Published
Some cultures put psychedelics at the centre of ceremony. Others put them in the criminal code. That alone should tell you these substances are doing something more interesting than producing a recreational high.
The Amazonian shamans concocted a brew called ayahuasca, combining DMT-containing plants with a vine whose alkaloids inhibit monoamine oxidase, allowing DMT to become active when swallowed.1 How did people arrive at that combination without the language of modern pharmacology? I find the question extraordinary. We do not have to invent an answer to recognise the depth of knowledge carried in those traditions. A laboratory name for a mechanism is not the beginning of human knowledge about it.
Peyote traditions make the same point in a different setting. In the Native American Church, the cactus belongs to prayer, song and an all-night ceremony. A rattle and water drum accompany the songs; the surrounding practice is part of what the medicine means.2 Reducing that to “people taking mescaline” tells you the chemical and loses most of the event.
At Eleusis, the ancient Greek Mysteries centred on an initiation and a drink called kykeon. The possibility that the drink contained psychoactive ergot alkaloids is one of the most provocative hypotheses in the history of religion. It remains a hypothesis. The ceremony’s secrecy leaves a gap between the surviving accounts and what was actually in the cup.3
The question became more interesting in 2026. A study in Scientific Reports tested whether processing compatible with ancient technology could change ergot’s alkaloid composition in a way that supports the proposed explanation.4 That is evidence about chemical feasibility. It is not a recovered recipe from Eleusis. The difference leaves room for serious investigation without pretending the mystery has been solved.
The Modern Pioneers
Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin synthesised and explored hundreds of psychoactive and related compounds. He and his wife Ann - a writer and Jungian lay therapist in her own right - would try new compounds from Sasha’s lab, and if a compound proved worthy, they’d share it with a close group of friends who would test and rate it for duration, psychedelic qualities, and other effects. The couple published their findings in two groundbreaking volumes: PiHKAL5 and TiHKAL6: Phenethylamines and Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved. Their books put chemistry beside accounts of experience, rather than pretending one made the other unnecessary. As Sasha put it:
“Everyone has the license to explore the nature of his own soul.” Alexander Shulgin
Albert Hofmann first synthesised LSD in 1938 while researching lysergic acid compounds for the Swiss drug company Sandoz. He shelved LSD-25 after inconclusive initial tests, but five years later his thoughts returned to it. During a second round of synthesis he believed he had accidentally absorbed some, and he had to leave work early due to “a feeling of remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness.” At home he “perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colours.” Three days later, on 19 April 1943, he deliberately took LSD and made the famous bicycle ride home. Sandoz investigated the compound and introduced it as Delysid for psychiatric research and treatment. The bicycle ride became famous; the years of work before and after it matter too.
Steve Jobs called LSD “one of the most important things in my life”. His account is about what he valued afterwards, as much as what he saw during the experience:
“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important - creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.” Steve Jobs, quoted in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs (2011)
Alex Grey attributes his extraordinary artworks depicting the energetics of the human form to the use of LSD. These were people refusing the boundaries of ordinary perception, using these tools to see deeper rather than to escape.
Direct Perception
To think that which is unthinkable, you first have to change the scope and frame of reference within which consciousness operates. Nothing changes it more drastically than dimethyltryptamine.
DMT exists naturally within us, and in a range of plants and other animals.1
The reported experience of taking it can be astonishing. People describe leaving the body, traversing space, or passing through what feel like alternate dimensions at tremendous speed. Some report meeting entities with which they can converse. The encounters can carry an overwhelming sense of wisdom: clarity about a choice, the direction of a life, the meaning of something the person thought they already understood.
These experiences can also be terrifying. Panic, confusion and psychological distress are part of the picture, not evidence that someone simply failed to surrender properly.7 Respecting the experience means leaving room for the person who comes back frightened as well as the person who comes back transformed.
Whether an entity exists independently of the person experiencing it is a different question from whether the encounter changed that person’s life. The experience can be interpreted as more real than ordinary consciousness. That conviction is itself worth understanding; it does not settle the question of what was encountered.
In the 1990s, Rick Strassman brought controlled human DMT research back into the laboratory at the University of New Mexico.8 His accounts helped make entity encounters a serious subject of discussion. The resemblance between reports raises questions about shared features of human perception as well as the participants’ interpretations of what they encountered.
A 2020 survey collected accounts from 2,561 people describing their most memorable DMT entity encounter. Many attributed lasting meaning and changes in worldview to it; 41% also reported fear during the encounter.9 The sample was selected for people who had an encounter to describe. It tells us about those experiences, not how often every person taking DMT will have one.
What interests me is how quickly the feeling of knowing can change. Someone can return with a conviction stronger than an opinion they spent twenty years defending. You can dismiss that as chemistry, but chemistry that reorganises a person’s sense of reality is hardly a trivial subject.
The overlap with near-death accounts deserves the same care. A small placebo-controlled study of 13 participants found that DMT increased scores on a questionnaire used to characterise near-death experiences.10 That gives researchers a way to study overlapping features. It does not prove that DMT causes the experience of dying, or that either experience reveals the same external realm.
Aldous Huxley arrived at a similar place through mescaline. In 1954 he wrote “The Doors of Perception”11 - a vivid visual commentary on life, art and culture as perceived through the eyes of mescaline. It was one of the key literary works responsible for the 60s social revolution. Read it alongside Leary, the Merry Pranksters, Sergeant Pepper, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and you can feel the same argument running through the culture: ordinary consciousness was no longer allowed to pass itself off as the only available view.
