Interview here with parapsychologist and all round dude Dr David Luke. This was a telephone interview and it seems they pretty much just transcribed verbatim (somewhat pseudo-phonetically at times), despite the odd errors in translation the content is more or less intact.

http://littleatoms.com/s...-belief-life-after-death

DMT doesn't really replicate the NDE very well, as Strassman has pointed out.

Of course my gut reaction would be to say "5-MeO-DMT," but recently I've found out NMDAR antagonists like ketamine can also replicate many aspects of the NDE, even the "white light" experiences.

It's a topic that is beyond my scope of knowledge and has too many variables for me to make any sense of it. I'll have to experience death to know what it's about.

I have had a NDE.... Nothing about it in any way was similar to DMT experience or any other psychedelic experience I have ever had.... DMT is probably the least similar experience to NDE out of psychedelics I have tried.

When I read Rick Strassmans work I also noticed that his research didnt support his hypothesis - none of his clients had NDE type experiences or traditional mystical experiences except 2 people I think.... The other 400-500 doses produced uniquely DMT type experiences. Sometimes I think people just read the intro to that book and never make it to the end, because talking to most people they seem to think the hypothesis and the findings were the same thing...

Yeah it is interesting the difference between these experiences. But then some people's NDE's do seem to share some parallels with DMT experiences...like neurosurgeon Eben Alexander's NDE, in which he described riding on a giant butterfly whose wings were “intricately-patterned, alive with indescribable and vivid colors,” like a “Persian carpet".

Some of his experience:

"I was a speck on a beautiful butterfly wing; millions of other butterflies around us. We were flying through blooming flowers, blossoms on trees, and they were all coming out as we flew through them... [there were] waterfalls, pools of water, indescribable colors, and above there were these arcs of silver and gold light and beautiful hymns coming down from them. Indescribably gorgeous hymns. I later came to call them “angels,” those arcs of light in the sky. I think that word is probably fairly accurate...

Then we went out of this universe. I remember just seeing everything receding and initially I felt as if my awareness was in an infinite black void. It was very comforting but I could feel the extent of the infinity and that it was, as you would expect, impossible to put into words. I was there with that Divine presence that was not anything that I could visibly see and describe, and with a brilliant orb of light...

They said there were many things that they would show me, and they continued to do that. In fact, the whole higher-dimensional multiverse was this incredibly complex corrugated ball and all these lessons coming into me about it. Part of the lessons involved becoming all of what I was being shown. It was indescribable.

But then I would find myself—and time out there I can say is totally different from what we call time. There was access from out there to any part of our space/time and that made it difficult to understand a lot of these memories because we always try to sequence things and put them in linear form and description. That just really doesn’t work."

http://www.samharris.org...item/this-must-be-heaven

It is weird, but my one breakthrough DMT experience, at the time, it really felt a LOT like death, or how I would consider death anyway (a hard one to know I guess until it happens for real). I remember this very tangible feeling of an electric, glass shattering in my brain, and the logical part of my operating at the time was totally convinced that I had done myself in, that there was no possible way to come away from something that brain shattering...and a shattering that I both heard and felt at a very deep level when it occurred.

Whatever the case, NDE's seem to have MUCH more in common with OBE reports than DMT trips...the feeling of leaving one's body, the experience of going down a tunnel, of encountering other beings and deceased relatives, of merging with an all pervasive white light, with associated feelings of deep serenity...all these are reported with both types of experience.

I would be careful to not go cherry picking data to support ideas.

The non-similarities are in this case more important than the similarities. It is like comparing the results of a substance with two different reagents, if you want to test a blotter and the result of one reagent is positive for LSD and the other is not then I would not assume that I have LSD.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

I'm not sure I was cherry picking here, just saying in the case of some people, or at least their reports of these experiences, there does appear to be some degree of overlap between the effects of DMT and NDE's...and for other people, much less so. Personally, I don't think the "DMT dump" hypothesis comes close to explaining NDE's.

