definitely try to look at it under that lens. But yeah, I think it’s both easier and harder to recall. And at the level of time, it was time away all of the time. And yeah, that pinging every minute or so about the experience, of course anchors you even further. So until we have a true infusion with no external stimulus, we may not be able to tell really whether time distortion is really occurring or not. It’s pure speculation at this point.

Dr Gallimore: Yeah, it seems like as Timothy Leary attempted to do back in the ’60s, we need some way of real-time communication, some kind of system, perhaps with advances in things like AI and stuff, kind of thing might become possible, or a neural readout people are talking about, but I think we’re quite a long way from that kind of thing. 

Okay, I am cognisant of time, so I’m just going to kind of ask one final question before I will hand it over to Graham for the end. So at the end of your DMTx sessions, did any of you experience any kind of unexpected or unusual after-effects that you weren’t expecting? 

Okay, you're nodding your head there Ali. So maybe you just want to continue? Briefly?

Ali: Yeah, I’ll be brief because I didn’t get to answer the last one. Yeah, the after-effects, particularly between the first and the second dosing, are very intense synchronicity experiences. In fact, these were in some ways more intense and stranger than any of the dosings, except perhaps the last dosing, so I think this is something I’ve certainly heard people report particularly with Ayahuasca, so I don’t know if it’s a quality of the after-effect of DMT. 

But you could explain some of those experiences, as me being more heightened and seeing more connections in the world, sort of heightened, but I also had experiences where I thought I recognised someone and went over to the street, and it turned out not to be them. But the person I thought it was had killed themselves two days before, but I didn’t even know that – Like, wow, really weird stuff, really weird. So that was actually much harder to make sense of and to sort of stay agnostic about and practise the kind of internal science around that than a lot of the actual experiences. So I think there is an interesting research to be done around synchronous experiences and DMT, DMTx specifically, because I think the longer you’re in, perhaps it enhances it in some way. 

Dr Gallimore: Interesting. So, Carl, I know, you had a particularly strange after-effect, if I’m right. 

Carl: Yeah, well, many actually, I think would call them abilities more than effects. But one thing was definitely a sense of precognition inside the experience. So seeing my future mind state, having done a lot of interesting experiments with other substances very intentionally, but maybe pushing the boundaries a bit too far and seeing six months hence where that would take me – so really not understanding what what was being shown to me in the DMT experience, but then living it six months later, was super-fast. 

Then Jack actually came to me after one of his DMT infusions, and warned me about the experiments I was doing, that they may be taking me down the wrong path. So that was doubly interesting that he was also having some sort of maybe precognition as well. 

But other experiences, I would say, certainly a greater ability and telepathy was something that I experienced afterwards. I think one of the main things that happens is telepathic communication inside the DMT journeys with the entities – that seems to be the way they communicate with you. So that again was some sort of literacy that I developed. And I think that was enhanced because of the extended-state overview effects. I think having this kind of multiplicity understanding of consciousness and understanding that we live in one timeline, but maybe there are multiple timelines that were not not normally available, that aren’t normally available to our limited bandwidth. It’s also vision – having 360 vision when I was having that experience with the with the cracked five-MEO DMT experience revealing the multiplicity of unities. I was actually given a key inside the experience, and it was being delivered right through these or tentacles, in multiple places. I had to physically grab it from behind me, so I had 360 vision at that point. 

And the final one was kind of this double consciousness where I’m having to relay to Chris and Lisa the intensity ratings, and I’m hearing my voice in the physical space in a very different kind of way than I’m experiencing it in the DMT space.

Dr Gallimore: Fascinating. So it seems like you’re developing this almost ascension – you are developing into a spiritual being in a kind of way. While you’re getting closer to that through this DMTx, it’s almost like a training period for your consciousness. It’s kind of fascinating, I had no idea that these sorts of things would be experienced at all. 

So perhaps before I hand over to Graham, Anton, did you notice any, any after-effects? A lot of people are talking about effects on dreaming – did you experience changes in your dreams after DMTx or any other after effects?

Anton: Yeah. A little bit. What I found, as I find with that commitment to Ayahuasca, is that synchronicities seem to start from the moment you make the decision to attend. And I’ve noticed that with your book in an Ayahuasca retreat or session, two, three months ahead, the moment you’ve made the intentional decision to be there, something starts happening. And I very much found this when I committed to partake in the experiment. And then of course, it’s almost as if the molecule knows you’re coming and working with you, guiding you, bringing you along. So I found that it was very strong. 

