5-MeO-DMT vs. N, N-DMT: Two Different Molecules, Vastly Different Experiences

Authors

Victoria Wueschner &
Joel Brierre

Date of original publication

Sep 5, 2023

Source

Two of the most powerful psychedelic experiences a human can have, both fast acting but completely different. Join us for our upcoming FIVE webinar exploring the differences between N,N-DMT and 5-MeO-DMT with experts Dr. Andrew Gallimore and Rak Razam. While N,N-DMT and 5-MeO-DMT may have very similar names, the experiences could not be less alike. Due to this easy misconception, many individuals seeking an experience may get more than they bargained for. In this webinar pioneers, Rak Razam and Andrew Gallimore shed light on these powerful compounds by drawing on research and experiential data. 

Dr. Andrew Gallimore is a computational neurobiologist, pharmacologist, chemist, and writer who has been interested in the neural basis of psychedelic drug action for many years and is the author of a number of articles and research papers on the powerful psychedelic drug, DMT, and its effects on the brain and consciousness. In 2015, he collaborated with DMT pioneer Rick Strassman, the author of DMT and the Spirit Molecule, to develop a pharmacokinetic model of DMT is the basis of a target-controlled intravenous infusion protocol for extended journeys in the bizarre worlds to which DMT gates access. His current interests focus on DMT and other psychedelic molecules as a tool for gating access to otherwise inaccessible subjective worlds. There are neuroscientific underpinning and their possible ontological and metaphysical location. He currently lives and works in Tokyo.

And also joining us is the one and the only, Rak Razam. Rak Razam is an alchemical storyteller with his finger on the pulse of tomorrow and the heart of today, a screenwriter, documentary, documentarian, author, journalist, and a plant medicine ambassador. He focuses on the cultural paradigm birthing in this brave new world.

Joel: All right. Rak or Andrew, anything you guys wanted to say or ask or share before we get started?

Rak: I'd like to have a confession. I'm not a scientist, as my bio said. And I wouldn't say I'm intimidated. Andrew and I have met before. And as a journalist, I've interviewed him on my old podcast series. And I just like to say there's probably a really nice interplay here between what the differences are between 5-MeO and NN-DMT.

But I feel before you can get to that point, you almost need to understand the context of what's happening on both these substances, which really could be more than just a peak experience hallucination and more of an incursion into an interior geography that these chemicals may enable in our consciousness. So I'd like to look at the context and then the differences and similarities there may be in the organic and synthetic versions of these compounds.

Joel: Yeah, that actually leads us pretty perfectly in. I would love to hear from each of you. Rak, I'd love to hear you speak a little bit about 5-MeO-DMT, and Andrew, I'd love to hear you speak a little bit about DMT and why you're each so passionate about each respective molecule?

Rak: You know what? I originally was very passionate about NN-DMT as well before 5-MeO came back into preference. I think NN-DMT is a gateway drug for 5-MeO. It's even in the chemical structure, right? Just to say that the tryptamines are believed to be quite endemic to consciousness itself. And the realms that they reveal, both in the indigenous lineages and in the modern psychonaut type of paradigms, are quite astounding and amazing.

Tryptamines reveal the Terra Incognita of Innerspace

And, you know, anyone who's felt this, they don't feel like they're just hallucinations in any way, shape, or form. So for many years, I was following the late-great Terence McKenna's mapping of these realms and these potentials and his promulgation of both ayahuasca and DMT throughout the late 1980s, early 1990s and the 2000s.

And this has just been the most remarkable terra incognita, the invisible landscape that these substances can reveal. I started off very much enamoured with NN-DMT, and then it wasn't really until 5-MeO came back my way with the Bufo Alvarius toad, that it sort of transcended NN-DMT. But if I can look at my seven years with 5-MeO now and pretty much my seven years with NN-DMT previously, I think that allows me to look at the context and the cohesion that they almost have been, for me, building blocks or a sort of stepping stones from one medium to the other.

And that they're both intimately connected, not just in the experience and visions or non-visions or what you're experiencing, you know, experientially. But in the geography that is explored.

I really believe that they're so complementary. Like one leads to the other, it's almost as if there's a baseline frequency, baseline consciousness. You go up one sort of level to a hyperspacial astral level with content and all the aliens, architectures, ancestors, all of that stuff. And if you keep going up, you end up at the white light or the absence of that content, which one graduates into the other. So anyway, that's my introductory bit. I'm sure we can get into some nitty-gritties in a bit.

Joel: Thank you, Rak. Andrew?

Andrew: Yeah, I mean, I guess I can echo what Rak says. I mean, for me, certainly, a friend once said to me about a guy called Carl Smith, who was actually one of the participants in the Imperial College London DMTX study, the extended state DMT. And years and years ago, he said to me, "DMT is like the fifth dimension and 5-MeO-DMT is like the 12th dimension." And he also described an experience during his extended state DMT, where he was in the DMT space and he saw the 5-MeO DMT space kind of there. He could see it somewhere, you could see like the portal towards that.

And as Rak quite correctly said, I think, you pass through this space of immense complexity and form, of structure, of content that seems way beyond anything that could possibly exist within our lower dimensional slice of reality.

This far simpler three-plus-one dimensional world that we occupy, DMT seems to, NN-DMT seems to occupy or allow you to reach a realm that is beyond anything in our lower dimensional slice of reality. It is full of content, full of form, full of intelligent beings. And because of that, it's actually quite easy to study. You've got a lot to kind of get your teeth into with DMT, which is why…

Well, the main reason why I talk about DMT and I study DMT and think about and write about and research DMT is because there's a lot to get your teeth into. Once you get to 5-MeO, I think this is when you move past the form and the content into no form, no content, this pure white light, as Rak called it, and as many other people like to call it. And so I think there is a continuum there. I think there is this deep relationship between the two molecules.

The problem, I think, is how do you study formless quite like… you know, as a neuroscientist and as somebody who wants to write about these kind of things, how do you, how do you study something? It's almost zen: you have almost like a zen like problem here. And that, you know, whatever you say about it isn't it, not this, not this. And so it's like, well, what the fuck do I do with that?

From an academic or scientific perspective, it's actually very difficult to kind of grasp. I think its one of the reasons that 5-MeO is less written about is because, in a way, whilst there's everything to say about it, there's also absolutely nothing to say about it other than you can't describe it, right, that it's ineffable. And it's like, okay, where do we go from there?

