3 BIG Mistakes
A DMT injection turns into a "hellish" experience
3 BIG Mistakes
A DMT injection turns into a "hellish" experience
"I had been up for three days and two nights working on a manuscript. That was the first mistake. The room where the "experiment" was to take place was a dirty, dingy, insanely cluttered pest hole. That was the second mistake. I was told that I would see God. That was the third and worst mistake of all."The needle jabbed into my arm and the dimethyl-tryptamine oozed into my bloodstream. At the same time the steam came on with a rhythmic clamor and I remember thinking that it would be nice to have some heat. Within thirty seconds I noticed a change, or rather I noticed that there had never been any change, that I had been in this dreamy unworldly state for millions of years. I told this to Dr.--. who said, "Good, then it is beginning to cross the blood-brain barrier."
"It was too fast. Much too fast. I looked up at what a minute ago had been doors and cabinets, and all I could see were parallel lines falling away into absurdities. Dimensions were outraged. The geometry of things crashed blindly into one another and crumbled into chaos. I thought to myself, "But he said that I would see God, that I would know the meaning of the universe." I closed my eyes. Perhaps God was there, behind my eyeballs.
"Something was there, all right; Something, coming at me from a distant and empty horizon. At first it was a pinpoint, then it was a smudge, and then--a formless growing Shape. A sound accompanied its progress towards me--a rising, rhythmic, metallic whine; a staccato meeyow that was issuing from a diamond larynx. And then, there it loomed before me, a devastating horror, a cosmic diamond cat. It filled the sky, it filled all space. There was nowhere to go. It was all that was. There was no other place for me in this--Its universe. I felt leveled under the cruel glare of its crystalline brilliance. My mind, my body, my vestige of self-esteem perished in the hard glint of its diamond cells.
"It moved in rhythmic spasms like some demonic toy; and always there was its voice--a steely, shrill monotony that put an end to hope. There should not be such a voice! It ravaged the nerves and passed its spasms into my head to echo insanely from one dark corridor of my mind to another. Me-e-e-e-yow~ow-ow-ow me~e~yow-ow-ow-ow me-e-e-e-yow-ow-ow-ow--the incessant, insatiable staccato went on. It would not have been so bad if it had just been diabolical noise. The chilling thing was that I knew what it was saying! It told me that I was a wretched, pulpy, flaccid thing; a squishy-squashy worm. I was a thing of soft entrails and slimy fluids and was abhorrent to the calcified God.
"I opened my eyes and jumped up from my chair screaming: 'I will not have you! I will not have such a God! What is the antidote to this? Give me the antidote!' But as I said this I doubted my own question for it seemed to me that this was the only reality I had ever known, the one I was born with and the one I would die with. There was no future beyond this state of mind, there was no state of mind beyond this one.
"'There is no antidote,' said Dr.--. 'Relax, it's only been three minutes. You've got at least twenty-five more minutes still to go.'
"I looked around the room. The seething symmetry had calmed down some. Instead of evoking terror it merely made one seasick now. 'Euclidian nausea,' I thought, and closed my eyes again. I found myself on a small planet of a distant star. A spaceship built like an amoeba reached with long tentacles out to grab me. The center of the space ship was diaphanous like an embryo's head with a network of blue veins, flowing blood, and shifting cellular wastes. It pulsed and pulsed and whirred and cackled. I did not wish to be a part of this protoplasmic blob although it was far cheerier than the first vision, and so, as its tentacles were about to enclose me, I opened my eyes and escaped its interstellar plans for me. By this time I was learning how to manage--or should I say Escape from--the experience. I thought that I would start to call my own shots, find my own planet.
"I closed my eyes again to discover a world of blue horses. The land heaved gently and the necks and heads of stately blue horses rose and fell as waves on the planet's surface. It was a land of perfect peace, a blue equine paradise.
"But still I hadn't seen the face of God! I would make a final effort at ultimate visions. My eyes closed and I found myself looking through one end of an immensely long cylinder. At first, there was nothing at the other end--a trillion miles away. Then God came and peeked in at me. I burst out laughing.
"The face of God staring at me from the other end of the cylinder was the face of a very wise monkey!"
Concerning this case it may be superfluous to remark that the subject should not be told she is going to "see God" or discover "the meaning of the universe." Yet more than one researcher and therapist we know of has done this sort of thing repeatedly, and probably never with benefit to the subject or patient. Medical doctors no less than other kinds of workers with psychedelic drugs have promised visions of God, revelations of Ultimate Truth, and so on. And for the self-anointed psychedelic priest, it seems to be just a small further step to assuming the role of God Himself! Sidney Cohen and others have warned about this danger--the threat that an unaccustomed power will corrupt the guide with resulting damage to the subjects, and possibly even greater damage to the guide himself. This, as we also have observed, is a real danger; but psychiatrists have no immunity to the disease and they go astray when advancing such a hazard as a basis for restricting all work with psycho-chemicals to themselves. There exists not a shred of evidence to indicate that the limiting of guiding to one or a few professions will do anything at all to eliminate abuses of power and corruption by power.
R.E.L. Masters and Jean Houston, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, pp.163-164)
