. . .
This sounds a lot like a DMT experience. And of course, there are a lot of parallels between the entities encountered in DMT experiences and abductions/encounters with UHI (unidentified higher intelligences).
Discarnate Entities and Dimethyltryptamine (DMT): Psychopharmacology, phenomenology and ontology | David Luke - Academia.edu
via
@smcder
But what really stands out to me is the fact that orthodox religions, occult practitioners, visionary plant experiencers, UAP abductees, and historical "scientists" all report interacting with UHI but none really know for sure what they are interacting with...
I somehow missed Steve's link to that paper and am very glad you've reposted it. It's an excellent overview of what DMT researchers have learned so far about the relatively coherent elements of DMT/Ayahuasca experiences and the daunting question of the 'ontology' of these experiences. I agree with your bolded statement above and its recognition that there are many avenues of human experience to explore before we can begin to understand what we call the para-normal.
On a first reading of the Luke paper, there seem to be at least two different categories of
veridical information that have been received by experimenters under the influence of DMT and also LSD and Ayahuasca-type concoctions. The first category includes insight into, knowledge of, biochemical and genetic operations in nature. The second involves the psychic reception of information associated with 'crisis apparitions' as investigated by the SPR early in the 20th C. (i.e., paranormal knowledge of the state of significant others -- primarily the death of, but also the illness of them -- at vast geographical distances from those others. Many of these experiences are also precognitive rather than concurrent with the crisis. NDE research includes many cases in which the experiencer reports paranormal knowledge discovered during the NDE concerning the death of an individual known by the family but not known by the experiencer or his/her family to have died shortly before the NDE-er encounters him or her on 'the other side'.
Extracts from the Luke paper:
“. . . Under the influence of DMT the colours of this geometry tend to exceed what are usually perceived with the eyes, and were brighter, more intense, and deeper than those of normal awareness or dreams (Stassman, 2001,p. 147). The dimensions of the geometric patterns often surpass normal percepts too, and were consistently categorised as four-dimensional or beyond dimensionality at high doses (Stassman, personal communication, 6th October 2008), with similar reports occurring for ayahuasca (Luna, 2008), leading this author to question the supposed physiological origin of such visions (Luke, 2010b): the optic system seemingly belonging to only three dimensions. The DMT imagery also appears as iconic forms, often becoming incorporatedinto the aforementioned geometry in a somewhat ineffable manner, as best described by this DMT experient:
“At this point the glorious geometries transcended what is even vaguely feasible in this three-dimensional mundane [reality], constantly concrescing [sic] into new and varigated [sic] permutations, exfoliating out of themselves what might be called hyperspherologies of the divine, and to look anywhere was to be shot clean through with scintillating amazement. . . You have a sense of being swarmed by the whimsical mastermind art forms of an extremely eccentric Boolean contortionist, a diabolical merry go round of linguistic Rubik's cubes, 13th dimensional millipedes saying themselves to themselves as they make love, and impossible Gordian knots dancing the jitterbug at a lyrical lightspeed: a gelatinous ballet of endlessly self-juxtaposing pirouettes.” [Sfos, 2000]
Iconic images seen may take the form of tunnels, stairways, ducts (Strass-man, 2001); symbols and scripts; incredible landscapes and cities of alienworlds (Shanon, 2002), the inner workings of fantastic machines, computers ,internal organs and bodies; and, commonly, DNA double helices (Strassman,2001).
The anthropologist Narby (1998) also found DNA was a frequent feature in the ayahuasca visions of Amazonian shamans, but often 'represented' by two intertwined snakes. A possibly apocryphal and certainly controversial story told shortly after Francis Crick's death suggests that the geneticist was under the influence of LSD when he envisioned the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, for which he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize (Rees, 2004). Prior to the Crick news report, Narby (2000) took three molecular biologists to Peru for their seminal trips up the Amazon and on ayahuasca. All three scientists received valuable information from their visions that helped inform their research, and which ultimately changed their worldview. For instance, the American biologist, who normally worked on deciphering the human genome, said she saw a chromosome from the perspective of a protein flying above a long strand of DNA (Narby, 2000, p. 302).
