true hallucinations.htm - Federal Jack

whose medium is the convenient smoke that the caterpillar possesses in abundantsupply.*Which is not to say that DMT is to be thought of as a stimulus for mere inner cartoons. Itis not. The feeling that radiates from the DMT encounter is hair-raisingly bizarre. It is asmuch as one can stand without the categories of consciousness becoming permanentlyrewritten. I am occasionally asked if DMT is dangerous. The proper answer is that it isonly dangerous if you feel threatened by the possibility of death by astonishment. Sogreat is the wave of amazement that accompanies the dissolving of the boundary betweenour world and this other unsuspected continuum that it approaches being a kind of ecstasyin and of itself.The sense of being literally in some other dimension, which these bizarre DMTexperiences had provoked, had been the focus of our decision to concentrate ontryptamine hallucinogens. After reading all that there was on psychoactive tryptamines,we came eventually to the work of the pioneering ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes.Schultes's tenured position as a professor of botany at Harvard had allowed him todedicate his life to collecting and cataloging the world's psychoactive plants. His paperon "Virola as an Orally Administered Hallucinogen" was a turning point in our quest. Wewere fascinated by his description of the use of the resin of Virola theiodora trees as anorally active DMT drug, as well as by the fact that the use of this hallucinogen seemed tobe limited to a very small geographical area. Schultes was an inspiring voice when hewrote of the hallucinogen oo-koo-he:Further field work in the original home region of these Indians will be necessary for a fullunderstanding of this interesting hallucinogen.... Interest in this newly discovered[* That a Disney film should be a showcase for this notion is not as surprising as it mightfirst appear. One has only to recall the carefully choreographed dances of Orientalmushrooms in Fantasia to wonder whether some portions of the Disney production groupmight have been shamanically inspired. After all, Fantasia was a very serious andambitious effort to make synesthesia a motif for popular entertainment. Rumors persistthat many of the European animators whom Disney hired for his extravagant projectswere aware of the psychedelic experience. Among the Czech animators who joined theDisney group during this period were some who probably knew of the vision-producingpower of peyote and its chemical constituent, mescaline.]hallucinogen does not lie wholly within the bounds of anthropology and ethnobotany. Itbears very directly on certain pharmacological matters and, when considered with theother plants with psychotomimetic properties due to trypta-mines, this new oral drugposes problems which must now be faced and, if possible, toxicologically explained.*Based on Schultes's paper, we decided to abandon our studies and careers and to pay ourown way to the Amazon and the vicinity of La Chorrera in search of oo-koo-he. We