So that's kind of why I've stayed in the relatively, I would say, lower dimensional space of DMT, which is still a lifetimes and more work to get your head around it and to try and understand it. But making that connection, that link between DMT and 5-MeO, I think is very important, but at the same time, you are, you're reaching into realms where very little can be said. You can study the neuroscience. You can look at neuroactivity. You can look at how these molecules, which we will probably get into, how they differ in terms of how they interact with the brain and why they have such–despite being extremely closely related– there's very, very little difference structurally between 5-MeO and NN-DMT.

Joel: Well, it's just that five methoxy group. That's literally the difference. And yet the effects in a way couldn't be more different. But, yeah, I think studying it beyond that, trying to explain and describe and, you know, put words to the experience, I think It's quite a challenge, wouldn't you say, Rak?

Receptor Sites for Tryptamines

Rak: I would, but I always beg to differ, because it is ineffable and it is sort of translinguistic, but so are most aspects of the great mystery. I think what we're really describing here is levels of engagement of the ego functionality, and obviously in the content of the DMT frequency, there's a lot of content to sort through. So the ego is always reacting to that and trying to make sense of that, you know, in navigation. With 5-MeO, though, there's still a spaciousness and there's still a presence of mind.

It's just that the egoic mind–I like to say it is invited to let go, but it doesn't always. And some strong minds hold on. And there's almost like a lucid dreaming quality of witnessing consciousness, which can go into deep Source, just around the event horizon of maybe we could call it a nirvakulpa samadhi and no mind where it goes.

But there is capacity to know, to be, to be connected to the Source of all things. And this language, you know, obviously, is something the ego frameworks around when it comes back. But it's almost like a fetal type of consciousness when you're deep in 5-MeO.

And what I'd like to ask Andrew is, I did see some study recently that was looking at the receptor sites. And I think it was the DMT extended research study where they were saying that even on the extended immersion and on big doses, ego was still present on NN-DMT. So obviously, the ego is invited to let go. And I think this is the key difference.

Maybe originally centuries ago, they had a stem where they were connected. But there is language and there is mapping, especially in the Vedic mapping and the yogic traditions, which Joel and I have been doing, working with www.bridgingheaven.com, looking at low-dose 5-MeO and meditation to describe levels of egoic consciousness into the full release. But, yeah, I would agree that it's more challenging for the ego to bring content back, but it is possible.

Andrew: So as you mentioned, the DMTX study, that was something that was, well, I mean, you can go back decades now. I remember Terence McKenna used to always say that the DMT in a way doesn't affect your mind. And in the sense that you aren't, you don't feel intoxicated. It's as if you are witnessing this. You are, your mind and your ego remains fully intact.

And yet, here you are in this most, to say the least strange, alternate environment, which can make it all the more terrifying, I think, in that you don't get the chance to let go of this frightened self that you do with high dose 5-MeO, perhaps.

And so it was kind of cool, I think, when these first DMTX studies started coming out and they were actually taking measures of the sense of ego loss throughout the experience and they did note that that unlike with high doses of psilocybin or LSD you do seem to retain that ego function which is an interesting effect because the ego is tied up with–it's part of this model that our brain is always constructing this external world model, the internal world model and the relationship between the two.

And the ego is all tied up with that, it's all part of this grand model if you like, that your brain has constructed. And so you do kind of expect the ego to to disintegrate but you don't see that on DMT and why that's the case is not quite clear, but I think my termation is that part of what the ego is doing or part of what the ego is without getting mystical, trying to kind of remain neuro scientific, which I always try to do.

The ego is part of that or is instantiated in this relationship between what's going on in your head or what's apparently going on in your head and your relationship to the world, basically, and how you keep those separate and how you maintain yourself as a distinct entity separate from your environment. And that's kind of how the ego feels like.

It feels like something, this subjective self that is distinct from everything else. And I think with DMT, because this DMT world does seem to be a completely alternate external environment. It doesn't feel like a dream or any kind of visionary experience in a way, it does feel like you're entering a new world. And so it makes sense to me that you can still maintain this sense of a self-witnessing and being part of or interacting with some other environment.

Whereas with something like psilocybin and LSD at normal doses at least, all of that is kind of dissolved and you find yourself merging with the environment. You find yourself becoming one with the environment and there's no differentiation between the self and the environment.

For some reason, DMT is kind of different. You maintain that sense of self. You maintain that sense of a subjective being that's having a relationship with this completely alien world. And somehow the ego somehow remains intact there

But I don't think we understand why that's happening yet, or what the kind of neural correlates of that are. But to me, it's again another indication that DMT is somehow special. And that as I've always maintained, I think it's extremely difficult to explain the content and the structure of these DMT worlds without invoking some source of extrinsic sensory information, some alternate source of sensory information that your brain is receiving.

And so the maintenance of the ego, I think, is all part of that, and that you truly are maintaining yourself as a watcher, an experience of some other reality. But once you get into 5-MeO-DMT, then things start to change, right? Then you are no longer, there is no longer any separation at all. And you transcend even what you achieve with DMT.

Default Mode Networks Again

Rak: A colleague of mine, Dr. Juan Acosta, who has since passed a few years ago, did some seminal NN-DMT and 5-MeO EEG studies that were published a few years ago. And his analysis of the data was that 5-MeO, as well as the default mode network, is actually targeting the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain and lowering electrical activity there. And at least anecdotally, that's sort of where this sense of ‘I” or the ego is generated.

But it seems to me that 5-MeO is affecting the ego and lowering the ego or dissolving it and diffusing it, where NN-DMT seems to focus it, you know, focusing in all the data and information that's coming. But are there different areas that are being targeted within the trip?

Andrew: So this is a question I can't give a definitive answer to. I think everyone has been–since well, 2012 like, for a decade basically– everyone's talking about the default mode network and this comes out of Imperial College’s pioneering work and everyone focused on this effect, this assumption that the breakdown of these large scale networks…

So the brain is a network of networks of networks; networks all the way down. So you have these large scale networks which are basically areas of the brain that are speaking to each other and that help control activity of large parts of the brain.

And the default mode network is one of those networks. You have other networks as well that become engaged during different types of neural activity during different types of tasks. And the DMN is this default. It's thought to be that network that is engaged when you're not actively interacting with or performing tasks in the so-called outside world.

And so the dissolution of that, the breakdown of that, as well as other networks as well that you see with psychedelics, has always been assumed, I think, to be this hallmark of the loss of ego function. But more recent data with other drugs has seen a similar kind of breakdown of this default mode intra network connectivity, even in completely non-psychedelic drugs.

So I think now the whole idea that, yeah, it's the DMN, that's what you've got to look for. And if that starts to break down, then you're going to be in loss of ego. That is not as sure-footed. It doesn't sit on as solid a foundation as it was once assumed. So it doesn't surprise me at all that you're starting to see what might be kind of paradoxical or unexpected effects with with certain drugs where loss of the ego doesn't correlate to loss of the DMN or loss of the DMN connectivity doesn't cause apparent subjective loss of ego.