The Suppression
Power has repeatedly tried to decide who may enter these states, under what authority, and for whose purposes.
The struggle around peyote is a struggle over that authority. Native American Church communities organised to protect a sacrament that governments treated as a prohibited drug. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act amendments of 1994 explicitly protected traditional ceremonial use by members of federally recognised tribes.12 A religious practice had to fight for an exception to a category imposed from outside it.
When LSD escaped the lab in the 1960s, one segment of the American population saw peace and spiritual awakening. The CIA had already been looking for very different uses. The 1977 Senate hearing on MKULTRA described 149 subprojects and documented testing on people who did not know they were being experimented on.13 Where a person might seek insight, an intelligence agency sought leverage over another mind.
Consent changes the entire meaning of the act. A person choosing to investigate consciousness and an agency secretly dosing a subject are not doing the same thing because the vial has the same label. Any history that treats them as equivalent has already lost the human being.
To classify these substances as “bad” because a legal doctrine says so is ignorance of the highest degree. Different substances have different effects and risks. Low addiction potential is not the same thing as an absence of psychological or physical harm. Like anything powerful, they can be abused and overused. They need to be respected for what they are - not a party drug, but a powerful tool for the purpose of knowledge and insight. The modern drug regime flattened every distinction that mattered, then called the flattening science; it was never serious thinking, just administrative fear.
The door is opening again, in specific ways. Oregon’s 2020 Measure 109 created a regulated psilocybin-services programme, with licensed services beginning in 2023; it was not blanket permission to use psilocybin anywhere. In Australia, since July 2023, psychiatrists authorised under the TGA’s scheme can access MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. These remain controlled pathways involving unapproved products, not general approval for every therapeutic claim.1415
The clinical research is promising enough to read properly. In the 2021 New England Journal of Medicine trial, 59 people with depression received psilocybin or escitalopram under study conditions, with psychological support in both groups. The trial found no statistically significant difference on its primary depression measure at six weeks. Secondary results generally favoured psilocybin, but were not adjusted for multiple comparisons.16 The trial gives us an encouraging comparison, with real uncertainty about the size and durability of any difference.
I don’t need the result exaggerated to find it remarkable. A treatment built around a small number of supervised experiences deserves investigation. So does the support around those experiences. Calling the whole intervention “the molecule” risks missing the very thing the older traditions understood: the setting and the people matter.
What Runs Through All of This
These substances sit in histories of healing, ceremony, art and coercion. Intention matters enormously. It is not the only thing that matters: the compound, the person, their condition and the surroundings all change what can happen. A benevolent intention is no guarantee of a benevolent result.
What connects the shamans’ ayahuasca ceremonies, Hofmann’s bike ride and Huxley’s afternoon in his garden, for me, is a confrontation with the filters. The familiar arrangement of the world stops being compulsory. What felt immovable can fall away, leaving an experience of direct perception that is raw, immediate, and sometimes terrifying in its clarity.
That is how I understand the appeal. It does not follow that every perception in that state is true. If I want to question the filters that shape ordinary consciousness, I have to be willing to question the certainty of the altered state as well.
This is the same capacity the gong fu masters spend decades building through the body, and the one the machines have no access to. State, not shape: felt sense where the machine has only a statistical guess. The chemicals can feel like a collapse of the path the masters spend years walking, and the machines can only describe a territory they’ve never entered. In a culture training itself to accept the statistically probable answer, every working route to direct perception matters, whether or not you accept the strongest metaphysics around it.
There is another question after the extraordinary afternoon: what survives into an ordinary one? Does the insight change how you treat someone? Can you remain with a difficult feeling without immediately escaping it? A glimpse and a practice are different commitments. That is where the connection to martial arts becomes interesting to me: the experience may arrive all at once, but learning to live from it still takes work.
The shamans, the pioneers, the artists who used these tools weren’t after the most likely answer. They were after the true one, however far from consensus it turned out to be.
The hardest truths are often hidden by the filters that consensus calls normal.
References
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Barker, S. A. (2018). DMT: past, present, and future research into its role and function. ↩ ↩2
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National Museum of the American Indian, Peyote Rattle made by Nishkû´ntu. ↩
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Charles M. Stang, Psychedelics, Spirituality, and “The West”, Harvard Divinity School. ↩
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Investigating the psychedelic hypothesis of kykeon, the sacred elixir of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Scientific Reports (2026). Chemical feasibility does not establish historical use. ↩
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Shulgin, A. & Shulgin, A. (1991). PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story. Transform Press. ↩
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Shulgin, A. & Shulgin, A. (1997). TiHKAL: The Continuation. Transform Press. ↩
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National Institute on Drug Abuse, Hallucinogens and Dissociative Drugs research report. ↩
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Strassman, R. (2001). DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Park Street Press. Based on FDA-approved research conducted 1990-1995 at the University of New Mexico. ↩
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Davis, A. K. et al. (2020). Survey of entity encounter experiences occasioned by inhaled DMT. Journal of Psychopharmacology. ↩
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Timmermann, C. et al. (2018). DMT Models the Near-Death Experience. ↩
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Huxley, A. (1954). The Doors of Perception. Chatto & Windus. ↩
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42 USC §1996a, traditional Indian religious use of peyote. ↩
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Therapeutic Goods Administration, MDMA and psilocybine hub. ↩
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Carhart-Harris, R. et al. (2021). Trial of Psilocybin versus Escitalopram for Depression. New England Journal of Medicine, 384(15), 1402-1411. ↩