by Dan Green
There is the argument that the taking of drugs is an effort to shortcut the way to either mystical or visionary experiences, and, perhaps, spiritual. Some argue it is a cheat, sidestepping personal effort, and therefore laziness. Ironically, the word acedia (also accidie) pronounced ‘acid-ia’ as in ‘acid’ as in LSD, means a spiritual sloth, once noted as a problem amongst and other ascetics maintaining a solitary life. Others may choose other inroads such as meditation, fasting, depriving themselves of sleep, drumming, dancing, confining themselves to long periods in darkness. Surprising then, we learn, there may be no need to do anything as it may just spontaneously do itself. Is it therefore necessary to take drugs at all?
Acedia – Spiritual laziness?
Both my knowledge and understanding of DNA is pretty average to say the least, but I do know when solid facts and statistics blow my mind. Consequently, the fact that the total length of these folded up microscopic strands in our body is 125 billion miles, intriguingly, and making the proposition of all forms of speculation possible, is the fact the fact that 97% of the function of DNA is unknown. Another fact concerns the tryptamine alkaloid Dimethyltryptamine, DMT for convenience, the most powerful of psychedelic drugs found in plants and animals and also thought to be produced within our own brain possibly the area of the pineal gland, as well as our blood and spinal fluid. Perhaps the pineal is the region that the practitioner of Tantra stimulates, that cranial vault perhaps containing this hallucinatory substance, and likewise where the Kundalini rests after ascending.
The cranial vault
People who trip out on this psychedelic – no wonder or coincidence that the wording ‘trypt’ sits in the middle of its lengthier title – will visit strange regions and their inhabitants in scenarios often most similar to that of the globally reported ‘alien abduction’ experience as experienced by millions of people all over the world who may have been ‘taken’ but have not taken any form of hallucinatory drug. The natural question asked is how valid are these experiences, are they ‘real’ in any potential way or simply a fiction of the brain influenced by an aggregate of previous interests or expectations? And why should both drug and non-drug taker arrive in the same themed scene? Wouldn’t it be more expected that each individual would arrive in their own individual landscape? Have we all got a hidden or deeply submerged script somewhere in our brain, Mind’s Eye or even that undiscovered 97% of DNA landscape?
Alien Abduction
Scientists are equally vague and arrogant in both measures regarding the nature of hallucinations and it is perhaps best to say that they don’t really know how they are produced – a World Health Organisation study in 2015 found that 1in 20 of the general population experience at least one hallucination in their lifetime that isn’t connected to drugs, alcohol or dreaming. This disappointing scientific arrogance continues in the labelling of ‘junk’ towards the mysterious, unaccounted for and un-decoded DNA landscape. Their major theory is that they are caused when something goes wrong in the relationship between the frontal lobe of the brain and the sensory cortex. Why should there be something going on that is ‘wrong’, a ‘false’ perception?
Neuropsychologist Professor Flavie Waters from the University of Western Australia says of hallucinations; ‘We’re still trying to understand whether there are different forms of of hallucinations or whether there is only one type that takes different shapes. And what makes a hallucination distressing in some situations and not in others?’ A disturbed and adjusted brain chemistry that within a moment is in the right state of flux and raised above a certain threshold appears to provide the perfect opportunity for opening up a window to another world.
Window to another world
Some excellent investigation and debate into this conundrum has already taken place and is gathered expertly by Graham Hancock in his extremely well researched and presented 2005 book ‘Supernatural; Meetings with the Ancient teachers of Mankind’, but as with any question related in any way to existing consciousness outside of the body, the outcome hits a brick wall (although some may have the ability to walk through those!) as I highlighted in my 2014 World Mysteries article ‘The Temporal Lobe Gateway – Mystic, or grave mistake?’
I couldn’t help noticing that DMT can also be seen written and sounded as ‘De-empty’, ‘De’ as a prefix to mean down from, away or indicating a reversal of process, and therefore DMT suggesting the opposite of empty (‘having no empty space’) which does seem to concord with the fulsome trips experienced. I also noticed that the letters ‘Hall’ in ‘hallucinate’ are also apparent in the ‘Hallows’ of the celebratory All Hallows Eve, a time when some believe the veil between this world and the next is at its thinnest, allowing communication with spirit entities from elsewhere. Rather like a hallucinogenic trip? The word hallucinate originates from the Latin ‘alucinari’ meaning ‘to wander in the mind’. If, as the Ancient Wisdom, attests, there is only Mind and all is but manifestations of it, then to wander about in it, as those tripping out do, doesn’t seem such a bad deal!