I think we just don't understand the ego as well as perhaps we thought we did. Now, to kind of get to the second part of your question, again, I can't be definitive about it because I just don't think we know enough. But in NN-DMT and 5-MeO-DMT they're both nominally members of the classic psychedelics which are these–as most people all know–these tryptamine psychedelics generally, but not always, bind to and activate these particular subtypes the 5HT2a receptors. All the classic psychedelics do, that's their kind of primary locus of activity. But then you've got all these other receptor subtypes, which are tickled to various degrees by psychedelics.

And the overall effect you're going to get with the psychedelic will depend upon that particular pattern of receptor station. And so, Sasha Shulgin described it like an orchestra. 

Each of your receptors is an instrument within that orchestra. It's stimulating, it's manipulating neural activity in its own distinct way. And the overall sound that you get, in other words, the overall subjective effect will depend upon which receptors are activated, in other words, which instruments are sounding, but also how those receptors are active in another layer of complexity.

So how you play the instrument will also determine the overall sound of the orchestra. We know with MDMA it activates the 5HT2A, of course, in its own particular manner. With FOXY-DMT, it's kind of different in that it's much more selective for this other serotonin receptor subtypes called the 5HT1A.

Now, for 5-MeO-DMT, it is still a classic psychedelic. You can still block its subjective effects to some degree at least by blocking this 5HT2A receptor. It's still a classic psychedelic, but it relies much more on stimulation at the same time as these 5HT1A receptors. Now 5HT2A and 5HT1A without getting too technical, they antagonize each other. So 5HT2A when you activate will actually excite the neurons within which the receptor is embedded and 5HT1A tends to do the opposite. It makes the neuron less excitable, this push and pull effect. And the balance of 5HT1A versus 5HT2A will determine the overall effect on the neurons excitability.

And so what 5-MeO-DMT is doing is because the balance is tipped towards 5HT1A, you're getting a different overall effect on neural activity and this is made even more complex because these receptor subtypes are located in different types of the brain–there is this population of very important neurons deep in the deep layers of the cortex called the cortical pyramidal cells, where psychedelics were primarily, but you also have populations of these receptors in different parts of the brain as well.

And so if, for example–I don't know if this necessarily is the case or if it's been studied, if you have populations of 5HT1A receptors in, let's say, frontal areas of the brain, so I might want to look at that, then you would get a more pronounced effect in this part of the brain. Or 5MeO-DMT would be affecting the frontal area of brain more specifically than something that DMT would.

And since 5HT1A is an inhibitory receptor, reduces the excitability, you might see some kind of shutdown effect in this frontal part of the brain, as well as the more global effects by affecting the 5HT1A and 5HT2A in the kind of the upper and the back areas of the cortex.

So to summarize, the overall effect that you're getting is the emergent pattern of neural activity that results from this particular pattern of receptor stimulation in different areas of the brain. And so that's the effect that you're observing with 5-MeO-DMT compared to NN-DMT.

Rak: Isn't there also something happening with the Hertz frequency, like the alpha, beta, gamma delta etc.? What I've read is the normal alpha beta sort of consciousness on 5MeO goes into gamma–and it's like a hyper coherence state– is that accurate? And have you seen that on NN-DMT?

Andrew: Yeah that's a good question. So neural activity–again, it all goes back to the receptors, but when you have large numbers of neurons that are being stimulated in a certain way, they become coherent. They tend to synchronize their activity to some extent because they're all connected, right? They're all speaking to each other. And this patterns of coherent activity you see as patterns of coherent electrical activity.

And the brain works at–as you said–at a number of different frequencies. So you have very high frequencies. So these gamma frequencies you're talking about, which is very important in synchronizing activity over large areas of the cortex.

And then you get down to lower and lower frequencies. So you have beta and alpha, which is even lower. And so different patterns of receptor stimulation will cause different patterns of electrical activity to emerge. And so, yes, if you were to see increase, so the kind of the hallmark of a psychedelic effect is actually desynchronization broadly.

So you're seeing a decrease in alpha beta wave activity suggesting that activity is becoming more disorganized because synchronized oscillations suggest organized activity, whereas desynchronized suggests very differentiated, very independent activity. And there's always a balance between them, right? Your brain is always trying to strike a balance.

It has to be organized. It has to be coherent. Otherwise, the world would just be a buzzing mess and your brain wouldn't be able to achieve anything. It wouldn't be able to maintain a stable model of reality. And yet at the same time, it has to be some level of desynchronization, different parts of the brain have to be able to work independently as well.

And so there's always this synchronization and then desynchronization and re-synchronization going on all the time and it's extremely complex and extremely beautiful really and psychedelics will certainly disrupt that. And so you tend to see this loss of alpha power with loss of alpha wave synchronization. Basically you know when these oscillations synchronize you get an increase in the signal because there's like two sounds that are harmonious and entraining.

So it's like when you have two waves that are vibrating but when you have lots of these, when these alpha waves are very synchronized, then you get a stronger reading, basically, on the EEG is this kind of the take-home message there. And you will see that drop away when you give someone a psychedelic.

You will start to see this reduction in the alpha power. But you also often see an increase in these gamma waves, as you said, which is just global synchronization. So you're getting these very interesting patterns that can emerge.

Now, I'm not sure how much – there's been far less 5-MeO work done, you know, compared to the other classic psychedelics. So, yeah, it would be really interesting to see. And I'm not 100 % familiar with how much 5-MeO work has been done in humans.

EEG brainwave readings and DMT

Joel: Well, we've got an exciting study this January, Andrew, if you haven't heard, we'll be taking two volunteers to get the full reading of the peak four to six minutes of the 5-MeO experience with a specialized 64 cap EEG. And so this is with the University College of London. And so it'll be really good to start getting some really usable data and getting to understand the neural mechanisms behind what is going on there.

Andrew: I think as Rak said, that is what I would expect to see if you start to see a drop off in these lower frequencies like alpha and alpha and beta and then you start to see a much higher synchronization in the gamma range, that would suggest that you're entering this hyper synchronized state, which you would predict subjectively to be much less differentiated, much less full of different content, and it should approach, one would expect, that kind of more formless, more white light state.

The same kind of state or related to in some way, to the state that you see with meditators, for example, you stick a very experienced meditator someone who can meditate into an MRI machine, which is quite a feat in itself, I think. And again, you see these increases in these particular high frequency oscillations, which would be similar, I think, or hopefully it should be similar to what you see with 5-MeO-DMT.

