DMT, Creativity and a Philosophy of Psychedelics
A version of this interview appeared in Catalyst.
Following his first experience with DMT, Director Mitch Schultz was inspired to create a series of four documentary films beginning with DMT: The Spirit Molecule. The films go first to understanding our connection with heaven, dimensions beyond our 3D world, and realms wholly different from our everyday reality. Second is Ground of Being, focused on understanding how to harmonize our relationship with our natural environment. Next is Global Beat Fusion, examining music as the soul of culture. The whole project concludes with a film focused on communication -- how to relate about all these experiences with each other.
Terra: Mitch, thank you so much for taking time for this conversation. You Directed The Spirit Molecule, which follows Dr. Straussman's sanctioned study of a psychoactive substance found naturally in plants, animals and humans, dimethyltryptamine. Why did you decide to make a film about DMT? Had you heard of Dr. Strassman's work previously?
Mitch: The simple answer, a personal DMT experience in 2002. Prior to that experience, I had never heard about Dr. Strassman's research, but it was that experience that brought me to his work. A close friend was moving home to Brazil from NYC, and several of us gathered in a midtown apartment to see him off. One of the individuals brought a small amount of DMT, and as it turned out, he was the only one there that had ever heard of DMT. I considered myself an experienced psychonaut and explained to him that I knew what to expect from my past psychedelic explorations. He quickly laughed me off. I was the third one to take the DMT, and by the second inhalation things began to shift very quickly. He encouraged me to take two more inhalations (I'm still not sure how I pulled that off), and immediately went into what I can only explain as dying experience. I had never been so afraid, and did my best to hold on. After approximately one minute the fear passed, and it turned out to be one of the most beautiful experiences in my life. Almost immediately upon my return to consensus reality, I knew I would make this film. The 10-minute experience changed the core of my being, provided a drastically new outlook on life, and ultimately became the impetus for my psychedelic research and life direction.
What is the focus of your current psychedelic research?
Healing, personal growth and spirituality. Now of course all of these can intersect with the next, but without two of the three present it's not worth going there. Ultimately, I believe the core of what we search for as humans lays at the intersection of all three, so I put my focus on uncovering ways to make them overlap. I've always had a sense that psychedelic mindspace is fully integrated with a multi-dimensional matrix of "life" that can be mapped, navigated and shaped in unimaginable ways. Reality hacking.
In your experience, do psychedelics only act on the mind?
Right, is like, your brain on drugs or close encounters of the third kind? I've come to think it's a combination of both. The cathartic emotions, shifts in time and space, entity communication, physical healing, and the variety of other experiences that we just can't wrap a vocabulary around seem to be more than just an internal occurrence. Science (as spiritual philosophies) continues to discover ways that our entire being is networked on multiple levels of reality, which becomes very apparent with altered states of consciousness connected to an interactive biological matrix. My sense is that the brain opens up its range of sensory awareness bringing insight into our mind, but at the same time we experience a variety of other energetic forces that remain hidden in consensus reality and play a role in our everyday life.
Psychedelic immediacy gives an experience of life unbounded. Through the freeing of thoughts and mind, psychedelic experiences can reveal the mystery of human potential, which is infinite. Can you describe life in a psychedelic world? Is this a good idea?
Phantasmagoric.
The dream, the reality, the imagined, all are contributing to the conditions of daily life -- each of these arenas has influence in our thoughts, habits and decision making. Examined close up, even the most still parts of life are full of movement and dynamic change. Rocks erode. Everything is in a constant state of decay or rejuvenation. In considering a state of psychedelic cohesion, is a psychedelic state a more immediate and direct awareness of this actual and constant reality?
Through personal trials and tribulations, I've come to understand my journey as a way to offer help to humanity with the concepts that have been revealed to me. And although the last decade has allowed me to solidify my musings, it has been a lifelong process. The culmination of my 38 years on this planet has resulted in a tetralogy of projects that make up the four-part Manifesto, a manifesto that aims to redefine our connection to Spirit, however understood or represented by any individual or larger culture.