Similarly, the biochemist, Kary Mullis, who received the Nobel Prize for inventing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR)—making possible the human genome project and forensic DNA testing—had earlier said that taking LSD had been invaluable in helping him visualise sitting on a DNA molecule and watching the polymerase go by (Mullis, 1998). Clearly LSD is not the same as DMT, but as a psychedelic tryptamine it has some similar neurochemical properties and, in auspicious circumstances, both substances seem capable of inducing microscopic molecular visions, particularly of DNA. Whether such feats are due to the imagination or clairvoyance remains unclear, but support for the latter is abundant, albeit inconclusive.
DMT AND VERIDICAL VISIONS
When the harmala alkaloid now called harmine, the first psychoactive compound isolated from ayahuasca, was discovered by Zerda Báyon (1912) it was named telepathine. Zerda Báyon illustrated the psi-inducing power of telepathine with the case of Colonel Morales, who, after ingesting ayahuasca,beheld a vision of his dead father and his sick sister. About one month later he received the same news by messenger. It seems unlikely that the news could have arrived first by non-paranormal means, as the group was deep in the jungle 15 days' travel from the nearest communications outpost. Indeed, beholding visions of distant dead or dying relatives—who were not known at the time to be ill or dead—is an ayahuasca story that has emerged repeatedly in the writings of South American explorers during the last 150 years (for a brief review see Luke, 2010a).
Many more published accounts of such apparent ESP occur in Luna and White's (2000) anthology of classic ayahuasca experiences, as well as elsewhere(for summaries see Luke and Friedman, 2010; Shanon, 2002). Survey respondents also reported DMT and ayahuasca as inducers of spontaneous psi-type experiences, although these were more conspicuous with certain other psychedelics (Luke Kittenis, 2005). Nevertheless, the only two published experiments to attempt to test for psi under the infiuence of DMT, in this case ayahuasea (Don, McDonough, Warren Moura, 1996; Tinoco, 1994), both failed to elicit it, though this may well be due to the arduous and boring testing deployed. In one study the participant complained that experiencing the visions was far more interesting than testing for psi, and both studies lacked control conditions to compare against (for a review see Luke, 2008c).
PHENOMENOLGICAL CARTOGRAPHY OF THE DMT WORLD
Considering the phenomenology of the DMT experience several researchers have attempted to map the psychic topography of the DMT space. Meyer(1994), probably the first researcher to write specifically about DMT entities, characterized the deepening levels of the experience (somewhat like Lewis-Williams and Dowson's (1988) stages of altered states of consciousness) as:
Level I: Threshold experience; an interior flowing of energy/consciousness.
Level II: Vivid, brilliantly coloured, geometric visual patterns; geometries are basically two-dimensional but may pulse.
Transitional phase: Tunnel or breakthrough experience; passage through an entrance into another world.
Level III: Three- or higher-dimensional space, possible contact with entities; a sense of being in an 'objective' space and of meeting intelligent and communicating entities.
Level IV: The white light. The cognitive psychologist Shanon (2002, p. 293) has a similar, albeit more refined, system for the stages of the ayahuasca experience, framed around the predominant visual or visionary phenomena . . . (continue reading in the Luke pdf, pg. 33)”
I think the hyperdimensional geometry experienced with DMT, LSD, etc. might be another potentially veridical experience which suggests that somewhere in the collective unconscious we all carry knowledge of, or familiarity with, a dimension of existence beyond our own immediate embodied lives. The hyperdimensional geometry described above recalls a recent paper on quantum geometry, linked here.
link to come
Another intriguing aspect of the DMT experiences is the interactivity of the experiencer with the entities he/she encounters. These beings communicate with (us) as well as pour light into our bodies (see Luke). They seem to exist in a dimension of reality extended beyond our own yet are knowledgeable about life in our dimension, providing us with insight into key biological aspects of how we are structured and how we’ve evolved, and implicitly suggesting that we are part of a reality extending beyond the boundaries of our present biological lives.
