Hi, I thought McKennas trips were always quite descriptive and he has a way with words so I found a few from a couple of searches and decided to put them up: Trip 1: You vaporize it in a small glass pipe. Something which is smoked. Behind closed eyelids, a kind of hallucination forms. A chrysanthemum -- a swirling floral pattern. Overlayed patterns of colours. You watch the chrsanthemum and if you've taken enough DMT, after about fifteen seconds, you are physically propelled through it. into a kind of tunnel-like space. You seem to be catapulting forward through some kind of labyrinth-like, tubular, unfolding, coloured, fluctuating space. And after a few seconds of this, it is as though you arrive. The trip stablizes itself around you. At that point you in a kind of domed, indirectly lit, comfortable, underground space. But, what is astonishing about this space, is that is is inhabited, it is crowded. Jewelled, self-dribbling basketvalls that bound forward, Chirping fractal denizens of the unconscious. They surround you, singing in a visible language and they use that language to produce objects. Sculptured, jewelled machines. Things made of precious stomes and metal. Agate, Topaz, Chalcedony. All kinds of precious materials. But not stable. Morphing. Transforming themselves. Matter somehow imbued with the spirit of language and imagination. And these elf-like, gnome-like artisans crowd forward, each offering their own creation for your inspection. Follow these entities, these hyper-objectified linguistic objects. It's terribly important that you learn to do this. They are the initiators of the human species into a new ontos of language, where meaning is beheld. Use your voice. It only lasts a few hundred seconds. Meaning is beheld. Trip 2: For me it was an enormous amount of DMT, and i immeditaley had a sense of entering a high vacumn. I heard a high pitched whine and the sound of cellophane ripping as i was transformed into the ultra-high-frequency orgasmic goblin that is a human being in DMT ecstasy. I was surrounded by the chattering of elf machines and the more-than-arabian vaulted spaces that would shame a bibiena. Manifestations of a power both alien and bizarrely beautiful raged around me. At the point where I would normally have expected the visions to fade, the pretreatment of LSD synergized my state to a higher level. The cavorting hoards of DMT elf machines faded to a mere howling as the elfin mob moved on. I suddenly found myself flying hundreds of miles above the earth and in the company of silvery discs. I could not tell how many. I was fixated on the earth below and realized I was moving south, apperently in polar orbit over Siberia. Trip 3: I have heard several tales of psychonauts toking DMT and then seeming to break into a place where they were not only unwelcome but also unexpected. One person in particular, a composer, was literally to the beginning of time by an astonished and irritated Jabba the Hutt type who he surprised at its meditations. I have never been told that I am not welcome but I find that it is harder and harder to get up the raw courage necessary to make the trip. It is almost as though a secret hides in and behind the DMT state and that secret is both real and so unexpected that it would leave nothing of reality intact. The secret cannot be told of course, or I would have told it. But it is something like: We are all gods, with the knowledge of gods, we are all omniscient, except for the fact that we are so damn stupid. It is interesting that you were told "Use what you have been shown, don't seek for more." It uses us, some of us, to transfer information into the world, but with very little concern for what we, the carriers of that information, think about it. It is a kind of hyperspatial muse. We become carriers of some force we don't understand, bearers of the Logos I would say, other see us as the Typhoid Mary's of meme pathology. But left unanswered in all of this is the question why. Why does the alien presence intrude in DMT, why does it appear as it does? Is that how it wishes to appear? Why? etc. etc. Trip 4: This was dimethyltryptamine, DMT, and I smoked it and I saw, I had a feeling of slight anaesthesia in my body, I saw a swirling, floral mandorla form behind my closed eyelids, and as I moved toward this mandorla, I realised I was going to penetrate beyond it, and I burst through into a kind of other-dimensional superspace, and I had expected a kind of instant psychoanalysis or perhaps swirling colours or moving geometric plains of light, perhaps a dancing canary or little candies doing two steps in a row - this is what's called hypnogogia in the medical literature, and it is essentially trivial hallucination. Instead, what happened was there was an encounter with what can only be described as an elf hive, a colony of self-transforming, hyperdimensional machine creatures that came bounding forward with joyful squeaks to dribble themselves like self-transforming jewelled basketballs on the floor in front of me, and I was dumbstruck with amazement. Occasionally people ask me "Is DMT dangerous?", and I think the honest answer is "only if you fear death by astonishment." Well, I was astonished, I mean, I was an intellectual of the Hegel/Camus crowd when I went through that violet scintillating