Many have seen your documentary The Spirit Molecule, the first part of this Manifesto. Please share with us how you see the whole manifesto taking shape.
It begins with DMT: The Spirit Molecule exploring a new paradigm for consciousness, quantum consciousness. At the center of awareness lies a simple, natural molecule that potentially exists in all living organisms. A molecule that consistently produces a mystical experience, and may be the seed to the ultimate connection to It. Viewed through the lens of Entheogens, consciousness encounters the quantum world, generating and fostering Gnosis, but this state of consciousness can also be explored via a variety of ancient and esoteric knowledge around the world.
The next film, now in editing, Ground of Being documents a thriving eco-village built as an effort of restoration, rehabilitating an exhausted bluestone quarry in Melbourne, Australia. The community of C.E.R.E.S. has created and now maintains an award winning, not-for-profit, environment and education centre and urban farm.
Ground of Being builds from the knowledge attained from quantum awareness, and addresses humanity's role and symbiotic relationship to the life force of Earth. Through food and general sustainability practices, our physicality, thought, emotions and behaviors directly relate to how we recognize and care for natural world. By acknowledging our connection to everything around us, we can create a successful realignment with Nature that begins with the individual, grows into local community, and blossoms into a well integrated whole, mimicking the life force that we exist in.
The third film, Global Beat Fusion (based on Derek Beres' book of the same title), examines the interpretation, and celebration, of Spirit through music (art). Music has always been a ritual and social activity, a personal connection and a communal art shared by many. Music is the soul of a culture. Global Beat Fusion uncovers the computer as the first global folk instrument that international musicians share their respective cultural soul via the electronic space, cross-germinating their mythologies to create a meta-mythology.
Your work on this Manifesto begins with a vision resulting from your first DMT experience. You became aware of a possible peaceful world -- a sustainable reality. This was brought to light by your experience of a well balanced realm -- so you were inspired to share this Vision through the creation of this Manifesto comprised of four documentary films, ultimately concluding with a re-view -- re-telling the story.
This work concludes with the communication component. Open Source Reality [a working title] asks for the evolution of consciousness, physicality and interpretation of Spirit. For this to take place we need to develop a new language of maps, models and metaphors to re-interpret the misguided mythologies that have directed humanity for millennia, and now plague the social fabric.
The DMTRMX project creates an opportunity for anyone interested to become engaged in the psychedelics conversation through experiencing a dynamic and audience participatory approach to film and editing. You've given access to The Spirit Molecule anthology to the global community via the Creative Commons license, allowing creative individuals global access to edit and create their own DMT on film experience. What are your thoughts on intellectual property vs idea sharing?
Rather than 'property' think abundance, an intellectual smorgasbord. Open source ideas, believing the source of inspiration is infinite. Through this open sourcing and idea sharing, we redefine our mythologies, incorporating the quantum physical realm. We are constantly connected and related to a heavenly presence and source. Additionally, data is prolific throughout the world and by the internet, all this information is now broadly accessible, allowing the (re)discovery of lost traditions and and illuminating a clearer understanding of new and emerging tribal beats, new stories, new technologies and innovations, new mythologies created and shared.
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DMT- the spirit molecule
DMT will destroy your ego, or at least expand it to the point that your self will cease to be. For 5 minutes anyways, feeling like a lucid dream all the content of your mind and things you keep hidden from yourself will be known to you in an instant. If you are not a good person, then you will probably assailed by all kinds of demons or entities or whatever you drudge up out of the horror films and religious books you have read. If you have done lots of cocaine and your mind is stuck in some fallacy of your own greatness and sense of entitlement then the self created vain narcissism whereby you feel you need to crown yourself and be the Queen of nothing...will be shown to be illusory and false. Then your ego will probably collapse in on you and you will be left in tears holding a glass pipe wondering what just happend to you and being scared of your own mind will entail some psychological consequences that you might need to seek professional help with...