Rak: I've seen those studies and, I mean, there wasn't a centralized study comparing them, but if you look at the two studies of the monks meditating with EEG and people on 5-MeO with EEG, they're basically identical brainwave readings. There we go. It's doing the same thing. That's why I always say, 5-MeO is like an internal mechanism, but if we take it externally, then it's an external catalyst to do the same thing. It's like a hypermeditation more than a traditional psychedelic.

Joel: Speaking of catalysts, I'd love to, you know, both of you have spoken about baseline consciousness or kind of baseline reality. Rak, you spoke about that earlier with the 5-MeO experience. And Andrew, I've heard you speak about potentialities of contact with communications coming from the kind of foundational fabrics or baseline fabrics of our reality. I'd love to hear from both of you around your feelings around potential implications of what we as humanity can learn from these non-ordinary states or where we can go with these.

Rak: Well, it's pretty profound, isn't it? I mean, maybe the indigenous people were right. Maybe there's a whole ecology on higher vibrational frequencies where there are beings. Maybe as Andrew says in his book, maybe it's like reality channeling and changing the channels. Maybe there's an infinite spectrum of density of life and intelligence spread throughout.

I know that it's hard to gauge. I mean, a lot of the iconography, a lot of the stages or there's capacities within NN-DMT where, you know, McKenna used to describe, you'd end up within the “chrysanthemum,” like the waiting room, and maybe there's like these big entities there that are waiting to shepherd you on, or if you have a full breakthrough, you end up in some sort of virtually real three-dimensional alien vista.

And there seem to be a commonality as well. There's, you know, David J. Brown is just releasing a book on DMT and the visionary state. But, you know, essentially there's archetypes which are perennial in that realm. And if we look at all the different cultures in the world when they've had entheogens and they've worked in their realms and gone in, they seem to report similar beings. You know, we see a lot of architecture. We see potentially sort of Atlantean golden age, sort of buildings and civilizations.

The real question is, are these independent beings and realms, or are they some type of mytho-poetic archetypal imprint, you know, that we're tapping through our genetic memory.

There was an experiment done in the mid-noughts by DMT Nexus, one of the online blogs where they did a hyperspacial sort of geolocation at the same time.

And they were mapping and looking at the locations, a bit like what DMTX is doing in a more professional way now, and looking at the commonality, where maybe everyone has a little different language base of how they describe it, but yeah, there was the face of the Sphinx, and then it was the praying mantis laying larvae legs to the left.

You know, and what does that say, if you can go into these realms and that other people can experience the exact same beings and locations that you have and that maybe other cultures have also described in that?

The Void that is Pregnant with Everything

I mean, there's a curious commonality there. So that's the NN-DMT. 5-MeO-DMT, it's the infinite formless void, which is pregnant with everything. Just talking about those receptor sites thing and the 2A and the 1A, it seems to me that one's the visionary one, and maybe the 1A is not as visionary. But you know what I've felt when I'm going into the white light is like it's pregnant with everything.

You know, in the visible spectrum, white light is like all color. It's like you see beings in 5-MeO, but around the periphery of going into deep Source, the ego is fully dissolving.

I sort of feel like they're all there. We're just not seeing them. We're feeling them. And so, you know, what are these realms? I mean, it's either the consensual, independent states of being that we're tapping into or the capacities within ourselves. But That's the question, isn't it?

Andrew: Yes, it is. Yeah, most certainly its the question. I think, I mean, I avoid, for the most part, I always reel back a little bit when people start talking about, you know, higher vibrational states and things like that, because I think it would be kind of committing academic suicide for me to start talking about this kind of thing.

But I don't think it's not because I think it's wrong, but I think it's easy to start talking about because there's a lot of woo also associated with the idea of vibration.

You're you're entering a very low lower vibrational state at the moment. I can detect in your aura of that kind of thing. I mean, maybe there's something in it. I don't know. But there is definitely, you know, I'm not trying to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Because, you know, a higher vibrational state, if you like, I mean, I think that from a neural perspective, like what does that mean?

Someone says, and I'm thinking about, okay, I'm talking about neural oscillations. I'm talking about electrical vibrations going on in the brain. And I've always focused to try to think about DMT from an information theory perspective.

And in that, what's happening with DMT, I think, is that it's somehow gating the flow of information from some other place, allowing your brain to construct an alternate world model. I've always maintained and continued to maintain that this, you know, the normal waking world, as I always say, is a model of the world. It's a model that's being constructed from a neural information by your brain all the time. But your brain is also sampling patterns of information from the environment that allows it to constantly model and test this model against sensory information.

It's all about the flow of information, basically, into the brain that allows the brain to construct this world model. And when you take DMT, what seems to be happening, or what certainly is happening is your brain is constructing this alternate world model, a world model that's not just slightly different, but that bears no relationship whatsoever to the normal waking world.

It is, it's almost disjoint in that there's nothing that's taken from the normal waking world and brought into the DMT world.

So the question then is, Is that alternate world model being modulated by sensory information from some other environment? And I think it's extremely difficult to explain how the brain, which has evolved to construct one world model, which is the model of the environment. This is one of the primary functions of your brain is as this world builder, this world model builder, which is a model of the environment. And it took your brain or the human brain or brains millions of years of evolution to learn to construct a stable and meaningful and functional and adaptive model of this environment.

It's not a simple thing to do. It's a very difficult thing to achieve. I don't think we realize how complex at times, you know, the world around us is.

And that all that world, that subjective world that we're experiencing is being constructed by your brain on the fly all the time. So your brain's ability to suddenly switch when perturbed by this simple plant alkaloid and start constructing a world almost effortlessly as it switches its reality channel and starts constructing these hypercoherent, highly crystalline, clear, inordinate, inordinate, inordinate, disordered neural activity and no, no, no, that's not a good explanation because these worlds, they're not just kind of pieced together from patterns of neural activity. It's a very coherent and inordinately complex and hyperdimensional world that is, your brain just somehow knows how to construct.

And I don't think that's easy to explain unless you invoke some other source of information. In other words, some alternate source of sensory information that somehow DMT is allowing your brain to access.

So I think we can then ask ourselves, well, what kind of neural state would the brain be in that would allow it to receive information from some other space? And it would be the kind of the psychedelic state. The psychedelic brain state, if you like, is one in which the brain is much more fluid.


Neural activity is much more fluid. It's like heating up a piece of glass. If you heat a piece of glass. It's at first very, very rigid, very fragile, but then you can kind of mold it to any shape that you like. So this kind of fluid state is much more susceptible to information driven reorganization.

