• Includes contributions from the late Ralph Metzner, Chris Bache, Whitley Strieber, Jeffrey Kripal, Angela Voss, Bill Richards, Chris Timmermann, Michael Winkelman, Luis Eduardo Luna, Anton Bilton, Bernard Carr, Daniel Pinchbeck, Dennis McKenna, Ede Frecska, and David Luke
• Explores DMT beings, alien abduction, plant sentience, neuroscientific DMT research, the connections between LSD and DMT entities, and the nature of mind and reality
Found throughout the plant and animal kingdom, DMT (dimethyltryptamine) is also naturally occurring in humans, and may be released during near-death and actual death experiences, earning it the title "the spirit molecule." When taken as a psychedelic, either via ayahuasca or in pure form, DMT is experientially considered to be one of the strongest and strangest of all entheogens. The majority of high-dose users report visions of unknown yet curiously familiar alien worlds and encounters with sentient nonhuman presences.
At a four-day symposium at Tyringham Hall in England in 2017, twenty of the world's psychedelic luminaries gathered to discuss entheogenic entity encounters, consciousness expansion, visionary experiences, and the future of research in this field. Contributors to the talks and discussions include many leading thinkers, including the late Ralph Metzner, Chris Bache, Whitley Strieber, Je rey Kripal, Angela Voss, Bill Richards, Chris Timmermann, Michael Winkelman, Luis Eduardo Luna, Anton Bilton, Bernard Carr, Daniel Pinchbeck, Dennis McKenna, Ede Frecska, and David Luke.
This book distills the potent exchange of ideas that occurred at Tyringham Hall, including discussions about DMT beings, encounter experiences, alien abduction, plant sentience, the shamanic use of ayahuasca, neuroscientifi c DMT research, the connections between LSD and DMT entities, and the nature of mind and reality. David Luke, Ph.D., is associate lecturer of psychology at the University of Greenwich and honorary senior lecturer at the Centre for Psychedelic Research, Imperial College. He has published more than 100 academic papers on transpersonal experiences and altered states of consciousness and regularly gives public lectures and conference presentations. A cofounder and director of Breaking Convention, a biennial international conference on psychedelic research, he lives in East Sussex, England. Rory Spowers is an ecological writer, fi lmmaker, and author. He is the founder of the Web of Hope, a UK charity and ecological education resource, and the creative director for the Tyringham Initiative. He lives in Ibiza, Spain. Selections from Chapter 4.
Subjective Experience and Sensed Presence Phenomena in Human Research with DMT
by Chris Timmermann
If it's possible to map the effects of DMT in the brain with a proper temporal and spatial resolution, can we actually figure out what's happening in the brain and in the experience, in the right moment? With the right precision? And finally, can we map some of the elements of the DMT experience? Can we actually map the subjectively-felt entity encounters? Can we map this breakthrough into this different "space," this different "place"? Can we actually see how realities are being built in terms of brain activity? Not only that, but can we map these experiential transitions--can we map the initial geometrical phase into this breakthrough DMT phase? Can we map the initial encounter?
To do that we split our research into two main stages. The first one corresponded to a dose-finding study of DMT, in which we administered different doses of DMT to different people in a safe environment, using EEG (a non-invasive neuroimaging technique), which we've now finished, and in the second phase, which we haven't begun yet, we want to actually map the effects of DMT in terms of brain activity but using both EEG and fMRI scanning. So we're using advance neuroimaging techniques that allow us to understand when things are happeni