Though if you have a background in yoga and meditation things will fair easily for you because the purpose of these disciplines is in the end to transcend ego and reach enlightenment. DMT is kind of a short-cut. Its like driving a car instead of walking, wait its more like a space shuttle instead of driving, wait its more like a time machine instead of space travel, wait its more like communing with all that is sacred and divine and condensing it into a seemingly infinite moment of pure knowledge and wisdom beyond form and conception into the one mind which is all mind, what is exalted and pure and what is the root of consciousness.
DMT is not a drug of abuse. Its not addictive, it's harmful to those who do not know themselves, or those who live through a false image of self. To those who seek truth and knowledge for those who seek to know the nature of mind, this is a spiritual technology.
The value lies not in the drug itself but what is done with the knowledge gained from the experience. You will know yourself as a temporal being conditioned by time and circumstance living life as you are in a corporeal body that will one day cease to be. You will know life and death and the transition between these states as one cosmic river. You will come to understand the illusory separateness between self and mind.
If you cling to the self, then friction will be produced, panic and anxiety will result; demons and entities will appear. But as in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, one has to realize that these entites be they peaceful or wrathful, are really emantions of ones own mind and consciousness, and in fact have no existence outside of our allowing them to be. That is to say if your mental disposition is weak or built of delusions, then you might be devoured alive by malicious crocodile entities from the 7th dimension here to suck your life energies and replace you with an automated bio-droid; oh the agony the horror the horror!
Again, if your mind is strong, you will breathe through the anxieties and recognize that what arises therin is really an aspect of your own mind, and that to meet that with fear is actually quite absurd.
Its different for different people however, some might graph their religious context overtop of the experience, others will see it for what it is. Still others might just be enamored with the colours and shapes dancing in kaleidoscopic contortions behind their eyes. They might come to wonder what is it that causes these spiralling fractal shapes which seem to shift and contort with my thoughts and feelings. What is this information I am experiencing here? Inquisitive people will have more questions and would want to spend more time understanding what the essence of this experience is. Breaking down the science of what is actually occuring during the uptake of DMT into ones brain. Fascinating stuff to be sure.
So to reiterate, DMT is called the 'spirit molecule' for good reason.
This one time I was running late at night, and I came upon 2 people in the back of a pick up, This middle aged guy and his younger girlfriend. They were asking me what I was running from, I said I just like to run at night, when no one is around. It was 3 am or so.- I was telling them about how I would do karate punches to entertain the police helicopter and its heat sensing light. I actually stopped doing that when they flew over our house and a cop car was parked down the street one day asking my room mate if he lived in the house with the red truck. - Anyways back to my story. So this guy was asking me about drugs and I started to tell him about DMT and as soon as I said it was a white crystalline powder he was like give it to me!! When can I get it? Do you smoke crack? We ran out of crack, is it like crack? I was trying to explain to him for a good 20 minutes that no its not like crack, and you have to be prepared to be doing it. And was just kept pressing me and pressing me asking again and again. So finally I was like okay this guy wants to journey wherever he wants to go so be it. I ran back to the house and got some DMT for these folks to try. When I arrived back at their truck they told me they didn't think I would come back.
Anyways, the guy who was in his early 40's smoked it out of his crack pipe as fast as he could with a huge giant plume, then he started to convulse and he fell to the ground in tears mumbling about how life was a video game with no reset button on it and how he was the king of some village in Nunavut, where he had a son but had to leave him for some reason. Then he said again he was the king of this village
'The toothless king of (*place name i can't remember) HAhaha hah...ugghhhh haha'
I felt kind kind of awkward in this situation, my main thing was making sure he didn't clip his head on the mirror of his truck as he flailed about when he tried to stand up. But he's a man older than I and he asked me for it so you know maybe some trauma maybe some catharsis for his wanting.
The girl who was maybe 19 or 20 saw him and was like 'Can I smoke it!!' I said well I gave it to you so its yours. Just relax and breathe.
When she smoked it she kept thanking me again and again and talking about how it felt so good to be small again, as opposed to the artificial ego inflation of a drug like crack-cocaine. She took it rather well and kept talking about the universe and expanding into the stars and how she was lucid dreaming like being a kid. All the colours so vibrant everything in its right place or some suchen.