doorway, and I came out a true believer, because these creatures in this place are filled with a kind of zany, affectionate, reckless humour and a desire to communicate with human beings, or at least with me in that moment, and what they were doing and how they were communicating was by generating, through their songs, objects, so that what I was surrounded by was a crowd of diminutive, self-transforming blobs of intentionalised ectoplasmic material, and they were producing out of their bodies objects which looked like Faberge eggs or exquisitely tooled machines made of ivory glass and gemstone that were themselves undergoing some kind of transformation, emitting musical sounds, condensing liquid metal out of the air and causing it to rain down on us. Well, my reaction to this was to go into a kind of shock of amazement and, you know, it raises fairly profound questions, like number one, "Surely I must be dead, surely no-one can have this experience and return intact." I mean, because, you see, it exceeds imagining, it is beyond your imagining - even when you're looking at it, you attempt to pour the salutory waters of description over these transdimensional objects and it runs, language runs off them like water off a duck's back. And the emotional content of this kind of encounter is tremendously intense. These things are attempting to communicate a new dispensation of the logos. They are holding out the possibility that language need not be processed by the ears, that language can become, under certain radical situations of neurological perturbation, visible, that literally the word condenses into visible space, and they were urging me to do this. They were urging me to experiment with my voice and I discovered years later, taking Ayahuasca in the Amazon jungles, tribes of Indians that have actually mastered this art, and that saturate their bodies with DMT and harmaline, and then sing. But for them this singing is not a musical exercise, it's a pictorial exercise. They see what they intend. This is a kind of telepathy. Well, it's humbling, it's transformative, it's astonishing to realise that Shamans all over the world for time uncountable have been accessing this appalling, complex, ontologically challenging, scientifically impossible, reality. This means that culturally we are living out some kind of schizophrenic delusion, because we live our lives totally ignorant of these possibilities, or perhaps only glimpsing them at the edge of anaesthesia, or something like that, unless, of course, we have the courage to be counter-cultural heads, but even then many people confine themselves in the private world of their own reflection because social pressure and, indeed, social legislation make it very touchy to talk about these things. But I say to you, this is part of the human birthright. This is as much a part of the game as birth, sex and dying. Trip 5: ...I remember the very, very first time that I smoked DMT. It was sort of a benchmark you might say, and I remember that this friend of mine that always got there first visited me with this little glass pipe and this stuff which looked like orange mothballs. And since I was a graduate of Dr. Hoffman's I figured there were no surprises. So the only question I asked is, 'How long does it last?' and he said, 'About five minutes.' So I did it and........ there was a something, like a flower, like a chrysanthemum in orange and yellow that was sort of spinning, spinning, and then it was like I was pushed from behind and I fell through the chrysanthemum into another place that didn't seem like a state of mind, it seemed like another place. And what was going on in this place aside from the tastefully socketed indirect lighting, and the crawling geometric hallucinations along the domed walls, what was happening was that there were a lot of ahh.. beings in there, what I call self-transforming machine elves. Sort of like jewelled basketballs all dribbling their way toward me. And if they'd had faces they would have been grinning, but they didn't have faces. And they assured me that they loved me and they told me not to be amazed; not to give way to astonishment. And so I watched them, even though I wondered if maybe I hadn't really done it this time, and what they were doing was they were making objects come into existence by singing them into existence. Objects which looked like Faberge eggs from Mars morphing themselves with mandiean(sp) alphabetical structures. They looked like the concrescence of liguistic intentionality put through a kind of hyper-dimensional transform into three-dimensional space. And these little machines offered themselves to me. And I realized when I looked at them that if I could bring just one of these little trinkets back, nothing would ever be quite the same again. And I wondered, Where Am I? And What Is Going On? It occurred to me that these must be holographic viral projections from an autonomous continuum that was somehow intersecting my own, and then I thought a more elegant explaination would be to take it at face value and realize that I had broken into an ecology of souls. And that somehow I was getting a peek over the other side. Somehow I was finding out that thing that you cheerfully assume you can't find out. But it felt like I was finding out. And it felt.. and