And then the other thing the entities showed me – they had like little iPads, and they were trying to show me these images. I’m very excited about these images. And I kept saying, “What are they?” I couldn't understand them at all, but they were geometric shapes and like hieroglyphs, and they seemed to think I should know, but I didn’t know. But I kept seeing these things for the next two or three weeks. I’d see that imagery, whether it was in nature or whether it was in pictures or whatever. I have seen that was the thing they were showing. So there was some sort of language going on in that.

Dr Gallimore: Are you going to try and draw these images? I do.

Anton: Yeah, I’ve got the drawings and there was a shuddering moment. So a few days later, when somebody was showing us at a conference these alchemical sorts of descriptions, and it looked like two or three of those, and in fact, were there. And it was, “Oh, my goodness.” 

And then the other thing was, I woke very, very early the following morning with really beautiful clarity of mind, a connection – sort of what Carl was saying, I felt connected to everything, and I sat down and actually had much more of a memory recall at 5:30am, rather than when I got home that evening, I think I was just exhausted, because it’s a very long day. But yeah, that was it.

Dr Gallimore: Wonderful. Okay, so thank you, everyone. So I think we get a really good picture now of what the DMTx experience was like for the panel, kind of the general form and structure and progression of this extended-state infusion. But of course, we’re all interested, particularly, in, it’s not so much where you go, when you take DMT, but who you meet there. I think we’ll all agree with that. So I think we’d really like to get on to talking about the entities now. So I think we should move swiftly on to Sir Graham of Hancock, who will lead the discussion from here.

Graham Hancock: Look, I’d like to begin not so much with the question, but with a philosophical point, which might develop into a question. We’re all in this conversation, people who have experienced DMT and experienced the effects of DMT. 

In my case, I’ve not had the opportunity for the extended-state DMT. But I’ve had plenty of experiences of smoked vaporised DMT. And of course, Ayahuasca is the active ingredient, being DMT. The philosophical point I want to make is there are certain common or shared experiences and the question then becomes for me: “Are we opening a doorway, in some way, onto a seamlessly convincing parallel universe inhabited by intelligent entities?” In other words, is our experience an experience of something real? And that raises questions as to what real is and what reality is – or is it? Is it some kind of archive, which is stored in our DNA? And we’re just gaining access to it in the altered state of consciousness? Or is it none of the above? Is it just our brains on drugs, coming up with these fantastical experiences? 

And where I find myself, as opposed to the notion that it’s just our brains on drugs, is that I don’t see how evolution would have created a brain module that would be activated in this situation. I don't see the utility of it. For example, an example I often give is intuitive physics. We all have intuitive physics, we all can deflect an object thrown at us, even though a very complicated mathematical calculation is there, and you can understand in evolutionary terms why that’s there. But why would there be a brain module for seeing entities that are part-animal, part-human – information that communicate with us telepathically? This, to me, suggests more that we’re entering something real and separate and free-standing. And so that’s the first question I’d like to ask all the volunteers, one at a time, your what’s your hunch? What’s your guess that you’re interfacing with when you enter this experience? Whatever we call it, I’ll start with you, Carl.

Carl: Thanks, Graham. Great question. Wow. I think it’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I think whether we are or are not experiencing a parallel reality, even if it is just our imaginations, that just proves the magnificence of our imaginations. My hunch, having done the DMT extended state for three months – and what a privilege it was to be invited to do so – I think is that that’s a mystery school, that there’s certainly something going on and there do seem to be these reliable portals that are that are available for us. Whether that is something – because what I experienced is something that’s super-holographic; it looks digital it looks like virtual reality – so that to a certain extent, and what I what I persistently see, is this language that’s there at the core of my vision, whether it’s on DMT or DMTx extended, I’m seeing entities made of this language. 

And what I would have loved to have done was actually draw while in the experience. And I think that that idea that we do remain intact, and we do remain in ourselves, essentially, where we do have the ability to sketch and potentially do other things, I think that that's the promise of DMT extended, that we can investigate, we can become investigators on to consciousness onto these phenomenologies that that could well be, whether it’s ourselves in the future, whether it is a parallel reality. 

I think that what DMTx offers is an opportunity to really inject, right – I mean, there are other ways of extending the state and with other medicines, etc – but I think that DMTx seems to me to be an interesting space, but not for the faint-hearted. I would add. I think that these things are very much for those just like the Greek Mystery Schools – it wasn’t about how much money you had, whether you got into the school; it was how emotionally available, how mature you are to actually be part of this.

