Page Content (OCR)
324 * WHAT COULD AND MIGHT BE nature of the peak mystical experience. There is no sound, touch, vision, smell, or taste. No thoughts or words, and no time. Simultaneously there is an indescribable completeness, power, and understanding. In between TV channels is "snow," the white noise and images asso- ciated with what is "between" the various stations’ programming material. What is there if we look and listen carefully? It is the very nature of the activated television itself, electricity coursing through it, energizing and driving it to display something, but that something seems like nothing to the pattern-seeking everyday mind. In this case, the best analogy might be that DMT has reconfigured the brain's receptive qualities to now stop receiving "outside" information. It is only aware of its own existence, its own intrinsic nature. It displays its own consciousness or resonating frequencies, which have no particular content. Nevertheless, it is the ground upon which all of the programs depend for support—the space that the channels fill. This space between channels, or the absence of channels, is not empty; rather, it is itself full. The content of the programs replaces this perfect emptiness with their busy fullness. Neither is its nature necessarily "po- tential." Rather, it is complete unto itself. It needs nothing to exist as it is. But it needs something in order to take shape or form, to manifest. For some volunteers, DMT's ripping away of consciousness from the body was the stimulus to seek that space between the various levels of perceived reality. They went straight to that empty totality underlying their sense of themselves and the outside world, no longer supported by the body. As Freud commented years ago, "The ego is first and foremost a body-ego." With no body, what's left? These research subjects, like Carlos and Willow, experienced mystical consciousness by virtue of leaving their bodies behind. Other volunteers found their way to their essential nature through a more direct use of their own will. Sean gave himself permission to go further and deeper into the unknown. Elena disengaged from the wild display of psychedelic colors that obscured their formless foundation. Both succeeded in pulling back and moving forward with just the exquisite knife-edge balance required to make that daring leap into the space be-