So if you wanted to create a brain state where it was more susceptible to receiving information from some other source, it would be the psychedelic state. So that's broadly what I think is going on or could be going on with DMT is I think that it is generating this particular type of neural activity that allows your brain that is both highly fluid but also highly complex as well.

So it's like it is able to kind of in a way tune in to these particular patterns of information that are coming from some other place. I don't think we have a clue what I mean by some other place. Still, clearly there seems to be some other place that is populated by intelligences and I just I think that is a it's a shattering idea in a way because it completely uproots all of our basic fundamental ontological assumptions about who we are and the nature of our reality and our relationship to broader reality and kind of brings us to the shattering conclusion that actually we are existing within a very thin slice of something much larger, much more complex, much more difficult to understand or maybe perhaps even impossible to understand.

And it's a place that we can reach into with great facility by inhaling a couple of lungfalls of one of the simplest plant alkaloids that's ubiquitous and everywhere.

So, yeah, so that's what I would say is I think DMT is not, I always come to DMT from a nearer scientific perspective and try to explain it in that regard from that perspective.

But I think it's very difficult to explain DMT. It remains difficult. I've been trying for 20 years to try to explain what's going on with DMT. And I think the more I study it, the more I think actually there is something far, far stranger going on here that could indeed involve some other type of intelligence or vast numbers of intelligences.

Innerspace is the new Outerspace

Rak: You know what I've been saying since 2006? Innerspace is the new outer space, right? And it's like a language thing. Science has a certain language, but certain filters on it as well.

And we can obviously see outer space around us, but this idea of inner dimensionality and that there could be beings in inner dimensionality is no less valid than there being beings in outer space. In fact, you know, it's maybe even more probable. I don't know. But I mean, with these technologies of the sacred, we seem to be able to tune in.

But I think again, like we said at the start, to understand and give a context to this exploration as exploration, right? And science is all so caught up in PTSD and trauma and placing antidepressants and the capitalist, you know, a corporadelic approach to psychedelics at the moment than really science.

Kudos to Andrew and Rick Strassman and the team in the UK doing the extended state DMT immersion because I think it's one of the first times. Strasman's study in the 90s was really rigorously looking at the physical effects. And this one seems to be at least more liberally open to the idea of hearing the subjective encounters that people experience and mapping that data. It's like we can use science as a lens to go inwards and to look at this realm if we ask the right questions.And so I think, you know, we are starting to do that, which is exciting.

Andrew: Yeah, I think it also, the whole idea of inner versus outer, that very kind of Western perspective and that they have the inner world, which is just your mind, and then everything else is happening outside. I think even that starts to break down. And so what do we mean by inner space versus outer space?

I think even that, when you realize that actually all of that outer world is all happening in there anyway. So in a sense, it's all inner and also all outer and also all neither inner nor out. I love it. I love it.

Joel: Well, guys, we're going to get onto some questions. And I see we've got some good questions in here. Real quick, before we get into those, I'll just address. I think there's one or two of them that we can rock out really quickly. Mr. Chris Bova and Lisa and a few other people just asked about the memories and or effects of 5-MeO-DMT wearing off after a few weeks.

Andrew: Yes, this is common. It is very hard to have a subjective memory of something where the subjective mind was not present for. And so, yes, that is very common just like a dream. The memory will fade.

Joel: However, this does not mean that effects will wear away. This can all be solved with integration. If you are doing 5-MeO-DMT, have an integration specialist, work with an integration specialist. The difference is night and day.

The attempt to, you know, how do we take an ineffable experience and allow it to make sense in our daily life if we're not engaging with the process. And so a talented integration specialist will be able to work with you to engage with the process and to work with and draw from the content that can be found from that opening that is created.

The 5-MeO experience isn't about the content necessarily that you experience in there, but more so the connection and opening that it allows afterwards.

And first question For Dr. Gallamore: in Reality Switch Technologies, you spoke extensively about the models of reality, which our brains predict and generate how psychedelics will break down these models, but you spoke mostly about the models in terms of visual models of self, ego, etc. I'm curious about models relating to body schema and control of the musculoskeletal system. Do you have any insights of how these kinds of models are affected by the psychedelic experience in general, and furthermore, how 5-MeO and NN might affect body schema models differently.

Andrew: Okay, I can answer some of that question. So, yeah, what do you refer to the body schema?

Joel: Your body or your experience of having a body is also part of this model as well.

Andrew: So you have a body model that's incorporated as part of the visual and the auditory and the whole thing, your whole experienced world. You have this model with it, you have your body within it. But whilst we usually think of the body as kind of separate, as a separate thing that we have or our brain has, actually our experience of our body is also part of that model.

And that is also susceptible to being disrupted by psychedelics. And so when you take, you know, high doses of something like psilocybin or LSD, you will often experience a loss of that sense of a body and become a point. People often describe high dose psychedelic experiences as feeling like a point in space or a single point of awareness where the appears to be lost, you know, that the modeling of your body in real time is lost.

And that also applies with DMT. I don't think, in trying to think back to my own experiences, it's something that most people don't think about. You're so focused on the visual aspects of the experience that you don't necessarily think too much about whether you have a body.

But in my experience, and I think in most people's experiences, It's like I don't have a body. It's like you are floating or that you are simply a point of awareness. And that makes perfect sense because, as I said, you know, this body is part of that model as well. And whether it's different for different psychedelics, it's possible, again, I don't think it's been studied kind of systematically or formally in any way of how different psychedelics affect your body models. It's reasonable, it's possible that certain psychedelics will affect your body differently.

I mean, we know, for example, that certain psychedelics, I think it's, let me think now, is it dye, which is the auditory one? Is that dipropile? DET? I don't think it's DET. I think DET is more similar to, but anyway, it's a tryptamine. So there is one particular tryptamine, someone who's smart can put it in the chat. I think it might be DiPT, but anyway, there's one particular tryptamine, which is primarily an auditory hallucinogen or auditory psychedelic. So you don't get visual effects, but you get very strong auditory effect. So you think of the auditory is being a different part of that model.

It's one dimension of your world model. Now, why would certain tryptamines, certain psychedelics affect that part, that particular dimension of your world model and not the visual is unknown?

And people have thought about it. And I think I was speaking to Hamilton Morris a few months ago and he actually did some experiments trying to find other differences in the expression of certain genes when you administer this particular auditory hallucination.

It would be good to get one of these psychedelics in the brains of someone in an MRI scanner so you can actually see, you know, the difference, you would expect to see certain parts of the brain, you know, the sides of the brain, the temporal lobes where the auditory part of the model is instantiated and you would expect to see differences there. And if you wanted to look at effect on the body part of the model, or the body dimension of the model, then you would look for changes in activity in other parts of the brain.