then I can't remember what it felt like because the little self-transforming tykes interrupted me and said, 'Don't think about it. Don't think about who you are. Think about doing what we're doing. Do it. Do it now. DO IT!!' And what they meant was use your voice to make an object. And as I understood, I felt a bubble kind of grow inside of me. And I watched these little elf tykes jumping in and out of my chest; they like to do that to reassure you. And they said, 'Do it.' And I felt language rise up in me that was unhooked from english, and I began to speak.. like this, 'Ehh yo ca dem wa, etc.. .. or words to that effect. And I wondered then what it all meant and why it felt so good if it didn't mean anything. And I thought about it, a few years actually, and I decided that meaning and language are two different things. And that what the alien voice in the psychedelic experience wants to reveal is the syntactical nature of reality. That the real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish. (More unintelligible tongue here..) And one of the things that I learned about DMT was that if you've ever had it, even just once, then you can have a dream, and in this dream somebody will pull out a little glass pipe, and then it will happen! It will happen just like the real thing. Because there's a button somewhere inside each and every one of us that gives you a look into the other side. And that's the button that resets the compass that tells you where you want to sail. Good luck... Trip 6: What happens to me when I smoke DMT is, there's a kind of going toward it. There's a sequella of events which lead to the antechamber of the mystery. I mean, you take a toke, you feel strange. Your whole body feels odd. You take a second toke, all the oxygen seems to have been pumped out of the room. Everything jumps into clarity. It's that visual acuity thing. You take a third toke if you're able, and then you lay back, and you see this thing which looks like a rose or a chyrsanthemum, this orange spinning flowerlike thing. It takes about fifteen seconds to form, and it's like a membrane. And then, you break through it. You break through it, and then you're in this place, and there's an enormous cheer which goes up as you pass through this membrane. Some of you may know the Pink Floyd song about how the gnomes have learned a new way to say hoo-ray? They're waiting. And you burst into this place, ... and you say, 'Am I all right? Am I all right?' That's the first question, and so then you run your mind around the track, and you say, 'Hmm. Heartbeat normal? Yeah, normal, heartbeat normal. Pulse normal? Breathing? Breathe breathe breathe, yes.' But what's right here, right here and from here out is this thing which, no matter how much science fiction you've done, no matter how much William Burroughs you've read, no matter how much time you've spent in the company of the weird, the bizarre, the autre, and the peculiar, you weren't ready: and it's completely real. It's in a way more real than the contents of ordinary reality, because, see how the shadows here are muted and there's a lot of transitional zones from one color to another and so forth? This isn't like that. This is crystalline, clear, solid, you can see the light reflected in the depths of these objects, and everything is very brightly colored, and everything is moving very, very rapidly. And there are entities there. It's not about calling them up or the whisperings of them. No, they're in your face. And they're right here, and they're worse than in your face, because what they do is, they jump into your chest and then they jump out. And you have to keep saying, 'Keep breathing, keep breathing, don't freak out, pay attention.' And the entities speak to you, and they speak both in English and another way which we'll get to in a minute. But in English what they say is, 'Do not give way to wonder. Hang on. Don't just go gaga with disbelief. Pay attention. Pay attention.' And what they're trying to do is they're trying to show you something. They are very aware of the fleeting nature of this encounter. And they say, you know, 'Don't spiral off into amazement, and start raving about God and all that. Forget that. Pay attention to what we're doing.' And then, what they're doing is they're dancing around, they're jumping around, they're emerging explicitly out of the background, bounding toward you, jumping into your chest, bounding away, and they offer, they make offerings. And they love you, that's the other thing. They say this. They say, 'We love you. You come so rarely. And, you know, here you are. Welcome, welcome.' And they make these offerings. And the offerings are objects of some sort. And now remember, you are not changed. You're exactly the person you were a few minutes before. So you're not exalted or depressed. You're just trying to make sense of this. And the objects which they offer are like, Faberge eggs, or exquisitely tooled and enamelled pieces of machinery, but they don't have rigid outlines. The objects are themselves somehow alive, and transforming and changing. So when these creatures -- I call them 'tykes' -- when these tykes offer you these objects, you like, you grok it, you look it and immediately, because you are yourself, you have this realization: my God, if I