HOW THE WORLD GETS HIGH Get the Book
Explore · The Human Body

You had the equipment all along.

The turn. Having toured the natural world, the book asks what is inside us.

Every chapter before this one is about something outside you. A mushroom, a cactus, a vine, a toad, a fish, a jar of honey. Things you have to go and find.

This chapter asks a different question, and the answer reframes everything before it.

DMT was identified in human blood in 1965. The enzyme that makes it, INMT, is present in human tissue. A 2019 study demonstrated DMT synthesis in rat brain tissue.

You are not visiting this chemistry. You are made partly of it.

Standard equipment. The receptors, the molecules and several reliable techniques were all here already. Leonardo da Vinci, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

The receptors were already thereAnd so was the key

Consider what a receptor actually is. It is a lock. Locks do not evolve so that something from outside can open them — they evolve because something inside is already opening them.

Anandamide is the cleanest example. Identified by Mechoulam's group in 1992, it is the body's own cannabinoid, and it is named from the Sanskrit ānanda — bliss. Somebody in that laboratory was paying attention to more than the chemistry.

Functional MRI. Most of what is now known about these states was invisible before this existed. DrOONeil, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

StrassmanAnd the part the book will not overstate

Between 1990 and 1995, Rick Strassman administered roughly 400 doses to 60 volunteers at the University of New Mexico — the first human psychedelic research in the United States in two decades.

His pineal-gland hypothesis remains unproven, and this page says so plainly.

The idea that the pineal gland floods the brain with DMT at birth and death is repeated everywhere as though it were established. It is not. It is a hypothesis, it is interesting, and it has not been demonstrated.

Enthusiasm without honesty is just marketing.

The pineal gland as drawn by the Theosophist C.W. Leadbeater. This is the mythology, not the evidence — and the mythology arrived first, which is worth knowing. C.W. Leadbeater, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

What is established is stranger and quieter. Near-death experiences are reported by roughly one in ten cardiac arrest survivors. A 2018 study compared NDE accounts against DMT accounts and found substantial linguistic overlap — people reaching for the same words without knowing they were doing it.

And none of it requires a substanceThis is the real finding

Here is what the chapter is actually for.

Lilly's tank, and the best argument in the book

In 1954, John Lilly built an isolation tank to remove every sensory input he could and expected the mind to go quiet.

It did the opposite.

Take away the world and the brain supplies one. Not as a malfunction — as a default. Whatever this capacity is, it is not an intrusion, and it is not something the mushroom gave you.

You were designed and built for this. What an exhilarating and most extraordinary thought!

Standard equipment

Nothing here was added. All of it was already yours.

The organ doing all of this, at rest. National Cancer Institute, via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
Sobotta's anatomy, 1909. Sagittal section — the pineal and pituitary, drawn eighty years before anyone proposed what the first might be doing. via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

A note on the numbers below. Doses and timings are reported from the published clinical and toxicological literature, and they are here so you can read a headline or a trip report accurately. This is education, not instruction, and it is not medical advice.

EXPERIENCE

Samadhi

The only entry on this whole site with no molecule in it, and possibly the most interesting one. Samadhi is the eighth and final limb of Patanjali’s yoga, the state in which the meditator, the act of meditating and the object of meditation collapse into one thing. The dose is years. Onset is measured in decades of practice. And by every account it produces a state that overlaps considerably with what the compounds on this site produce in an afternoon.

The stages

  1. the yearsDharana, concentration

    Attention held on a single point. Effortful, unglamorous, and the stage at which very nearly everybody stops.

  2. the practiceDhyana, meditation

    The holding becomes effortless and continuous. An observer is still present, watching it happen.

  3. the stateSamadhi, absorption

    The observer goes. The classical texts split it in two: savikalpa, where absorption is deep but an object and a faint sense of self remain, and nirvikalpa, where neither does.

Core sensory and psychological effects

  • Dissolution of subject and object. The same ego dissolution reported on 5-MeO-DMT, arrived at from precisely the opposite direction.
  • Timelessness. Hours pass without duration. Reported consistently enough to count as a defining feature rather than a flourish.
  • Ananda. A bliss described as uncaused, meaning it is not bliss about anything.
  • Measurable physiology. Slowed breathing, reduced muscle activity, and raised EEG alpha power and coherence. Recent jhana studies using 7-tesla fMRI have found these states stable and reproducible enough to be classified by machine learning.
  • Voluntary entry and exit. The distinguishing feature, and the one no drug on this site offers. Adepts can enter the state, describe it, and leave it on request.
Good

The same peaks with no toxicity, no legal risk, no supply chain and no comedown, plus complete control over entry and exit. Nothing is metabolized and nothing wears off.

Bad

It takes years, most people never arrive, and the traditions are candid about the hazards along the way: dissociation, depersonalization, and the destabilizing episodes clinicians now call spiritual emergency and the contemplatives have always called the dark night.

This is the argument the last chapter of the book makes. Every state described anywhere on this site is one your own brain is already equipped to produce. The molecules are shortcuts into a room you happen to own.

Chapter Seven is the turn the whole book is built toward.

Read the book