Illusions of Self and Consciousness Explored With DMT

How are we to use the extraordinary power of psychedelics to help us penetrate the mysteries of consciousness? In our ordinary states of mind, consciousness, self and free will all seem real but in other states they may be revealed as illusions. Then our normal, taken-for-granted, state of consciousness is seen as a state of delusion. Psychedelic experiences can certainly seem profound and meaningful, but do they help us understand the illusion of self and consciousness when we are not in that state?

DMT Idea.

Source: L.Brown - Own work/CC BY-SA 3.0

Do psychedelic experiences provide a way out of delusion into clarity and understanding, or do they just replace one set of delusions with another? We may find ourselves in strange other worlds or discover that we cannot find ourselves at all. We may be transformed into another being: an animal, a plant, a flying spirit, or a disembodied observer. Our body may entirely disappear or the boundaries between self/other and mind/world may dissolve. In this state, the unity of everything seems blatantly obvious, and the hard problem of consciousness appears laughable—no problem at all. Yet, in my experience, this apparent insight into nonduality fades, duality reasserts itself, and I am not left with any kind of theoretical understanding that would sweep the hard problem away.

As an example, think about DMT, dimethyltryptamine. This can be taken in several different ways, on its own or as the main active ingredient in ayahuasca. Its peculiar property is that it is inactivated by the enzyme, monoamine oxidase, MAO, so if you ingest DMT it has almost no effect. Smoking or inhaling its vapour bypasses the enzyme but means a dramatic but very short-lived experience, sometimes said to be like compressing an eight-hour LSD trip into 20 minutes. How then is it possible to drink ayahuasca and have many hours of psychedelic experience? This is because over the centuries in which the peoples of the Amazon developed their shamanic brew, as a teacher and healer, they found many plants, such as psychotria viridis, that combined with the ayahuasca vine, or Banisteriopsis caapi, allow for long-lasting effects. The reason, as we know now, is that these other plants contain MAO inhibitors such as harmine and harmaline.

I have taken DMT using all three different methods of administration—always in very safe and well-prepared circumstances. They produced wildly different consequences. Smoking DMT evoked a brief screaming, colourful world of terror. Drinking ayahuasca produced a multitude of extraordinary, and extraordinarily varied, immersive experiences. Vaporised DMT, with controllable periods of inhalation, produced something different again—a transformation of self with close links to aspects of my 40 years of Zen training.

This one molecule can vary dramatically in its effects, as the art inspired by users beautifully and colourfully reveals. Yet this makes the task of understanding it at the molecular, cellular, or whole brain level especially hard. We know something about changes in EEG, increased disorder, changed connectivity in the default mode network and increased activity in parts of the visual system. There are relationships with dreaming and especially lucid dreaming, but we have hardly begun to work out why the different psychedelics, and the different modes of administration, produce the experiences they do. The recent Tucson conference, "The Science of Consciousness online," included three whole sessions on psychedelics and I spoke about DMT in the ‘Psychedelic Experiences’ plenary.

I like to imagine a future in which psychedelic research, combining experiential accounts with neuroscience, will help us see through our normal illusions and understand the nature of these other worlds of experience.