All Hallows eve
Let us take a look at two spontaneous abductions that occurred to individuals who do not do drugs. The first is as related to me by my friend the Australian author Ellis C. Taylor. It first started for him on 13th April 1996 one Saturday morning when he woke at about 7.30am. Returning from the toilet his partner looked shocked and pointed out fast fading long strangely shaped configured finger marks on his right wrist, a geometric-like face on the left hand side of his chest and a strange claw or tail-like pattern on his left upper arm and circles on his thighs. He was burnt red like sunburn. For weeks onward, including sometimes during the day, these ‘visitors’ came and Ellis’ girlfriend would witness his physical struggle in the bed as she clung onto him with her arms. One clear message just before the abduction spoke; ‘Peace, no harm. We do not understand your fear.’
Ellis Taylor, incision on ear (top) and strange mark on chest (bottom)
A fine cut with 5 dots all within a circle was once found on Ellis’ earlobe. His abductions continue to this day. Next, I will share my own abduction which I only very recently realised was one, when I read of similar encounters by people who had taken DMT. Again, I have never shown an interest in taking drugs, preferring the way of deep, profound Tibetan Vajrayana meditations. It would have been sometime during the early eighties, a period of time when I was undergoing a lot of stress and soon had a number of otherworldly experiences during sleep, a factor that can, obviously unnoticed, change brain chemistry and therefore open one to reception of hallucinatory visitations.
The encounter began when I was aware of being in a lucid state during a dream but realised immediately that I was strapped down on an operating theatre type trolley and travelling quite speedily along a monorail railway track. My surroundings were clearly subterranean and I watched smoothed rock walls as I was moving around twists and bends. Now I think, could this be where we have arrived at the idiom ‘going around the (DNA?) twist/bend’ to mean losing one’s senses? I was filled with fear knowing that I was strapped down and couldn’t free myself and not knowing either how I had gotten there or where I was going. In usual dream scenarios if I am in a situation where I am not liking it or facing an imminent danger I will, with that thought, propel myself back to waking consciousness. This time, and the only time I recall, my method didn’t work. So yes, this does appear like an abduction.
Dan’s subterranean trip went along something similar to this
The next thing I know, I am in some sort of smooth floor tower, am now free and wandering about. From out of an arabesque shaped window I recognise what sounded like an Adhan call that one hears when the muezzin is calling the faithful to prayer. My ego is fully in play and with a tinge of arrogance most likely to mask my fear, I approach a calmly seated male wearing a turban and beard. I ask the obvious, ‘Where am I?’ ‘Well,’ he started slowly, ‘you could be in Nempis or you could be in Lilliland’. (I have spelt these ‘places’ as they sounded to me) ‘Or,’ he continued, ‘you could be in an element’.
Interesting things to note here are that Nempis/Lilliland are the sort of place names you might expect to hear if one had been classically abducted by the fairy folk, and that my encounter gave the impression of being an Asiatic wise man in perhaps his palace, which, at the time, would have fitted perfectly with my preferred form of expression whilst investigating all things spiritual, and usually this phenomena it has been observed, will obligingly meet with our expectations – Not only is seeing believing but additionally you see what you believe.
I asked why this had happened to me and his final words were, ‘Well…you will become well known, and then…’ And with that I am swiftly finding myself back in my bed and running a temperature, leaving me to now wondering if dehydration may have been the instigator that changed my brain chemicals and launched me into this hallucination. As I sit now typing this some 37 years later I if wonder if my humble current status places me anywhere near a ‘well known’ classification, and if so, what could follow? These encounters, that take so many forms to so many people, are quite common and usually go no further than the ‘promise’ leaving one wondering why have it in the first place!
Metal Hilt – a clue?
Time now, in Dan Green trademark style, to take a closer and deeper look into things total. We start with having arrived at the name of Dimethyltryptamine. On the basis, understanding and acceptance that ALL things are connected and interrelated, then obviously a greater significance will be hiding itself in this title if we approach it properly. Using the once lost Mother Tongue rediscovered by my autistic wife Avril, we can sift out in the wording Dimethyltryptamine, ‘di METHYL’ = ‘Metal’, and furthermore, borrowing a partial of this sequence of letters, ‘dimet HYLT’ giving us the full phonetic clue of ‘Metal Hilt’.
Finally, as mentioned earlier, ‘Dimethyl TRYP tamine’ points out a ‘trip’ the terminology used for being under the influence of drugs. And what has a metal hilt? A sword. The term ‘stoned’ is not just reserved for cannabis users, it can also be referred to as the state found when under the influence of psychedelics. The myth of the ‘Sword in the Stone’ conveniently offers us the link we are looking for. The symbolism of this Arthurian legend by removing the sword from the stone is to undo oneself and be removed from its normal neurological state giving a freedom to claim one’s rightful place in the cosmos, or, at least, away from an earthbound material plane of consciousness. Experimental trips can vary and indeed lead one into truly frightening territories and encounters, but, as in the sword in the stone myth, only one who has the required pure intention in seeking out truth by way of reality can ‘remove the sword’. The notion of a sword being firmly affixed in stone is to allude at attachment to concrete ideas alone.
