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DMT: THE SPIRIT MOLECULE + 315 and experience meshed well with research subjects' descriptions of per- sonal and transpersonal sessions, such as "feeling and thinking," near-death and rebirth, and mystical states. I understood these experi- ences, volunteers felt | was appropriately tracking and responding to them, and there was little conflict. However, whenever I tried to react to being-contact sessions with anything I knew or believed previously, it just didn't work. I was stuck. So, I decided to engage in the thought-experiment to which I refer at the end of chapter 13, Contact Through the Veil: 1. That is, I tried responding to volunteers' reports of contact with beings as ifthey were true. At first, this involved simply listening, and asking for clarifica- tion. Later on, as more tales accumulated, I could refer to other people's accounts in an empathic manner that made it easier for volunteers to feel I understood and accepted what they had to say. That way they could share with me their most unusual and almost embarrassingly unexpected encounters. Therefore, let's consider the proposal that when our volunteers jour- neyed to the further bounds of DMT's reach, when they felt as if they were somewhere else, they were indeed perceiving different levels of reality. The alternative levels are as real as this one. It's just that we cannot per- ceive them most of the time. In making this suggestion, I'm not discarding the brain-chemistry and psychological models. Rather, I wish to add to the options we entertain in attempting to develop explanations that are helpful to volunteers, intel- lectually satisfying to researchers, and perhaps even testable using methods not yet invented but theoretically possible. Returning to the TV analogy, these cases suggest that, rather than merely adjusting the brightness, contrast, and color of the previous pro- gram, we have changed the channel. No longer is the show we are watching everyday reality, Channel Normal. DMT provides regular, repeated, and reliable access to "other" chan- nels. The other planes of existence are always there. In fact, they are right here, transmitting all the time! But we cannot perceive them be- cause we are not designed to do so; our hard-wiring keeps us tuned in to