Dennis McKenna

"Terence was very … he was a good promoter. Basically, he said its the ultimate metaphysical reality pill. Even though its not a pill, but I thought that was a pretty good characterization after I took it. It would seem to be of a different order than LSD and mescaline and some of the other things that were around. DMT really did seem to be a whole other level of experience."

"I think DMT is a forcible reminder that theres a lot more about reality, the universe, ourselves, the biosphere, whatever—theres a lot more to it than we imagine."

"What does it mean? Why is there a part of the brain that seems to be, for lack of a better word, a "God-detector", you know? Whats the evolutionary advantage to having some part of the brain that seems to trigger and mediate experiences of the transcendent?"

"Every culture has its own creation myth, its own cosmology. And in some respects every cosmology is true, even if I might flatter myself in assuming mine is somehow truer because it is scientific. But it seems to me that no culture, including scientific culture, has cornered the market on definitive answers when it comes to the ultimate questions. Science may couch its models in the language of mathematics and observational astronomy, while other cultures use poetry and sacrificial propitiations to defend theirs. But in the end, no one knows, at least not yet. The current flux in the state of scientific cosmology attests to this, as we watch physicists and astronomers argue over string theory and multiverses and the cosmic inflation hypothesis. Many of the postulates of modern cosmology lie beyond, or at least at the outer fringes, of what can be verified through observation. As a result, aesthetics—as reflected by the "elegance" of the mathematical models—has become as important as observation in assessing the validity of a cosmological theory. There is the assumption, sometimes explicit and sometimes not, that the universe is rationally constructed, that it has an inherent quality of beauty, and that any mathematical model that does not exemplify an underlying, unifying simplicity is to be considered dubious if not invalid on such criteria alone. This is really nothing more than an article of faith; and it is one of the few instances where science is faith-based, at least in its insistence that the universe can be understood, that it "makes sense". It is not entirely a faith-based position, in that we can invoke the history of science to support the proposition that, so far, science has been able to make sense, in a limited way, of much of what it has scrutinized. (The psychedelic experience may prove to be an exception.)"

"One of the things besides what it does, one of the things about DMT that always fascinated me, was the fact that its such a simple molecule. Biosynthetically, its two steps from tryptophan, right? Two trivial enzymatic steps from tryptophan. Well, tryptophan is an amino acid, of course, and its everywhere. So all organisms have tryptophan, and all organisms have the two key enzymes that lead to the synthesis of DMT. And these enzymes are very ancient enzymes, theyre all over the place. They are, again, part of basic metabolism. So, theoretically, anything could synthesize DMT."

"It just rips that filtering mechanism away for a few minutes, and for a few minutes, youre immersed in sort of this raw data sphere of input, of sensory input, of memories, of associations. I mean, it seems like the brain builds reality out of these things: what youre experiencing, what you have experienced, and how you associate and synthesize these things together to tell yourself a story, essentially, about whats going on, where you are in space and time."