Graham Hancock: Anton, turning to you, is it a parallel universe? Is it an archive, stored somewhere in our brains? Or is it just our brains on drugs?

Anton: I don’t think it is our brains on drugs. It’s just where the drugs are taking us, you know – what key they are to a certain portal? I’m personally convinced it’s not the God imagination. And you know, people would sometimes say, Is it Jungian archetypes? What, are you doing archetypes?” I think this is a portal to another realm of existence. These entities seem to have a message for us. 

Who are they? Are they the realm of the dead? Are they the realm of us in the future, not made of matter, organic form? And now communicating with us? 

The thing I like most about it is the military notion of KISS: keep it simple, stupid. There exists this compound on Earth. It is ubiquitous, it’s in us – it’s in plants, it’s everywhere. And the only thing we know that it does is take people to an extraordinary other place. Only assume, therefore, that some type of creative force – whether that's Cosmic Mind, God, advanced aliens, or the computer programmer for this simulation – has put it here to allow us to communicate in some way with it, or its mysteries. 

So I think this is an extraordinary communication device, which is why the experiments are so exciting. And you know, that might be spending billions sending rockets to space, what we’re doing in this little experiment is probably far greater in terms of understanding of the nature of our existence. 

Ali: Yeah, probably, all of us wrestled a lot with it. But I think, well, I think it’s both, but I actually think it was certainly where it brought me was to asking the question, “Okay, well, is the universe made of stuff matter? Or is it made of mind?” And like many people, there’s actually research by Chris Timmerman, from a different project, looking at the fact that people shift to a more panpsychist or idealist view, and more of a view of the world being made of mind, after taking psychedelics unless they’re staunch materialists to begin with, in which case, they don’t shift very much. But then also, you know, Johns Hopkins has read more recently, but it wouldn’t be. ..

Graham Hancock: Picking you up at that point, it would be fascinating if Richard Dawkins would undertake a DMTx experience.

Ali: That would be amazing. Let’s get on that. So, yeah, basically, I do think we are entering a – I’m going to say, distinct reality. That was very much my experience, I was very much my intuition. I do think we overlay a lot onto it to make sense of it. So I actually had a few experiences in DMTx and also elsewhere of having a sense that the way I was interpreting what I was seeing was a lot of my own projection onto something, and there was even a moment in the DMT. 

Graham Hancock: Because that’s true of all experiences, isn’t it? Yeah. The experience is mediated by DMT. Or not construe it in terms of our own frame of reference.

Ali: Exactly. Yeah. So if we both went to Paris and we came back with different stories and someone asked us is Paris real? Paris is real, but we have different Parises as well, but there is a Paris there. So I think there is something there. Yeah, for sure.

Graham Hancock: How about you, Jack? What’s your view on this mystery?

Jack: Well, I like to be devil’s advocate in every direction. I have seen a lot in my life. And I have been privileged to see entities in altered states other than DMT as well. There’s other substances that can create complex entities; they are far more technical and somewhat dangerous. But I have seen entities as complex and coherent and incredible, as with DMT, both with them, but also in the realm of dreaming – like I’ve always been a lucid dreamer since I was a child. And even to date, some of my more radical lucid dreams appear even more magical and incredible than DMT. 

So then that poses the question, “Are we naturally equipped to travel to alternative realities through different modalities? Or is this simply our brain desperate to generate meaning out of the overwhelming amount of information we are presented with?” And we know that, as humans, we can only really tune into lesson 0.1 of all information there is, and then we have to extract constructs out of it, we have to make sense of it, we have to generate autonomous entities within our mind to interact with. And having experienced this through so many different channels, and especially during dreaming, I personally don’t know. And I really keep my mind as agnostic as possible, even for the sake of my own sanity. Because for me, encountering entities is quite frequent. And it’s not just relegated to DMT. And I don’t really know what to do about it, it  can be really overwhelming. And it can be so consistent, so coherent, so precise. 

And especially if one is stuck in a lucid dream for a long time, the level of interaction, the level of responsiveness, the level of line… in one of my most recent lucid dreams, I could operate my phone and select the apps and the apps would operate exactly like the characters would be all weird. They were a mixture of like Latin and Hebrew, or just predator-like, like symbols. And there was no drug involved at that point. But it was just so pure and so stable, like I could stare at the details for minutes on end. And I could move my head around, and the whole dreamscape would just stay stable, interactive and alive. So I really don’t know. I have been both a materialist and an idealist, and I tried to stay context-dependent. And I tried to focus more on what’s useful than what’s true. 