But it's, It's one aspect, I think, of psychotics that we, as with many aspects, really, of psychedelics that we just don't understand fully. That is, though there's been a lot of recent sort of research and looking at the role of tryptamines, including NN-DMT for stroke victims. I think in the UK, they're using it with paramedics, obviously subthreshold doses so you're not going into the state.

But there's something about what we're finding tryptamines in general, which have a neuroprotective capacity to protect the brain from oxygen loss in near death, sort of situations. There's the neuroplasticity. There's the anti-inflammatory sort of response with both 5-MeO and NNDMT.

These things really do affect the body. And it's like they're starting to study them. It's quite exciting because if it protects the brain, it's got this functionality. We know that the near-death experience has been a recent study comparing 5-MeO experiences to near-death experiences, and again, virtually identical. So there’s the quality of the visioning and going into these realms, but it's also protecting your physiology as you go in?

Joel: Package deal, yeah. Yeah, I love it. All right, next question. Well, real quick, just for harm reduction purposes, Suzanne, no, it is not safe for just anyone to take 5-MeO-DMT or DMT. There are physical contraindications, medication contraindications, psychological contraindications, a lot of things that can go wrong. So do do your research, work with a competent facilitator and know your source. For more harm reduction information, go to www.5-meo.com. We've got all the information you'd ever need to know to keep yourself safe with at least 5-MeO-DMT. All right.

Next question. Why do you think it is that people report encountering the same DMT entities and have such similar experiences?

Andrew: Okay, I'll start. Well, there are a number of explanations, some more satisfying than others some would say if you are young and you would say well, these are archetypes right, you'll see archetypal structures and that we all carry within ourselves this neural heritage that we all inherit the propensity to form certain types of images and whilst that is certainly true to an extent, I think it's often overhauled the idea that archetypes explain the types of entities that you meet in the DMT space. I think certainly the brain draws upon these kind of very low level old basic patterns in order to construct its ongoing model.

So it's not surprising, even if you were interacting with some other intelligence, it's not surprising because the brain still has to kind of model it, right?

Even if you are interacting with some intelligence that is perhaps formless or unrepresentatable, is that a word? Non-representable. That's a better version. Even if it's completely non-representable, your brain still has to find some kind of incorporating it into its usual way of modeling reality, which is, you know, visual and auditory and, you know, so it's not surprising your brain is going to draw on these basic archetypal patterns.

But you have to remember that the archetypes, the very simple structures, they're carried from our ancestral past, the basic fundamental ways modeling certain characters and a certain social relationship, relationship to your mother, the relationship to enemies. These are very simple, important, emotionally charged social interactions that give you the propensity, the inherited propensity to form certain types of images. But what they don't explain is the extreme complexity and the intent and the intelligence and the behavior of these entities.

That's not something that's encoded, in my opinion, you know, in my neuro-scientific opinion, that's not something that you inherit. It's encoded deep in your brain. That's something else. That seems to be your brain is using that basic archetypal model to give you the overall form of the entity, but the actual entity itself seems to transcend anything that you could explain in terms of archetypes.

So that takes us to the next possibility: that you're actually dealing with some kind of other intelligence here. And that's always been my hunch, my belief–belief's the wrong word–but I've always struggled to explain these entities in any other way then they seem to be, we seem to be interacting with some other extremely advanced intelligence that is, from our perspective, incomprehensibly advanced more, you know, far more advanced than ourselves.

So that would be the other explanation, I think, because otherwise it's quite difficult to explain the commonalities and why people do seem to see the same kind of beings interacting with them in the same kind of ways, undergoing the same kind of procedures with these same types of of any kind of personalities and character and intent and behavior and that kind of thing.

Rak: Andrew, what do you think the evolutionary functionality is, though, of this reality-changing capacity with DMT? When we know that the tryptamines are all through nature, it's not just humans that have them. And there's these archetypal forms, you know, the praying mantis is very common. It makes me wonder if DMT is in all things, you know, in the ayahuasca culture, we, we drink the ayahuasca with mixture plants with DMT, there's plant intelligences in the Amazonian Cosmovision, but DMT seems to be in all things, which would imply if its functionality is to switch reality channels, then all things can also tap into all realities.

And then it starts to get very metaphysical in the sense of what is the identity of the individuality across all these species lines and it's almost like parallel processing in this multiplicity of alternate worlds in the multiverse type of deal; it's like it's complicated but it gets even more complicated when you go beyond the humanity of it.

Andrew: I mean, it's a bit much yeah, I agree it's where to start with that. You do get this sense that we have lost something in recent millennia and that we are reconnecting in a certain way with something which, you know, kind of a hyperdimensional heritage of some sort that we have that is valuable and that may well have been extremely valuable from an evolutionary and adaptive perspective in our in our past and that somehow we have lost that and we have become very much more concretely fixed within this lower dimensional space and that the DMT is kind of reactivating this ancestral function in some way.

Which is why perhaps it's so familiar and there's this great sense of coming home when you take DMT and that perhaps it is part of our nature, our deeply embedded ancestral nature, to be in contact with a much more, a much broader reality within which, you know, there are extremely diverse populations of intelligences of all different forms and that we're kind of reconnecting to that.

So it's not necessarily something completely new, I don't think. I think maybe the brain has been doing it or was doing it for for millennia before we kind of forgot about it or stopped doing it.

When DMT has no Effect

Joel: Next question. What neurological explanations can account for individual differences in tolerance, whether 5-MeO or NN-DMT?

Andrew: Yeah. So there are different types of tolerance, first of all. So you get like intrinsic tolerance or a susceptibility, if you like, to certain drugs. So someone, you know, the first time, so you get the tolerance over time, you get accumulated tolerance. If you take a drug over extended period of time, you will build over tolerance. And you see that with many drugs. You can see it with alcohol and you see it with the opiates and also with the psychedelics as well. And there are several different mechanisms to how that works.

But certainly there's also kind of an intrinsic tolerance or susceptibilities. Someone might need 30 milligrams of DMT to completely break through, whereas for other people it will take 40, 50, 60 milligrams. And there is a small population around 5%. That's borne out by Rick Strassman's study, I mean, Terence McKenna back in the, back in the 80s would said that, you know, about 5 % of people when he gave them, you know, two, three full lungs of DMT and they would experience nothing.

And then Rick Strassman found that of the 60 people or so that he injected with DMT, even at the highest dose levels, they experience no effects.

