Did you know that you are presently “holding” a schedule 1 psychedelic drug in your brain right now? Unfortunately as soon as that shit is anywhere other than in your brain, it's as illegal as heroin or crack.
You may be wondering what it is. Well, psychnautical guru and all-around interesting guy Terence McKenna said DMT was the most shocking thing a human can consume this side of the yawning grave. Coming from a guy who was to psychedelics what Lil Wayne is to “Sizzurp,” this is quite an astonishing claim.
Due to its difficulty to get ahold of, some have gone through the work of figuring out how to get this mystical substance from their expanding little minds. A friend of mine was one of those people. He, like many others, had been hearing wonderful and sometimes terrifying stories of DMT's transformational power. He had read books like The Cosmic Serpent, Supernatural, and DMT: The Spirit Molecule and watched all kinds of YouTube stuff.
By this time, something in him just had to make his first encounter with DMT happen. It's not like you can just score some on a street corner, and it's not exactly an easy thing to casually bring up, so with no other option seemingly available, he did what any resourceful young man would do; he made it himself.
Before he knew it, he had the bark he needed from an online source and a recipe from the Internet. Lo and behold, he had (with some trial and error) the real deal. After he had made a batch of his own and tried it, he was now on a mission to let other people know about his wild journey through hyperspace.
I had come to many of the same conclusions as him about the nature of consciousness and spent many nights talking about the mysteries of the world, so when he revealed to me that he had figured out how to make DMT, I jumped at the chance to try it.
Though he was very excited to share with me (free of charge), he was also very stern that this was not some lighthearted deed. He offered that I take a moment to be at peace with myself and make sure I wasn't going in half-cocked. I took his advice and gave it a whirl.
Upon first inhalation, I was staring at my bookcase, which now looked like a giant smile with six rows of book-teeth. It smiled at me because “it held so much wisdom in its mouth.” During this first time, the plants in the room all reached out to me and telepathically told me that they were always there for me.
Something was not quite right, though; when I closed my eyes, it looked like I was staring at a giant mandala that was ever changing. It also felt like I was on some cosmic swing and needed a push in order to swing higher. There was this frustrating feeling of not being all the way there, even though I didn't know where “there” was.
I committed to a larger dose of his home-brewed paradigm changer, and off I went! This time, everything was left behind, including my sense of self. In fact, self was a laughable concept. While the set of eyes that made up the perceptive character I knew as myself floated in a Technicolor clusterfuck, every digital media I had ever seen in my life spun like a trillion rainbow dervishes and transformed into “people.”
I use the term people very lightly—these were like a million-year-advanced species of light serpents making love and tangling like earphones in Jerry Garcia's pants pocket. Through all of this, they spoke to me in jokes and riddles, telling me the mysteries of the universe in a Fourth of July finale.
The illusion of disconnection had been so powerful in my life just moments before, and now it was laughable. Everything and everyone was a mechanical part in a giant machined object; one of love and hate, of all manner of feeling. It was amoral; it was loving, it was alien in a way that beggared any Hollywood depiction of alien.
I came back with tears in my eyes having witnessed a wild spectacle that only the closed eye can reveal. The potential of the human mind walked into the room like an unexpected visit to your home from your favorite movie star.
My friend and I suddenly spoke a language of symbol and metaphor, because everything seemed to be exactly that. I understood finally what the mystics of the ages saw. No wonder they seemed so otherworldly! They very well may have seen these things from a natural outburst of DMT in their own system. Religion was someone else's trip report sadly misunderstood!
Two years and many trips later, my life was changed by an experience that my own brain holds the key to. Holy shit.
This leads us to the question of whether or not it is responsible to even try such a thing. I cannot tell other people that this is the be-all and end-all, because it isn't. I can't say that it's advisable to try, but I can say that I should be able to make those decisions for myself as an adult. If I'm going to live and die, I'd like to think it's on my own terms.
So is DMT the thinking man's moonshine? It might be. My friend burned a hole in his floor and stained his toilet purple as Grimace's ass. He set his first batch on fire because he forgot to do some sort of chemical wash before he tried it. Trial and error made mayhem and peril possible as well.
Like moonshine, people can make DMT at home, but with no small amount of legal risk and pharmacological uncertainty. Hopefully, like moonshine, the psychedelic helper known as DMT will become like booze: legal.