And in terms of making the most of the DMT for personal growth and inspiration and quality of life and, or extracting just information, yeah, we are faced with a very powerful modality that is really informing us a lot about what we are capable of as biological processing units, or antennas, or whatever it is that we want to talk about. But yeah, I personally don’t know. And I could resonate with all answers, really, and find 1,000 different rationalisations for all of them.

Graham Hancock: Yeah. Do you guys compare notes after the session? I mean, after our Ayahuasca sessions, it’s typical to have a sharing. Do you have something similar with the DMTx? Or do you talk to each other once you’re out of the experimental setting about what you've experienced? Start with you, Jack. 

Jack: In terms of sharing, yeah, I mean, we were not really allowed to talk much publicly about what we went through for a while, because of the rules of the study. Yeah, of course, behind closed doors, we shared bits and pieces, and we found resonance, whether there was an actual connection between us or not, I’m not sure – like, as Carl mentioned, I did have him in one of my visions and had a premonition or a simulation that maybe some of what he was going through triggered me and scared me, so then I felt compelled to communicate with him about it. 

And there was some meaning, there was some salient exchange about the contexts that we were talking about. Whether this is just the fact that we are good friends and we interact with each other more than the next person, or there was an actual portal open, it’s hard to say,

Graham Hancock: I suppose the reason I’m asking the question, just to move on, is I want to ask you each specifically an entity question, but is it possible that your experiences communicated with one another have had an influence upon you? Has person A’s experience of an entity had an influence on person B’s experience of an entity, if you share these experiences? Let me put that question to Carl, because we talked about it for a moment.

Carl: Thanks, Graham. So you’re asking whether there’s some sort of stability with entity encounters between us? 

Graham Hancock: Yeah, I’d like to come to that. But first of all, I want to know whether you’ve shared among yourselves the entity encounters that you’ve had, and whether there’s any risk that this would influence the empathy encounters of the person you're sharing with?

Carl: Yeah, so as Jack said, we’re sort of sworn to secrecy around this stuff, not just between ourselves, but to the wider world. And obviously, there’s great interest in this experiment. So it was very difficult to not talk about it, but we will manage to keep it. And this is like the first time we've been able to talk about it publicly. So definitely, yeah, it’s a great question. I think, you know, priming, if we were to talk about the, I mean, you can see why we weren’t allowed to talk about depression. Lisa, the Imperial team, didn’t want people primed. I mean, Terence McKenna is probably the worst example, isn’t it? The self-dribbling elves? If you don’t get self-dribbling elves after listening to terrorists, and you think you’re not tripping? Yeah.

Graham Hancock: So the next question I have is, ask each one of you what, and I’ll start with you, Carl, since I’m on you at the moment, if you could pick from the range of entity encounters that you’ve had – I assume there’s been a range? Wha’'s the single most powerful encounter that you had? What describes that entity?

Carl: I think there was certainly a greater resolution of entities as you’re going through the dosing sessions. But for me, it was very much the alien – it wasn’t one entity, it was this alien, it felt like a co-opting of the space by foreign entities. And whether that was just because I was being sort of taken out of the traditional DMT space into a bridging between the DMT and five-MEO DMT space and then actually being taken beyond the white room of the five-MEO DMT space and shown that there’s not just one type of unity, but there’s a multiplicity of unities. And maybe that points towards the multiverse or whatever. 

But yeah, I think it's tribes of entities, rather than single entities that I’m always experiencing. I never, apart from when I’m given a key by this sort of locked octopus, like, with all the tentacles, I think that it’s much more about tribes. And just one experience was this idea of interspecies splicing. So I felt like I had morphed into a sort of a dinosaur shape. And, and then on the other side, it may be I’m interspecies splicing with an actual animal type. 

They are also consuming DMT, maybe on a different planet, and we’re literally swapping bodies. So suddenly that animal gets to see inside the hospital.

 

Graham Hancock: Yeah. And Anton, would you describe your most powerful entity experience during this series of experiments?

Anton: Yes. I mean, it hasn’t been the most powerful experience that I’ve ever had with DMT, particularly with Ayahuasca, and I would describe this experience as bounding into 90 minutes after the beginning when I was in a session. You’re just suddenly there at the strongest moment, and it’s that assimilation that’s very tricky to get. 

