 This video is brought to you by Spirit Medicine Walkers. More about it at the end of the video. Continuing down our rabbit hole of psychedelics, today it's time to discuss what many people call the spirit molecule. Known as DMT, it is short for NN dimethyltryptamine. While fewer of us may have heard of this psychedelic than the more popular psilocybin LSD or ayahuasca, DMT is very peculiar. You see, it exists throughout the natural world, including in hundreds if not thousands of plants. It also appears in every mammal that's been studied, including us. So DMT, unlike psilocybin and LSD, exists naturally in the human body. It is endogenous, which means made within the body. This happens when dietary tryptophan is converted into tryptamine using an enzyme called AADC. Then another enzyme called IMNT attaches two methyl groups to the tryptamine and voila, dimethyltryptamine. And the rapid spread of this botanical psychedelic in the western world is introducing the DMT experience to a vast widespread audience. Well, that and Joe Rogan won't stop talking about it. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, DMT ushered in the North American psychedelic renaissance. Joining me again today is Dr. Rick Strossman, whose DMT study at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque began in 1990 and ran for five remarkably busy years. Rick has collaborated with us in several ways recently. He joined us on a podcast that we recently published on his channel, as well as participated in Spirit Medicine Walkers, our transformational experience designed to empower you with everything you need to know about psychedelic journeys. But in the meantime, in this very episode, we're going to blow the door open on this subject even further. Welcome to the bizarre and magical world of DMT. In a non-research setting, DMT is usually smoked. However, during his experiments, Dr. Strossman injected DMT intravenously to ensure that subjects received the whole dose without coughing and to avoid any lung problems. The IV route was just as fast and intense as the smoked one. In both cases, effects begin within a few heartbeats, peak at about two minutes, and start to fade at about 10 to 12 minutes. A DMT experience might go something like this. Generally, the first thing you notice is a sense of inner excitement, tension, anticipation, and acceleration. The visual world begins to break up into a pixelated structure, and with eyes closed, you might see a rapid morphing, buzzing, intensely colored display of geometric patterns. There's a high-pitched sound that rises in intensity until a climax is reached. Your body now disappears, falls away as you enter into a world of light. The geometric patterns now coalesce, becoming more solid, and you can identify shapes and objects that are more brilliantly saturated and bright than you've ever seen before. Here you are absolutely transfixed by this new world, your mind enveloped in a space with no borders, powerful, pulsating with energy, absolutely convincing. More real than real, and what it is beholding are made of the same stuff. Not that you and it are the same, but your mind occupies the same level of reality as does the display playing out all around you. It is a state full of information and significance. Oftentimes, beings appear, insects, plants, angelic, or robotic creatures. They relate to you and you to them. They may comfort, frighten, heal, or teach. They are as aware of you as you are of them. The experience feels outside of time, but still there is a progression, a beginning, a middle, and an end. Vast amounts of experience occur in real-time, tiny-time scales, and almost as quickly as you enter the state, you exit it. And in the case of the Albuquerque volunteers, you're talking normally and sipping tea by 30 to 45 minutes after the injection. So, what exactly is DMT? Like all other psychedelics, DMT is a chemical, a molecule, not much larger in molecular weight than blood sugar or glucose. It is also the simplest of the tryptamine psychedelics. The tryptamines are one of the two major families of classical psychedelics. Thymothoxy, DMT, and bufo toad venom, psilocybin, and LSD are also tryptamines. The other family is the phenethylamines, the most well-known is mescaline from peyote cactus. DMT psychopharmacology, in other words, its effects on brain chemistry, receptors, and related circuits is nearly identical to the other classical psychedelics, attaching to serotonin 2A receptors on nerve cells in brain areas, regulating perception, emotion, thought, and so on. DMT, however, is unique, and that tolerance does not develop with repeated administration. Normally, the same dose of a drug given repeatedly results in a decrease of effect over time. However, giving DMT twice a day in humans in a study from the 1970s resulted in no change in tolerance. While you might think it was the short duration of DMT's effects behind these results, a study in Katz reported no tolerance, even at a dosing schedule of every two hours for 21 consecutive days. Even in our studies, we tried to cause tolerance by giving a full dose every half hour four