So it's kind of sounds appalling, doesn't it? If you, if you happen to be in one of those groups and there's really nothing you can do about it, that's it. It's like, it doesn't matter how much DMT you consume, you'll never be able to experience any effects. And why is that the case? So again, it goes back to receptors in that DMT is binding to this receptor.

A receptor is a protein, and protein is encoded as a long chain of amino acids, which is ultimately encoded in your DNA, your base sequences in your DNA, and everyone carries slightly different versions. We all, you know, these are called polymorphism in that everyone has slight different versions, slightly different genetic sequences, genes that encode these receptors.

So although everyone has 5HT2A receptors, that some people will have slightly different versions, different polymorphisms, which might be less susceptible, that might not bind, for example, they're slightly different shape. They might not bind to the DMT molecule as effectively or at all.

it's not been studied. So this is kind of educated, semi-educated speculation. But that could be an explanation for why, you know, and then there would be kind of intermediate where somebody's receptors, they bind to DMT and they can still experience the effects, but it takes more DMT in order to kind of saturate those receptors.

And then you've got differences in metabolic rates as well. So people will metabolize, again, because of proteins, they will metabolize drugs at different rates. And so, you know, accumulating a certain amount of DMT in the brain is more difficult than with other people. So then you get tolerance over time.

And what's interesting about DMT is that you don't seem to experience that. You can take DMT several times a day if you wanted to and the effect is basically the same each time.

So lack of subjective tolerance is interesting with DMT. But with most drugs, you get tolerance over time. And again, it's all to do with changes in your neurochemistry, changes in the expression of certain receptors and upregulation, down regulation of receptors, changes in the metabolic milieu in your body and in your brain, which can be affected by these drugs over time. So the kind of the important message really is you can never really predict for the first time that you use a psychedelic, how you're going to respond to it.

So it's wrong to say, you know, 30 milligrams is what you need to break through or whatever. For some people, that's going to be the case. For some people, it will be a massive overshoot.

And for some people, it will be a massive undershoot. So always the first time, if you are using any kind of psychedelic, is to start low. You can always take more. You can't take less once you've taken it.

Rak: Could I just add to that that? I think there's also a microbiome connection. I had a facilitator friend in Mexico that was working with 5-MeO and she said she worked with these local people that never drank water, only drank Coca-Cola and all of them across the board weren't affected by 5-MeO at all.

But, you know, the building blocks of the serotonin system and other stomach biome going up to the vagus nerve to the brain biome, that really may be the case as well. I've had experiences with, you know, knowledge of certain people that have very high thresholds. Often with toad as well its one form of 5-MeO but there's only about 30 percent density of 5-MeO in there and it's hard to get enough in. “Jaguar” or the synthetic 5-MeO does seem to get people over that hump and sometimes it's extremely high a chance of synthetic 5-MeO can break people through ridiculously, but it seems to me that there is a volume control or a tolerance, but as you say, maybe it's the receptor sites, obviously, as well. But it's a mystery.

Joel: So we had a question here that goes to rehash an old topic of discussion. So, you know, Rick Straussman, you know, popularly theorized that there is an endogenous release of DMT from the pineal gland whilst sleep or in a dream state. What are your theories around this? Has there been new research to point that that may actually be something? Because I remember a lot of people ran with it kind of after the book came out and especially after the documentary came out and it was reported as fact.

And then, you know, he came out and said, no, this is just theory. What are your guys' thoughts here?

Rak: Can I just jump in because Andrew will give it the correct answer after I say my question. But yeah, I mean, Rick went to pains to say, look, this is just a theory. And of course, everyone loves a bumper sticker and a slogan and to keep it simple.

Part of the issue is the legacy and the heritage of the mystical tradition, looking at the third eye of the pineal gland, which is obviously in the center of the head and total darkness. The problem which some science explained to me is it's very difficult to get live tryptamine readings in the body, or especially in the pineal gland because you're alive and you're going to carve you up, you're dead. Someone was saying you'd have to do a catheter in the bone marrow up on the spine to get live fresh readings of tryptamines because they evaporate very quickly in air.

So there's all of that. But in general, what I hear from some of the 5-MeO community of practitioners who are well established with this, and obviously we want to know the right science, but there does seem to be something tantalizing about the pineal gland.

And there was that study in the last few years looking at rats and confirming that melatonin is produced in the pineal gland in rats. So we're making a leap to say that maybe it's likely for melatonin in humans.

The current theory in the facilitator underground of some very well-placed individuals who've been working for over a decade with thousands of people suggests that there's some process by which melatonin may, again, I might be getting this language wrong, methylate or they're sort of backtracking on those ideas, that there's still no concrete evidence of that in those areas, or maybe there's a residue that they're overflowing and appearing in those when they do the studies. But we come back to this pineal gland.

I mean, you know, I'm just sad that science, can’t look at mysticism with a scientific lens and find the right functionality of language and explore these terrain and parameters, because that pineal gland definitely seems to be the seat of consciousness in the human human being. Now over to Andrew.

Andrew: Okay yeah you covered the kind of the the key point here which was that that Strassman's idea that DMT was released at death, that it was, it provided the conduit to allow the soul to exit the body. And this is why we call it, or some people call it, I don't, but some people call it the “spirit molecule”, right? That was Rick Straussman's idea, its important during death.

And so you have these two kind of not so much myths, so to speak, but two kind of ideas that have promoted as being fact, which is the idea that DMT has produced a little bit when you dream and then a lot when you die and so many different people I've heard this from and spoken as if it's complete fact.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be. Firstly, well, let's tackle the dream thing. We know a lot about dreams. People have been studying the phenomenology of dreams for hundreds of years and scientifically, certainly in the 20th century, there's been a lot of work on the phenomenology of dreaming. The dreaming phenomenology, if dreams were a result of nocturnal DMT secretion, whether by the pinnial or other parts of the brain or elsewhere in the body, you'd expect the phenomenology of dreaming to be very similar to DMT. And in most is it's just not the case. Dreams are very similar.

You're looking like that, right? Maybe your dreams are kind of different, but no, I mean, you know, most dreams are basically continuous with waking.

You're going about the things that you see in the normal waking world. Your brain is modelling the world in the dream state as it does during waking life. So, no, I don't think DMT makes any sense, that the DMT is stimulating production of dreams and that goes back to an old idea actually of Jace Callaway in the 80s he thought that maybe DMT was responsible for the visions of dreaming but again the phenomenology doesn't match, it doesn't make any sense the going to the pineal itself it's Dave Nichols who did a very good analysis of this a few years ago, the pineal is a very small gland.

