Reality Unfiltered: DMT on the Brain | Entheogen Entities | Neuroscience of Dr. Andrew Gallimore

➡ The text discusses the effects of DMT, a psychedelic substance, on our perception of reality. It suggests that our brains act as filters, limiting our experience of reality to prevent overload. When DMT is used, this filter is disrupted, potentially allowing us to experience a broader reality. The text also explores the idea that the brain cannot create experiences it has no knowledge of, suggesting that the vivid and complex experiences induced by DMT may be more than mere hallucinations.
➡ Graham Hancock, a known DMT user, believes that certain entities can manipulate our emotions and consciousness. He suggests these entities might be a form of intelligent life that constructs our reality. Hancock questions how these entities could know the history of many civilizations unless they exist outside our reality. This idea is compared to a marine biologist who must step outside his environment to study it effectively.

They call it blasting off. Instead of leaking bits and pieces of other channels onto your screen, like the psychedelic dial, it abruptly changes the channel, like a remote control. More real than real, they say. There are higher pitched realities that, when experienced, are unmuddled by our nervous system, getting in the way by processing it. Living behind a body is to experience a sliver of a reality that has been filtered and whittled down to only what we need and on a need-to-know basis. When extra snakes in, madness creeps up. And the nervous system filter engages, not as a biological side effect, but like cars are built specifically optimized for the road.

The filter feature comes free, built in to our vehicles, as a factory default, courtesy of nature’s production line. If that filter is removed, the entirety of reality would come pouring in unobstructed, every channel on the screen at once. DMT prefers to select just one. When we change the channel of our personal antenna, that filter would not be able to come with us, because the nervous system is a feature forged by this particular channel alone. Call it Channel 4, the cube. So, with DMT, we are changing the channel and then viewing it directly without the nervous system processing it down and exporting a body safe experience of time-space.

More real than real, indeed. That speculation backs up into an interesting fact. Neurologically, brain activity on DMT is not to be confused with the dream state. Despite the popular belief, the newest data shows a distinct differentiation. So, before we dive into who these entities are and where they come from, we need to ask ourselves, how do they get in the first place? What’s actually happening in the brain? When it comes to observations about our living world, Aldous Huxley is the absolute OG. He sees things clearly, but also has a superpower that few riders can imagine having.

Pattern recognition. Observing something to outline its potential, tracing not its past, but its future. On May 4, 1953, Huxley took 400 milligrams of mescaline to observe and report what happens within. The resulting book, Doors of Perception, takes the reader through his trip report and comes to a sharp conclusion as to why hallucinogens work. He surmised that the brain works as a reducing valve that builds reality out of the information filtered by the nervous system. It builds our world, but not enough to overwhelm the fragile human psyche. His hypothesis was simple. Hallucinogens disrupt the reducing valve. A frightening indication that the worlds and entities we experience on DMT are right here, right now.

Just like every website, TV channel, and nearby radio station is right here. A year later, he doubled down in a lesser known book called Heaven and Hell, where he addresses the entities. Writing, you do not invent these creatures any more than you invent marsupials. They live their own lives in complete independence. A man cannot control them. He is looking at an entirely new creation. These bold words can surely be disproven by modern science, right? I mean, if today’s neuroscience was to put these claims to the test, it wouldn’t result in an overwhelming confirmation of Huxley’s conclusions with findings that are so startling that they would have to be ignored by the mainstream as absolutely anomalous to a degree that would assert panic onto a population dieveally assuming that the world is a true reflection of its face value, right? Yeah, the newest science will certainly put this claim to bed.

Enter Dr. Andrew Gollimore, here to carry on the torch of Dr. Strassman’s research. His response to theories that our brain creates the DMT world is, as if the brain is using a language it never learned to speak, building models it never learned to construct, and doing so flawlessly. He adds that it is more likely for a five-year-old British child to confidently speak fluent Siberian Yupik inspired by nothing but mouthfuls of frosted mini-weets. And what is probably the most specific example I’ve ever entertained? It’s fun. The specificity of that example is the absurdity required to get this point across.

The brain is complex enough to experience the abstract and absurd, but utterly unable to generate what it knows nothing about, any more than you can explain color to the born blind. Another reason that DMT is not a psychedelic. The word psychedelic means mind manifest. In short, our entire experience of our entire world is literally and only made of predictions sorted out by the brain. Like a reducing valve. He breaks it all down in his excellent new book, Death by Astonishment. For the full picture, you’ll have to get this unit yourself. Let’s take a peek at my favorite nuggets.