I remember with the automated voice saying “Entities, yes or no?” And I’ve been saying “No, no, no.” And suddenly, I’m surrounded by them. My little voice was “yes”, it was like suddenly somebody saying, “Are there tigers.” “Yeah, there.” And you go, “Yes, but please be quiet. Don’t want them to know because they’re all around.” What I found, and I follow the same notion of the tribe, that I what I tend to see very regularly is this group of humanoid forms that don’t really fit into the Terence McKenna sort of description. They’re almost gingerbread men – like they are indistinguishable from each other. But the noses are flat, the eyes don’t really open. But somehow they’re seeing. There are children and adults. And it’s a grouping. And you seem to have just arrived at their place, their home, their village, whatever. 

And I refer back to that comment about being the wounded pigeon, you evaluate yourself, because the children look down at you, as do the adults. And then the adults push the children back and say, “Leave it alone,’ and usually two male adults will come across. And they always seem to look at the back of me when I can’t work it out because I don’t have a neck or arms or legs. But my guess is they’re looking to see if a cord or a connection has been severed. And I can only guess into this, because it’s so regular, that they’re sort of assessing, has this essence – this soul, the spirit, whatever it might be, this consciousness – has it died and left organic Earth or left the realm of matter and arrived in the realm of light? Or is it just a tourist passing through on DMT or the like? And they sort of, if, as they see it, the cord must be there, they tend to sit on either side and watch what I’m looking at, almost like guardians or protectors in some strange way. 

So that’s the sort of regular thing that happens. What swerved with me on this one was I had them and they were very keen to show me these tablets with all this information. And you get a little bit frustrated, because you can’t download. And they’re so excited to share. And you keep saying, “What is it? What does it mean? What does it mean?” And they’re just grinning at you and you know, you can’t grasp it. But it’s obviously very important. And then I swerved, which took me up to nine out of 10 in intensity, and arrived in this very beautiful pastoral environment where there were 10-foot-tall, sort of Mr Zeus, orang-utangy, airy-type entities with their children with what looked like trees and waterfalls, but weren’t. And it was beautifully pastoral. It was sort of like one of those Attenborough documentaries when they arrived in a village or in a group of monkeys. And the monkeys or the villagers are aware that the camera man’s there, the tourist is there, but they’re not interested. They’re just in bliss. And it was the sort of download I got then that this was primal being – this is how we should be, just being in this existence in beauty and nature connected. Yeah, so that was it for that experience.

Graham Hancock: Jack, you made a point earlier that, in a way, what’s more important to you is what’s useful than what’s true. Or than establishing what is true. Could you describe your most powerful entity encounter and what was useful about it for you?

Jack: Well, during the DMTx, these were harder to pinpoint. They were all around me, it was an ecosystem of them, a jungle of them. There was a distinctive, matrix-like, robotic ensemble of tentacles, cables, cogs all around me, just interwoven in the individual aspect. Funnily enough, the most distinct entities for me that I could just look at and see for what they were, were at the very lowest dose, which is very strange, where I just got shocked for the first 10 minutes by some of the most distinct entities. And one I can remember was like some kind of elfish creature, humanoid with quite delicate features – they are very clean-faced and a petite kind of structure, and they were operating or reshuffling some kind of material or equipment in front of it, in front of me. 

And so there was not much acknowledgement of me. I am rarely acknowledged by the entities. It does happen occasionally where they would be showing me the world or welcoming me into it, but that’s rare – they’re usually doing their thing. And I’m just witnessing. And this was very much the case for me during the DMTx as well. And that was particularly aesthetic and, and impressive, as usual. But in the level of making use of it, it’s not easy. These are very much like films that I’m watching that have some kind of autonomous entity doing their thing in their own world abiding to their own narratives, their own motives, and I very rarely manage to make a connection to the mundane, the mundane day-to-day data. Maybe living in my human experience, like some, the most meaningful things are usually emotional, where I am reminded that a lot of my problems, and a lot of my worries and fears, but now in the grand scheme of things, they are telling me that there is a deeper cosmic purpose to all of us, that channel can be consolidated through a DMT experience, whether that’s the DMTx or Ayahuasca. It may not matter. 

In fact, for me, the afterglow, or the repercussions afterwards that I did not discuss prior is a relative sense of wellness and afterglow that would persist for a few days afterwards, in which I felt that I was reminded of some intrinsic purpose in life. And I could connect with that, at a personal level, in a way that transcends what I perceive to be my problems and my shortcomings. And so by the end of it all, I could feel like I could do DMTx even once a month as almost in the way someone would do an IV therapy session with vitamins, but using DMT instead, like a certain type of check-in. And yeah, a reboot in terms of value systems, value attribution, in terms of what’s useful on a day to day.