I mean, it's the size of the end of your little finger, really. It's capable of producing nanograms or micrograms at most of melatonin, very, very small amounts of this melatonin hormone, neurohormone melatonin. So the idea that it can only kind of start pumping out milligrams of DMT, so you know, you're talking sort of two orders of magnitude, probably, of quantity of tryptamine that it has to start producing.

The pineal is just not up to the job to do that, I think. So it doesn't really make any sense. I think that the pineal isnt releasing enough DMT at any point to, to, I also had they actually studied this or they conjecturing it couldn't be possible.

Rak: One of the key things is dark and light. There are still traditions in Mexico and Mantak Chia the Tantric Masler does darkness retreats, but people have gone on them. The thinking is in total darkness, after seven or ten days, melatonin and melatin and the other tryptamines aggregate in darkness.

We know ayahuasca culture is often most likely done in darkness and there seems to be something about darkness obviously related to the pineal gland and introducing melatonin. But unless we've got a live study with electrodes in there in darkness how do we really know?

Andrew: Okay yeah we don't 100 % know that's true so that you have to have that that caveat certainly darkness. I mean, darkness, I mean, there's confounding variables there in that darkness is a state of reduced sensory stimulation. And once we know that, you know, you can put somebody in a sensory deprivation chamber or float tank or something. And they will start to have visions.

It's not, you don't have to invoke any releasing DMT to explain that. But once the brain is no longer, if you like, distracted by having more based upon incoming sensory information, then you tend to get self-generated activity. And so you get the emergence of hallucinations, visions, basically. So I don't think necessarily because people use darkness, that that means that they're kind of activating the pineal. They could be. But again, it is pure speculation and the pineal. I mean, why focus on the pineal?

I mean, that's always my thing. It's like, well, every neuron in the brain, pretty much every cell in the brain, is capable of producing DMT. I mean, DMT is two steps from tryptophan.

It's very closely related. You just need to diverge slightly from a serotonin pathway, and you'll get DMT or even indeed 5-MeO-DMT. So it doesn't really make sense of DMT as Ed Fresca and Dennis McKenna's work showed that the DMT is neuroprotective in times of hypoxia.

The lungs would be a good site for detecting that in a condition of low oxygen that the lungs might start producing DMT, which of course goes straight into your brain and helps to protect your neurons there.

So, and also there have been studies that have looked at way back now a few decades ago that actually measured DMT concentrations in the bloodstream and in the urine over a 24-hour period and DMT and its metabolites hoping to see if there is some kind of diurnal pattern, see if DMT levels rise when you're asleep, but then fall again when you're awake. Unfortunately, there is no pattern that could be detected. That doesn't mean it's not there.

It doesn't mean it's not being produced, but it's an indication, again, that there doesn't seem to be an increase in DMT levels during dreaming. And finally, well, the death thing, I mean, what can you say? I mean, who knows, right? We can't really be measuring or very difficult to measure DMT levels and so on's brain at the moment of death. It's very hard to get subjects for that kind of study or ethical permission to do that kind of study.

But so that will as a grand speculation, as DMT as a spirit molecule. In terms of melatonin being converted to DMT, you can't convert melatonin to DMT. Melatonin has this five methoxy group. So you can't easily cleave that off and form DMT. So melatonin can't be a precursor to DMT.

It could be a precursor, however, to 5-MeO-DMT, which is also much more potent as well. You need much less of 5-MeO. So that is, in my mind, makes more sense, because we know the pineal is already doing that 5-MeO, in addition of that five methoxy group to tryptamine, all you have to do is cleave off this acetyl group that you've got on the nitrogen of melatonin, and then you can dimethylate that and then you've got 5- MeO-DMT. So actually it might make more sense that the pineial is producing 5-MeO-DMT than it does that it's DMT too.

Joel: So Chelly had asked, this is a question for you, Andrew. I am a developer focusing on a graphical representation of dynamical and ancient systems, which he touches upon on alien information theory. Does he also believe that perhaps these entities or hyperspace consciousnesses are emergent properties of some cosmic system?

Could the world space landscape you speak about also be a morphogenic process? When you talk about an orthogonal projection of hyperspace, do you mean that it's a part of the world-scape landscape, world-space landscape, excuse me.

Andrew: Yeah, there's a bunch of kind of intersecting questions there. But yeah, I mean, all life is, life is an emergent property of matter or stuff, whatever. It might even be an emergent property of consciousness. It's an emerging, everything emerges through these layers of hierarchical organization. And we kind of sit at what seems to be the upper end of that.

And so that would also apply to, in my opinion, beings, intelligences, presumably. And we don't really know, of course, because we don't know anything about, really about their domain where its origins are or its structure or its relationship to ours. So there's a certain amount of speculation, well, a massive amount of speculation, kind of extrapolating the emergence of intelligence and of conscious beings and life forms in our reality and extrapolating that and assuming that it works the same way, perhaps in a high dimensional space.

It could be that, in fact, our lower dimensional space is something that has been constructed, and not necessarily a simulation as such, but something that has been a playground for the emergence of conscious intelligences happening on a lower dimensional slice of this high dimensional system within which these beings reside, whether they themselves emerged from some cosmic process.

I think possibly, that would be the default position, but it's also possible that these intelligences have always been there. I mean, that's another possibility that actually are timeless and ageless, whereas we have clearly emerged on a fairly recent temporal scale. So the short answer is, we don't know.

And the second part of the question I mean the world space landscape is basically all possible worlds that your brain can construct, so I don't make claims about so your brain is this world builder and and the total kind of state space of the brain represents, contains all possible worlds that your brain can construct. And so this forms this attract a landscape, which I call the world space landscape. But I don't make any claims about how each of these areas of the world space landscape is mapped to other realities.

It might be because we know that we occupy a small, normally in normal waking life, we occupy a small region of this world space landscape where it is mapped in some way to some external environment.

You're receiving information from some external environment. So it's possible that as you look out over the whole of this world space landscape, because the DMT space is also a part, a region, a district within this world space landscape. Is it that all these different regions are mapped to different types of realities or different areas within some grand super reality, right?

And so as you move through, stimulates, perturbed by different psychedelic drugs, different drug technologies, if you like, it's allowing you within each area of the world-based landscape to actually start interfacing and receiving information from some other dimensions, some other aspect, some other perspective within this grander reality and so we're kind of moving through and sort of picking up different pieces of this larger structure and perhaps 5-MeO-DMT to kind of bookend that idea is allowing you to kind of experience all of it or even to transcend all of that complex um playground if you like, you know of the mind and transcend all of that and view everything perhaps all at once, which would be like a white light experience, perhaps.

Joel: Yeah. Good stuff. Yeah, thank you both so much for being here.