Their temporal moment of epiphenetic coherence passed and again turned into a fragmented state of compulsive need for Crack. I stood there and answered some questions, then Terry was like 'Cool dude, yeah shes my woman, get your own hah' 'Yeah what are you doing here?' so I bid them good evening and as I jogged away they were like 'Wait come back, why are you leaving?' I just waved and kept running, I didn't want to spend time trying to piece together the pseudo communication of crack-heads who couldn't remember anything past the last thing they said.
Strange situation, I felt kind of bad at first as I was running thinking about Terry and his bad trip, but I thought maybe it was what he needed to realize where he was at. He mentioned he was a red-seal chef and was proud of it, maybe he would go back and see his son someday. Back to where he was king.
Expansion of TSM
I am impressed to see that The Spirit Molecule has caused an expansion into the realm of right living, music and communication. The music issue especially intrigues me. I have not taken the DMT path yet, but this is not the right time of life for me either (my days of sojourn came in the 1970s when I was a young sprout and I learned enough to be able to walk around with my melon wide open...it still is...).
The music issue has always fascinated me -- music and its connection to telepathy. I know that this is something often touched upon by those who have studied ayahuasca cultures. It has never seemed to me that people have adequately followed up. Nor does it seem that folks realize how important this nexus is -- and how messy to understand.
I'm not sure, too, whether you really need to be in an altered state so much as open and aware. At any rate, thanks for this interview and making us all aware of the June 24 Online Video Course. Keep us posted on how to participate.
I would try it twice.
Thanks
Not sure if Mitch will read this, but...
Not sure if Mitch will read this, but I just wanted to offer a few resources that I think are great and that he might find useful for his final project - the one on communication and finding a better way to orient ourselves to the world through the language we use. I have a feeling that he's already familiar with some (or all) of them, but on the chance that he isn't, here they are:
The first book is Alfred Korzybski's book "Science & Sanity," which introduces and fleshes out a system he pioneered called General Semantics (which holds "the map is not the territory; the menu is not the meal; the word is not the thing"). His original work is somewhat hard to find (not to mention a monster of a read at 900 pages), but an abridged version of it called "Selections from Science and Sanity" is still in print. Korzybski not only thoroughly highlights the failings of modern language, but actually suggests ways in which words/communication can be used to better reflect the world and our relationship with it (with, however, the fundamental understanding that words/symbols can not and will not ever be able to truly and absolutely reflect that which actually "is"). He covers the "language of maps and models" extensively, which is why it was the first thing that came to mind when I read Mitch's description of the project.
The second is a book by Robert Anton Wilson called "Prometheus Rising," which does a good job of distilling Korzybski's method and putting it into practice. In fact, I'd advise reading "Prometheus Rising" before tackling Korzybski himself.
The third book was just released last year and is called "Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere" by Richard M. Doyle. It deals directly with the psychedelic experience (or, using Doyle's neologism, the "ecodelic" experience) and the role of rhetoric in conveying it. He might actually make for an excellent interview subject.
Finally, an author/philosopher who has plenty of material to mine (kind of like Robert Anton Wilson) is Alan Watts. Thankfully, a good deal of his talks have been thrown up on YouTube, and a good deal of them cover the difference between the world "as it is," and the world as we think about it, talk about it, and describe it. I could post a laundry list of clips, but these make for a good start:
Alan Watts - Limits of Language
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExHhC44Hqgs
To Speak the Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIX3r1_ZPRE
Man in Nature
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFnYw5i29Ko
If needed, I'd be happy to recommend some more.
One last thing, I'd like to express my deepest thanks to Mitch for taking up such an important cause, for making such a great documentary in "DMT: The Spirit Molecule," and for all of his continuing tireless efforts. Thanks, Mitch!
The Spirit Molecule - Vision of Utopia
Dimethyltryptamine, DMT short, the spirit molecule...
Peaceful Warriors of Shambhala
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Personally, I found IBOGA to achieve a vastly prolonged visit to the reality provided by DMT; the greater duration of the altered state allowed for many evolutionary transformations not possible in the 30-minute high afforded by DMT.
Our bodies produce DMT
I've thought about trying a
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