times, but no tolerance to its psychological effects appeared. This lack of tolerance to DMT is important in considering whether it has a role in human consciousness. For example, when scientists began developing a theory of overproduction of DMT and schizophrenia, a lack of tolerance was necessary for this theory. Otherwise, the psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia would last only until tolerance to DMT developed, but we know otherwise that such symptoms are often constant. The same could be said of any altered state in which endogenous DMT may play a role. It's tempting to dismiss claims of how real the bizarre DMT world feels, but this is one of the most characteristic features, one that occurs more often and intensely than with other classical psychedelics. It wasn't until Dr. Straussman decided to accept this claim at face value, engaging in a thought experiment that would help us to understand how real the DMT world feels. Before that, the models he had brought to his research interpreted these experiences as hallucinatory and unreal. As we explored in our last video, these models were psychopharmacology and psychology, specifically Freudian and Buddhist. In other words, the brain, the unconscious, and meditative enlightenment. In other words, the brain, the unconscious, and meditative enlightenment. The psychopharmacology model says that the DMT effect is just your brain on drugs. I wonder if it looked like an egg frying in a pan. Freudian psychology, that it's just like a dream, symbolizing usually unconscious conflicts and wishes, and Zen Buddhism, which teaches that the DMT world is the miscellaneous and non-essential being shed by the mind on your way towards the true goal, a formless unified state of emptiness. All three imply that the DMT world is something else, which is the complete opposite of the experience itself, one that feels more real than anything you've ever seen before. If the contents of the DMT state are real, where might they be? Inside of us or outside of us? Is the experience revealed or produced? Wherever it is, its contents were previously invisible and now are visible. In favor of the idea that the DMT world is outside of us, one volunteer put it this way. I couldn't have imagined this. Another said, it's not a drug, it's a technology. Like a microscope revealing a freestanding objective, but utterly alien world existing all around us. Modern physics points to possible locations for these normally invisible but real layers of the universe. Once in a lifetime, one scenario is that DMT changes the receiving ability of the mind-brain complex, allowing us to perceive dark matter. Most of the universe's matter is dark, neither reflecting nor generating light. Perhaps the world of dark matter is also inhabited, and what we see in the DMT space exists there. While such a theory crosses the line separating science and science fiction, it may direct future research projects dealing with this question. For example, in the future, we may have sensors that can image the contents of dark matter. Then we could compare reports from DMT volunteers with those images. Regardless of the location of the DMT world, inner, outer, or most likely some combination, it is not only the things that we see and hear there, but the information that we bring back from visiting it. What did we learn? What's different now? Like the effects of all psychedelics, who we are and what our goals are, what we bring to our sessions, determine the value of the experience, no matter how unusual it may be. While we now understand a lot about how the brain makes DMT, we still don't know what regulates its production, what triggers an increase in its formation, and what inhibits it. Concentrations of DMT in the blood and urine are too low to measure. However, now that we can monitor the activity of the genes controlling DMT production, future research can measure that activity. For example, is the DMT system in people with schizophrenia more active than healthy controls? For many years, high concentrations of INMT in the lungs led us to believe that this was the primary source of DMT in the body. Some people even said tongue-in-cheek if schizophrenia was a lung disease. But in the end, they couldn't find the AADC ends on there. Likewise, since NDE's dreams or deep states of meditation have their own DMT-like features, then such features in similar sober states, visions, voices, loss of body awareness, meeting beings, and the supernormal sense of reality might be driven in part by changes in endogenous DMT. Interestingly, the brain makes more DMT at the moment of death. In fact, DMT is neuroprotective in conditions of low oxygen, which gives us a working model for NDE's. In addition, the greatest elevation of DMT in dying animals occurs in the visual cortex. But just as much as DMT may be involved in non-drug altered states, it also may play a part in normal waking states too. Research from the University of Michigan reported that concentrations of brain DMT in normal conditions are as high as those for well-known neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. This