could get this thing back into my world, history would never be the same. A single one of these objects is somehow, you can tell by looking at it, this would confound my world beyond hope of recovery. It cannot exist. What I'm being shown is a tiny area where miracles are transformed. And the creatures, the tykes, are singing. They are speaking in a kind of translinguistic glossilalia. They are actually making these objects with their voices. They are singing these things into existence. And what the message is, is 'Do what we're doing. You can do what we're doing. DO IT.' And they get quite pushy about this. They say, you know, 'Damn it, DO IT!' And you're saying, 'Bu...bu...bu...bu...' And they say, 'No, DO IT! Do it NOW! DO IT!' And you say, 'I can't handle this,' you know, and then this kind of reaction goes on for awhile. Well, then, I actually, I don't take credit for it, it was not willed, but like something comes up from inside of you. Something comes out of you, and you discover you can do it, that you can use language to condense objects into existence in this space. It's the dream of all magic, but here it is folks, happening in real time. And then they're just delighted. They just go mad with delight and turn somersaults and turn themselves inside out and they all jump into your chest at once. And after many encounters of this sort, I mean, when I first did DMT, I couldn't bring anything out of it. I mean, I just said, you know, 'It's the damndest thing I've ever encountered and I can't say anything about it and I don't think I ever will be able to say anything about it.' But by going back repeatedly and working at it, I think I've gotten a pretty coherent -- well, let's not go that far, I think I've got a pretty clear metaphor anyway for what's happening in there, and I think a lot of people have this experience. When you talk to shamans, they say, 'Oh, well, yes, the helping spirits. Those are the helping spirits. They can help you cure, find lost objects, you didn't know about the helping spirits?' And you say, 'Well, I knew, but I, I had no idea that it was so literal.' And they say, 'Oh, no, that's the helping spirits.' But then, the other thing they say, if you press a shaman, if you say, "Well, what exactly is a helping spirit?" They say, "Well, a helping spirit is an ancestor." You say, "You mean to tell me that those are dead people in there?" They say, "Well, yes, ancestor, dead person. You didn't know about ancestors apparently. This is what happens to people who die." And you say, "My God, is it possible that what we're breaking into here is an ecology of souls?" That these are not extraterrestrials from Zenebelganooby or Zeta Reticula Beta. These are the dear departed. And they exist in a realm which, for want of a better word, let's call eternity. And somehow this drug, or whatever it is, is allowing me to see across the veil. This is the lifting -- you want to talk about boundary dissolution. It's one thing to get tight to your partner, it's quite another to get tight to the dear departed of centuries past. That's a serious boundary dissolution when that happens. What these creatures want, according to them, is they want us to transform our language somehow, and I don't know what this means. I mean, at this point in the weekend and in my life, we all are on the cutting edge, and nobody is ahead of anybody else. Clearly we need to transform our language, because our culture is created by our language, and our culture is toxic, murderous, and on a downhill bummer. Somehow we need to transform our language, but is this what they mean? That we're supposed to condense machines out of the air in front of us? How does this relate to the persistent idea, promulgated by Robert Graves and other people, that there is a primal language of poetry? That poetry as we know it is a pale, pale thing, and that at some time in the human past, people were in command of languages which literally compel belief. They compel belief, because they don't make an appeal through argument or metaphor. They compel belief because they are able to present themselves as imagery. You know, William Blake said, 'If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.' And it's very confusing, because you wonder, have people been doing this for thousands of years? And if so, have they always encountered this tremendous urgency on the other side? If people have been doing it for thousands of years, why is there this urgency on the part of these entities? And who exactly and what exactly are they? It appalls me, you can probably tell, that I have to talk about this, because I am not, this is not my baliwick. I mean, I'm a rationalist who's just had a very weird set of experiences, but I am a rationalist. I mean, I have no patience with channelling, you know, the lords of the many rays, the divas and, you know, there's this whole thing going around about disincarnate intellignece, mostly under the control of fairly, shall we say, non-rigorous thinkers. But I like to think that I am a rigorous thinker, and yet, here I am, telling you that, you know, elf legions await in hyperspace one toke away. The difference between my rap and, you know, the finned horned folks or somebody like that is that we have an operational method for testing my assertion. We can