Graham Hancock: Now, going back to the question of the reality status of all of this, I’ve tried to establish whether there’s been a lot of chatter between you volunteers afterwards. But the question I want to ask, and this I’ll ask to Carl first, the question I want to ask is, “Have any of you experienced the same or similar entities? Or is each person’s experience isolated to themselves with no common points with the other experiences? Carl, what’s your thoughts?

Carl: Yes, it’s a great question. I think having this discussion today is super, super useful. And even though Jacqueline and Allie and I have spoken with Anton hosting a session at the Turing Initiative recently, this is much more in depth. I think that maybe we’re not experiencing the same entities, but we’re certainly experiencing the same phenomenologies. And I think that that's super interesting. And yeah, I think ultimately, we will benefit from having much more of a deep dive. This is why I think that drawing things immediately afterwards would be a benefit. And even during I think that the ability to draw this stuff out and to then identify these entities. For me, it’s very hard to, as I mentioned, to identify individual identities of entities there – there’s  vast quantities, much more than you would normally imagine could fit in a space. And they always come in multiples for me, so it’s difficult to identify them.

Graham Hancock: You mentioned that you had developed some new abilities, including telepathy, and this is a question I’d like to put to all of the volunteers. Has novelty emerged from these experiences? You, Carl, have already answered this question in the sense that you felt that your telepathic abilities – of course that’s something that materialist science would sneer at immediately, but we’re hopefully beyond that very narrow mindset here – that your experience was the telepathic contact increased following this experience. I would regard that as novelty – something new that came into your life – and I want to ask the other volunteers, starting with Jack, has novelty come out of this for you? Have you learned something new that you didn’t know before or that you couldn’t possibly have known before?

Jack: For me, novelty came mostly as a result of developing a new skill. As I discussed, I’ve been through entities and extended the DMTx in various forms before, but during the DMTx experience, by I would say the third session, I had developed a skill that I did not know was quite available. When I would say by the middle point of the third session, I returned into my body. So, during smoked DMT, it’s usually a pretty overwhelming and debilitating experience, in which you’re surrounded by very strong vision, but you’re semi-paralysed, and you can’t quite operate, you’re almost, like, kidnapped by the experience. And that was very much my experience forever. Even though you asked about it, it can be quite crippling in many ways and soils, farming Ayahuasca, but by DMTx the third session, I returned into my body. And all of a sudden, I could experience a full breakthrough with all of the entities around me. And absolutely overwhelming visions. But I could move, I could raise my head, I could look left and right. And by the fourth session, I knew that I could have even stood and walked around if I wanted to. I became in full control over my body. So I could now operate.

Graham Hancock: You could have walked around in this realm in your body, while continuing to experience the DMT realm if that’s what we’re going to call it

Jack: Exactly, like I could have never possibly imagined that the body could have learned to navigate like stabilisers on a bike, let’s say, when by my third session, I felt I could remove the the stabilisers. And I could have simply treated the breakthrough as augmented reality. And that, for me, was an absolute breakthrough.

Graham Hancock: And do you think this new ability is something that you could cultivate further? And if you did, what would be the benefits of doing so?

Jack: 100%, like that was a certain level of my body becoming capable of reactivating systems that evolution usually suspends in times of critical crisis. So this parallels my experience with skydiving. I’m a professional skydiver, or at least I have my own rig. I’ve done it hundreds of times. And then at the beginning, you’re mostly just floating and trying to keep it together and, and deploy the parachute, not die. But after many dozens of flights, your body comes back and you start savouring the movements between your arms – you can flip, you can fly in the terminal directions, you can think about your life, the richness of the integration between all of the different aspects of you, as a human, become available. And I experienced exactly this after my third session of the DMTx in a way that then I could simply gain access to more parts of me in a meaningful and coherent manner. 

So that seems to me extremely useful in different contexts, and I have experienced even more recently where I’ve had a breakthrough of DMT smoked. And I felt that for some reason, my bladder was going to explode, and I managed to run towards the bathroom, and have a leak in a full breakthrough. So problem-solving, managing my bodily functions, not making a mess of any bathroom while being surrounded by entities. So that to me is something that I could have never possibly imagined possible, and it is possible, and the DMTx experience seems the cleanest way to be guided towards learning that kind of ability that is very, very precise, very clean. That’s

not whimsical, that novelty.

Image: Kaleidoscope Of Interfaces by Jemma Foster → @mamaxanadu  

This image was created with Stable Diffusion, using prompts from the DMT panel of Carl's description of his DMT experience.

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