The Sword in the Stone
Our sword hilt and handle association gives birth to a number of meaningful idioms that could refer to liable DMT experimentation; ‘I can’t handle it’ meaning in the emotional sense a feeling of overwhelming intensity; ‘Get a grip’ in understanding of how to deal with something, sometimes having lost touch with reality; and ‘To the hilt’, meaning to the maximum extent possible. To manage to ‘get a grip on’, by controlling emotions and behaving more calmly is what many a tripper attempts doing especially when in the company of often appearing therianthropes – shapeshifting hybrid creatures found in myth and imagination. I can think of one such major and appropriately named figure – the Griffin with the body, tail and back legs of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. The Griffin is also known as the Gryphon, coincidently or otherwise, a phonetic ‘grip on’.
The Gryphon
One other famous Stone, of course, is the Philosophers Stone, the legendary alchemical substance capable of turning base metals into gold, the central symbol of this mystical terminology of alchemy involving a state of heavenly bliss. The world wide spread hallucinogenic and psychedelic brew Ayahuasca, once only the property of the indigenous people of the Upper Amazon, appears to be presided over ultimately by a female goddess type, possibly the consciousness of Mother Earth Herself, and many encounter this figure during their trip. Her Mother Tongue clearly announces her role for the seeker in their journey and what they must do; Ayahuasca, a phonetic for ‘I, who ask her.’
I who ask Her
The clear difference between Ayahuasca, made from several different plants, and DMT is that the latter is a chemical found in nature that can catapult one into a differing reality. What both have in common, of course, is the obvious question, although not one asked by scientists. Are these experiences, these trips, actually occurring on some other existing reality other than on the earth plane, or just a private affair and only in the physical head of the individual? If it were all a brain fiction then how come millions of people all over the world, whether having ingested a drug or had a spontaneous unwanted experience, have pretty much the same themed encounters with the same themed figures, suggesting that these voyages to elsewhere and what will be discovered there is already hard-wired into our brains?
In describing these scenarios, a sort of Godfather of all this thought, Professor Rick Strassman, psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, and the first person conducting US Government human hallucinogenic research, in a 2005 interview with Graham Hancock said this; ‘If they were really what they seemed to be, then where could such realities reside? I began allowing myself to consider that DMT provides a portal into alternative dimensions of reality – perhaps parallel universes or dark matter.’ Does the answer hide in that vast amount of DNA we know nothing about? Even Francis Crick, who was revealed the DNA and consequently became its Nobel prize winning genius and co- founder, was under the influence of LSD – his ‘thinking tool’ – at the time.
Alice in Wonderland
If so, is the answer in our DNA on a slow release timer awaiting our point in human evolution when we can discover this scientifically and for certain? Crick went much further in his 1981 book ‘Life Itself; Its Origins and Nature’ daringly describing how he thought that DNA was not a chance find on earth and was more likely to have been directed here by an alien civilisation in automated spaceships preserved in the form of simple, stripped down bacteria, resilient seeds of life to maintain a civilisation perhaps facing its own cataclysmic oblivion, to crash on an obliging planet to release the bacteria for a new beginning and slow evolution of what would eventually become a conscious race. Are we back to the hypothesis that the human race has been genetically engineered, and furthermore, within their DNA is a neurological visa that can glimpse us the way home?
PS: Slightly related – Since the 1960’s the famous book ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll has come under scrutiny by readers attempting to identify an underlying drug theme. With the aid of synchronicity, I couldn’t help but notice the name of his heroine hiding in the hallucinogenic drug LSD, or ‘LYS ergic A cid’ – ALYS = Alice, and the title of its sequel ‘Through the Looking-Glass’’ contains an alternative phonetic for ‘looking’, the word ‘Leucine’ – an essential amino acid of which one of its benefits is in healing wounds. Part 10 of Hancock’s ’Supernatural’ book introduces ‘The Wounded Healer,’ where we meet with the ‘wounded men’ of Palaeolithic cave art, often having therianthropic qualities relating to hallucinogenic produced transformation into spirit animals. ‘The Wounded Healer’ is a term created by psychologist Carl Jung, based on the notion that an analyst is compelled to treat patients because the analyst himself is ‘wounded’. With introversion, by deeply examining oneself it is ones own hurt that gives a measure of his power to heal. This is reminiscent of our sword in the stone analogy and its freedom from earth bound attachment.
Copyright 2019 by Dan Green