all smoke DMT, or you can make it your business to now find out about this, and see for yourself. And not everybody agrees with me. I mean, some people say it wasn't anything like that. But some people agree, and I think if you get two out of ten agreeing with a rap like this, then you'd better pay attention. Trip 7: What happens is, the world is completely replaced, instantly, 100 percent, it's all gone. And what is put in its place, not one iota of what is put in its place was taken from this world. So its a 100% reality channel switch. They don't even retain three dimensional space and linear time. It's not like you go to an exotic place, Morroco or New Guinea. It's like reality is swapped out for something else, and when you try to say what it is, you realize that language has evolved in this world, and it can serve no other, or it takes years of practice. So what you're looking at is literally the unspeakable. The indescribable falls into your lap... You cannot say what's there. Trip 8: What happens on DMT ... a troop of elves smashes down your front door, and rotates and balances the wheels on the afterdeath vehicle, present you with the bill and then depart. And it's completely paradigm shattering. I mean, you know, union with the white light you could handle. An invasion of your apartment by jewelled self-dribbling basketballs from hyperspace that are speaking demotic Greek is not something that you anticipated and could handle. Sometimes people say, "Is DMT dangerous? It sounds so crazy. Is it dangerous?" The answer is, only if you fear death by astonishment. Remember how you laughed when this possibility was raised.. and a moment will come that will wipe the smile right off your face. Trip 9: Well, I suppose it's an invitation to describe a DMT trip, which is never to be passed up. Because ... I think what we're talking about here is a continuum, I'm talking about a very narrow band of experience. A continuum of experience that comes through tryptamine hallucinogens: DMT, Psilocybin, and the DMT-Harmine combination... and that's it... Mescaline doesn't, isn't what I'm talking about. Ketamine certainly isn't what I'm talking about. Datura certainly isn't what I'm talking about. And some of these are plants, and some of them are synthetic drugs, but it's a very narrow spectrum of these highly visionary ones, and then the most visionary, the quintessence is DMT. I mean, I think that DMT is as intense as any drug should ever get; I don't ever want to be more loaded than that. I don't think you can be more loaded than that and come back. You know? What happens on DMT for me, and this is based on, you know, composite image of many experiences, and I've confirmed it to some degree with other people, but I was talking to somebody the other day, somebody who had just done it, and I said, "what did you think?" and they said: "It's the most idiosyncratic thing there is." and I thought, what a wonderful description, that's exactly what it is - it's pure idiosyncraticness. It's so idiosyncratic that's all there's there - it's like idiosyncracy without an object, is what DMT is. When you smoke this, the onset is very rapid. 30-45 seconds, you know? There's this feeling which comes over your body - half arousal, half anaesthesia. The air appears to suddenly have been sucked out of the room because all the colors brighten visibly, as though some intervening medium has been removed. And then there's a sound, like a piece of bread wrapper or cellophane being scrunched up and thrown away. A friend of mine says this is radio-entelechy leaving the anterior fontanelle at the top of your head. [laughter] I'm not sure I want to line up with that... but a membrane is being ripped; something is being torn. And then there is a total (what Mircea Eliade called in a wonderful phrase) "a complete rupture of the mundane plane". [laughter] You know? That's like a hit and run accident except the car came from hyperspace, you know? A complete rupture of the mundane plane. And you fall back into this hallucinogenic space, and what you see is a slowly rotating red and orange kind of thing, which, over the years we've nicknamed, uh, "The Chrysanthemum." And it's.. this represents some kind of disequilibrium state that has its roots in the synapses. What's happening as you're watching this Chrysanthemum is that millions and then hundreds of millions of DMT molecules are rushing into these serotonin bond sites in the synaptic cleft and disrupting the serotonin and switching the electron spin resonance signature of these neural junctions in this "other" direction. And this is taking, you know, 30 or 40 seconds, and there's this rising hum, this ____nnnmmmmMMMMMMMM^^^^ that rising tone; the flying saucer tone of Hollywood B movies... you actually hear this thing. And then, if you've taken enough DMT (and it has to do entirely with physical capacity: Did you take, did you cross the threshold?) something happens [clap]... for which there are no words. A membrane is rent, and you are propelled into this "place." And language cannot describe it - accurately. Therefore I will inaccurately describe it. The rest is now lies. When you break into this space, you have several impressions simultaneously that are a kind of gestalt: First of all (and why, I don't know) you have the