Agreed. If DMT is involved in some cases, in some way, it seems more likely to me that it would be in the presence of several other endogenous psycho-active tryptamines and beta-carbolines anyways, which complicates things even further.



Harmala states (with or without DMT) are also a lot more similar to typical OBE experiences than DMT, and beta carbolines are produced in higher amounts during times when OBEs tend to occur most often (at night when pinoline etc. is being synthesized, or during meditation. You've seen the studies banco )

Anyways, it's really interesting that some members here had NDEs that they say are very similar to DMT, while others experiences were completely different. And even if these things are involved in some cases, there is obviously other things going on in there to. The mystery continues.

Perhaps, rather than DMT or harmalas being involved, the NDE is a chain of commands/signals that cascade across all the processing layers of the DMN. In this scenario, it is possible that the ultimate outcome is sometimes identical the the end state of the DMN presented with DMT as a stimulus, and other times the final state of the system is completely different, because somewhere upstream an operation was executed in a different order or perhaps there was a point when the signals in certain areas had the option to diverge/choose different paths.

Another way to think of it is if the NDE is a webpage, which could be reached in various different ways. However, searching NDE on google sometimes brings up white-lite-webpages while other times it retrieves DMT trips. Metaphorically of course

From personal experience, I would say this might be due to the great variety of experiences DMT can engender: Some might be little more than “pretty colors”, while others may be deeply transformative spiritual experiences. Some are clearly the product of a drug-addled brain, while others seem to have no easy explanation regarding their origins.

It’s possible to have hundreds of “typical” DMT experiences, and then – for no obvious reason related to dose, set, or setting – have one that is different from all the others in some very extraordinary ways.

And as you say, add beta-carbolines to the mix, and the possibilities are greatly expanded.

There truly seems to be no end to the variety or depth of the DMT experience.

Regarding NDEs and DMT, I remember a Nexus member saying something to the effect “An NDE is a visit to the afterlife through the front door, and DMT can be a visit to the afterlife through the back door.” No way to test the veracity of this statement, but I’ve always liked it.

5-MeO-DMT is a much more fitting substance in my experience for modeling what the near death experience sounds like from descriptions.

That sounds very plausible to me, as someone who knows very little about the human brain. But I'm not sure that rules out the possible role of endogenous psychedelics/beta-carbolines, particularly if DMT (and consequently maybe other endogenous compounds) turns out to play some kind of somatophysiological role as hypothesized by Frecska. The role it could play might be to facilitate a certain physiological reaction/signal...like, you aren't "on DMT" during a NDE but perhaps DMT acts as some kind of catalyst for the larger process of death. Not to suggest that DMT or beta-carbolines are definitely involved one way or the other, I just don't think that this theory would prove or disprove it.

Either way, your analogy makes a lot of sense to me.

There's actually another big commonality toward the end of that Ebin Alexander book, I believe, where he mentions something along the lines of there being different cultural parts to heaven. I think he includes Hindu, and remarks the Egyptian side as the most beautiful. I remember thinking what he was saying about that was really resonating with me.

This is interesting, as it also resonates a lot with the accounts of modern OBE explorers like Robert Monroe, William Buhlman, Frank Kepple and others, who state that in the astral there are these different belief system territories, that are sculpted and given reality by the belief/thoughts of those that have died, the logic apparently being if you were Hindu and had Hindu beliefs you would go to a Hindu like realm. The other thing about this is that such territories are not "real" in a sense but the result of a shared belief/belief projection making it somewhat consensus like. At least that's what a few have reported back from their OBE's.

I don't know that I would associate DMT (or any other drug, for that matter) with NDEs. While there may be some overlap (in terms of neurochemical response), I doubt if any drug truly mimics a real NDE or death itself.

What I do believe is that DMT (and other psychedelic tryptamines) bring us closer to the idea of death and allow us to contemplate and accept it on a much deeper level than would normally be possible.