Okay, I’m gonna fucking mow through this. Send me good vibes. You got it. Ah, this part gets dense. World building is largely the responsibility of the thin outer layer of the brain known as the cerebral cortex, which is a folded sheet built from a bewilderingly complex network of billions of information generating cells known as neurons, connected mainly via specialized chemical junctions called synapses. Each neuron encodes information by generating patterns of electrical signals called action potentials. When sensory information enters the brain, these cells begin firing sequences past to an area at the back of the cortex known as the primary cortex.

This pattern of activity is as close as your cortex will get to the external world. But in and of itself has no meaning. It’s your brain’s job to impose meaning on this pattern by using it to build models that guide your behavior. If you’ve ever seen a traditional hand-drawn animation artist at work, you’ll notice they don’t redraw an entire scene for each frame. That would be a colossal waste of time and energy. Rather, they only redraw what changes between frames. The cortex can use this same principle. It can simply update the model if something changes.

Since neurons use energy, information processing is expensive. It doesn’t make sense for the brain to absorb and process any more sensory information than it requires to maintain its world model. Although you’re entirely unaware of it, this is precisely how your brain is modeling your world at this very moment. Your cortex has taken this noisy pattern of information and used its store of object models and concepts to impose meaning on it to construct a model of the environment that you can respond to and interact with. But how does your brain know when it’s settled on accurate objects and concepts in modeling your world? In short, it doesn’t.

Your brain only ever has access to the noisy patterns of sensory information. It can’t somehow check if there’s actually anything out there. The model that wins is simply the one that best predicts the ongoing evolution of information arriving. The brain has no yardstick by which to measure the truth of its world. Nor does it care. Your brain is only interested in building models to give you the greatest chance to survive and reproduce. To appreciate how skilled your brain has become in building your world, you need to only fall asleep. The dream world is remarkably similar to the waking world.

What makes the dream less real is not what it’s made from, but its relationship to the environment. This is why dreams tend to be more fluid and unstable, shifting from scene to scene. The brain has the freedom to explore its stored models without being held accountable to sensory testing. So that begs the question, is the DMT experience related to the dream state? This is the explanation that most scientists will cling to as if their life depended on it. For most, the alternative is simply unthinkable. Unfortunately, things turn out to be nowhere near as easy to dismiss as this.

The fact that your brain can construct incredibly detailed stable and functional models of the environment is not in question, since all experienced worlds must be represented by patterns of information generated by the cortex. But to fabricate them entirely independent of some external source of sensory information, then we need to sincerely consider the possibility that they represent something far stranger. The overall effect induced by the molecule DMT would be an unholy amalgam of spontaneously emerging cortical patterns stored object models and imagery drawn from memory. To explain them away as spontaneous emergent neural activity seemed utterly preposterous.

Clearly, there was much more going on here. It is a world that the brain should not know how to build. It is a world that should not exist. And yet, there it is. DMT means to confront not merely a different world, but one that is frankly impossible. We ain’t on EEG machines anymore. We’re doing full blown MRI stuff at this point. Basically, under proper equipment, we see that DMT experiences are processed as either actually happening or having once happened before. The difference is clear. When the brain dreams, it fires neurons that collect and categorize information to help the dreaming individual make further sense of the world.

The parts that decode objective experience remain dark or quiet because unbeknownst to us, the brain does know the difference. In the case of DMT, we see the opposite. Even with eyes closed in a full dark MRI machine, we are seeing something that is either there or a memory of what once was. And I am suddenly reminded of what the entities so often say. Welcome back. Our buddy, Graham Hancock, no stranger to DMT, has some insights eerily parallel to this notion. I can’t help being reminded of his story about DMT entities having particular recordings prepared for his arrival.

In his essay, mouthfully entitled Investigation of Occult Realities Using the Spirit Molecule, he writes that they create wonderfully visual immersive experiences to impose themselves invasively exhibiting capacity to methodically elicit a sequence of fast paced emotions. Suggesting my psyche was being expertly puppeteered by something that understands the terrain and mechanics of human consciousness. Well, he goes on to speculate entities to be a living code constructing the matrix underlining reality, writing, This is what it seems, a galactic intelligence. It knows the history of hundreds of thousands of civilizations. To me, this begs a question. How can it know such histories unless it was outside the reality that platforms those histories? That level of intel requires a sidereal point of view rather than just a sharp one.

Think of a marine biologist studying fish. He can’t deduce informed conclusions while down in the water. He has to take on the avatar of a fish with a wetsuit, an air tank to collect samples, etc. But then he retreats back to his air conditioned office to reel inconclusive results. [tr:trw].