impression that you are underground - far underground - you can't say why, but there's just this feeling of immense weight above you but you're in a large space, a vaulted dome. People even call it "The DMT dome" I have said, had people say to me, "Have you been under the dome?" and I knew exactly what they meant. So you burst into this space. It's lit, socketed lighting, some kind of indirect lighting you can't quite locate. But what is astonishing and immediately riveting is that in this place there are entities - there are these things, which I call "self transforming machine elves," I also call them self-dribbling basketballs. They are, but they are none of these things. I mean you have to understand: these are metaphors in the truest sense, meaning they're lies! Uh, it's a jeweled self-transforming basketball, a machine elf. I name them 'Tykes' because tyke is a word that means to me a small child, and I was fascinated by the 54th fragment of Heraclitis, where he says: "The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls" ... and when you burst into the DMT space this is the Aeon - it's a child, and it's at play with colored balls, and I am in eternity, apparently, in the presence of this thing. There are many of these things, but the main thing that's happening is that they are engaged in a linguistic activity of some sort, which we do not have words for, but it's visible language. They are doing the visible language trip. When you break into the space, they actually cheer! The first thing you hear when you pass across is this 'hhhyeaaaaaayyy' - you know the Pink Floyd song? "The Gnomes have Learned a New Way to Say Hoo-Ray?" This has gotta be what these guys were talking about; how else could it be? It doesn't make any sense otherwise. You break into this space... the gnomes say hoo-ray! And they come rushing forward and they, and, and the thing then that happens is... and people say "is there risk, to DMT? it sounds so intense. Is it dangerous?". The answer is: yes, it's tremendously dangerous; the danger is the possibility of death by astonishment. And you must prepare yourself for this eventuality, because you are so amazed. Amazement seems to be the emotion that has torn loose and swamped everything else - I mean astounded? When was the last time you were genuinely 'ASTOUNDED'? I mean, I think you can go your whole damned life without being 'ASTOUNDED'... and this is astonishment, you know, raised to the N-th degree to the point that your jaw hangs... I mean you're like this: And it raises issues: like you say, "Jesus, ah, huhh ... I must be dead!" And you, and the weird thing about DMT is it does not effect what we ordinarily call the mind. The part that you call "you" - nothing happens to it. You're just like you were before, but the World has been radically replaced - 100% - it's all gone, and you're sitting there, and you're saying, "Jesus, a minute ago I was in a room with some people, and they were pushing some weird drug on me, and, and now, what's happened? Is this the Drug? Did we do it? Is this it?" And meanwhile, these things are saying: "Do not give way to amazement; Control your wonder." in other words, they try to bring you down. They say, "Don't just goof out on this; pay attention. PAY ATTENTION... to what we're doing." "OK, what're you doing?..." Say this is what we're doing, and then they proceed to sing objects into existence. Amazing objects. Objects that are Faberge Eggs, things made of pearl, and metal, and glass, and gel, and you, when you're shown one of these things, a single one of them, you look at it an you know, without a shadow of a doubt, in the moment of looking at this thing, that if it were right here, right now, this world would go mad. It's like something from another dimension. It's like an artifact from a flying saucer. It's like something falling out of the mind of God - such objects DO not exist in this universe, and yet, you're looking at it. And they're clamoring for your attention. " 'k at this! 'ook at This! Look at THIS!" and they pull these things... and each one, you look into it and it begins to open into this wonder that you must fight. You say "No, don't look at it, look AWAY from it!" because it's so wonderful that it's swamping my objectivity and destroying my ability to function in this space. Well, then they say "do"... And the objects that they make have the peculiar ability to themselves generate this linguistic "stuff" which condenses as other objects. So beings are making objects, showing you objects, the objects are turning into beings and making other objects, these beings and objects, they jump into your chest - and then they jump back out. They jump into your body and disappear into your body, and then they jump back out, waving these things, just throwing this stuff in all directions. They are - the word that comes to mind is: they are Zany. It's like a Bugs Bunny cartoon, uh, gone mad. And all of this energy - they are elves. This is what elves are. It's this weird thing, where they love you - or they like you a lot, but you can tell that their sense of humor is Weird. And that you must be very careful of the deals you cut with these things, [...] in fact I've spent so much time trying to understand what this is. It has different kinds of feelings about it. One