suggests that DMT may be a neurotransmitter present in the brain, although a couple of other questions remain unanswered. One of the ways we learn about the functions of a neurotransmitter is by looking at the effects of substances that affect it. For dopamine, we know from cocaine and methamphetamines that it mediates pleasure and reward. In the case of serotonin, its importance in mood regulation is clear from the effects of SSRI antidepressants. In addition, psychedelics effects on perception and sense of self point to a role for serotonin in these functions too. You see, one of DMT's most characteristic effects is altering our sense of reality. It provides a feeling of beholding something more regal than real, unshakably true, and makes everyday reality seem like a pale, flat imitation. The DMT world completely replaces this one. In the 1990s, Dr. Straussman theorized DMT was produced in the pineal gland, and 20 years later, the University of Michigan found the pineal to be one such organ that had the necessary tissues to do so. A possible DMT neurotransmitter system may regulate our sense of what is real, the reality thermostats, so to speak, requiring the maintenance of a normal range of brain levels to maintain normal everyday reality. When the activity of this system is high, whatever is in our mind, experiences, feelings, and thoughts makes on a greater sense of reality. It is true for us, valuable, and adds solidity to who we are, our beliefs, and our behavior. Or, when the activity of this hypothetical system is low, we correspondingly don't think much about whatever it is in our mind at that time, and it has little lasting impact on us. Now this leads us down a very murky rabbit hole with many twists and turns. What does it mean that the brain produces a substance that may regulate our sense of reality? Does that mean our sense of reality is dependent on levels of that substance? Or even constructed by it? I've even theorized that DMT may be the endometrics, regulating consensus reality by some internal biological process. But what controls that biological process? While DMT continues to occupy the periphery of the academic research community, the larger psychedelic world is well aware of and well versed in its properties. There are at least two reasons why scientific inquiry lags behind public interest. First, the DMT experience is very strange, unlike anything one has previously experienced even with other psychedelics. How can you describe it and fit it into mainstream reality? Can it even be contained within this reality? Second, endogenous DMT, including a possible DMT neurotransmitter system, raises incredibly complex issues about the self and the outside world. In other words, what is real and what is not. As you know, we've often sought to explore the split worlds of science and spirit, and DMT appears to straddle both, a physical molecule that reveals to us a seemingly spiritual world functioning as a spirit molecule. Because of this, DMT requires much more study and a global enlarging discussion about psychedelics. We are just at the beginning of understanding this fascinating and unique substance and thank heavens because it's just so long overdue. Buckle your seatbelts, this is still only the tip of the iceberg. The subject of psychedelics is of huge interest in the emerging spiritual communities of the world, but the biggest hindrance to the prospering of this subject is actually that using them is not something that people are well educated on. From how to utilize psychedelics for healing, avoiding bad trips, what they are, how to take them, and even how to integrate the experience into your regular life afterwards, these are subjects that are often overlooked by many who utilize these substances recreationally, which can actually cause more harm than good. It's for this reason that we wanted to create a tool for anyone to understand psychedelics better, and so we set out to learn from trained shamans, scientists, mystics, and other professional psychonauts on every aspect of the psychedelic experience, and we put it all together into our latest course, Spirit Medicine Walkers. This course is designed to teach you everything that you need to know about psychedelic plant medicine ceremonies, from what they are to how to use them for healing, as well as their dark side. You will learn how to prepare for and enter ceremony, navigate the ceremony, and then integrate the experience after the fact, and even how to facilitate mystical states in your life without these kinds of substances, too. Along with this, the course offers you exclusive interviews with Rhythmia shamans and scientists, and I'll even show you how I created one of the most technologically advanced mushroom grow kits that I've ever seen. This course is designed entirely for educational purposes, as their legal status is not clean across the board, so viewer discretion is advised. Psychedelics can be profoundly helpful or seriously harmful, and so this course is not for the faint of heart. If you're interested to learn more, use the link in the description and access the course today.