Just as time is irrelevant in the spirit realm, my own time has expanded into a lengthy intermission since my last lines were written. Yet, I've not stopped my search.

After I finished Daniel Pinchbeck's book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl , I began a deeper scientific search for knowledge, by going to someone I call a true Master, Terence McKenna. Terence, along with his brother, Dennis McKenna, began a modern quest for knowledge in the Amazon in the 60's. He wrote about his incredible adventure in True Hallucinations. The most interesting revelation I read after listening to many hours of talks by Terence on the Internet was that Dennis was the one who truly experienced The Other during and after his mushroom trip.

For weeks, Dennis' psyche was strangely affected as his mind tried to come to terms with what he'd experienced. Interestingly enough, Terence became the apostle of tryptamine psychedelics after this event, whereas Dennis quietly pursued his education in ethnopharmacology. He also supported Terence emotionally and lovingly through to his death from a rare form of brain cancer in 2000. Without a doubt, the loss of Terence was a loss for humanity, since his greatest goal in life was to open up peoples' minds to the magical lands that await them by the use of psychedelics.

For example, at about minute two of a DMT trip, according to McKenna, you burst through a chrysanthemum-like mandala, and are absolutely astonished to discover that:

There's a whole bunch of entities waiting on the other side, saying "How wonderful that you're here! You come so rarely! We're so delighted to see you!"

They're like jewelled self-dribbling basketballs [at times he also called these beings fractal elves or self-transforming machine elves] and there are many of them and they come pounding toward you and they will stop in front of you and vibrate, but then they do a very disconcerting thing, which is they jump into your body and then they jump back out again and the whole thing is going on in a high-speed mode where you're being presented with thousands of details per second and you can't get a hold on [them ...] and these things are saying "Don't give in to astonishment", which is exactly what you want to do. You want to go nuts with how crazy this is, and they say "Don't do that. Pay attention to what we're doing".

What they're doing is making objects with their voices, singing structures into existence. They offer things to you, saying "Look at this! Look at this!" and as your attention goes towards these objects you realise that what you're being shown is impossible. It's not simply intricate, beautiful and hard to manufacture, it's impossible to make these things. The nearest analogy would be the Faberge' eggs, but these things are like the toys that are scattered around the nursery inside a U.F.O.--celestial toys--and the toys themselves appear to be somehow alive and can sing other objects into existence.

So what's happening is this proliferation of elf gifts, which are moving around singing, and they are saying "Do what we are doing" and they are very insistent, and they say "Do it! Do it! Do it!" and you feel like a bubble inside your body beginning to move up toward your mouth, and when it comes out it isn't sound, it's vision. You discover that you can pump "stuff" out of your mouth by singing, and they're urging you to do this. They say "That's it! That's it! Keep doing it!".

We're now at minute 4.5 [of the trip] and you speak in a kind of glossolalia. There is a spontaneous outpouring of syntax unaccompanied by what is normally called "meaning". After a minute or so of this the whole thing begins to collapse in on itself and they begin to physically move away from you. Usually their final shot is that they wave goodbye and say "Deja vu! Deja vu!".

Science fiction? Terence would have you believe that this is cosmic fact--or as he called it, a cosmic giggle! "Cosmic giggle" was his term for an event in which the inherent benevolence of the universe suddenly bowls you over with a delightful shockwave of synchronicity. He believed you could and should actively court such eruptions.

I'd like to say that all this is just food for thought. But to Terence, these substances were nothing less than the Food of the Gods; one of Terence's other books.

In the meantime, I'd purchased my next few readings. The first, was PIKHAL: A Chemical Love Story by Alexander and Ann Shulgin.

The Shulgins are an amazing couple. Alexander, or Sasha Shulgin is a brilliant chemist who at one time worked as a research scientist at Dow Chemical. Dow was (and possibly still is for all I know) the notorious producer of a jellied gasoline weapon known as napalm. This incredibly evil substance was used very effectively during the Vietnam and other wars.

This famous and horrific picture moved thousands to protest Dow Chemical on many campuses throughout the country at the height of the Vietnam War; including my own, The University of Wisconsin - Madison.

This is what the website GlobalSecurity.com said about this picture: one of the most famous of all images taken during this nation's Iraq-like insanity in Vietnam in the 60's and 70's:

Kim Phuc was the subject of a Pulitzer-Prize winning photograph during the Vietnam War taken in 1972, when she was a child, running naked down a road, screaming in pain from the napalm that was burning through her skin. The photograph has come to epitomize the tragedy of the Vietnam War. Ironically, this incident did not involve any American participation, and their impact in Vietnam was minimal. In the United States, however, the impact of this scene was tremendous, and uniformly negative. Practically everyone old enough to have viewed the news during those years remembers this scene, and others like them, with a combination of revulsion and disgust.

The comment that there was no American participation in this incident--which frankly I hadn't heard before--totally ignores the fact that it was American scientists who invented this terrible agent and that American corporations were supplying it to the governments who had no compunction to use it against innocent civilian populations.

I unexpectedly went off on this tangent because for years after that devastating war ended, I refused to buy Dow Chemical products because of this corporation's amoral complicity in creating conditions that would cause this kind of suffering.

Back to my original point, then, I was glad to learn that Sasha Shulgin had left Dow Chemical near the beginning of the Vietnam conflict. By that time, he'd had a number of psychedelic experiences. He said of this, "I first explored mescaline in the late '50s, Three-hundred-fifty to 400 milligrams. I learned there was a great deal inside me." He would later write that everything he saw and thought...

"had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid, but that in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid... I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability."

He created a new way of synthesizing MDMA, or Ecstacy as it is popularly known. MDMA is a molecule that had been first synthesized in 1912 by Merck, but which was not seen to have had any pharmacological effects worth exploiting. Yet Shulgin, who with his wife has judiciously self-tested hundreds of drugs he personally synthesized immediately realized that this substance had effects on the human mind that could be of great benefit in the treatment of psychological disorders.

He therefore gave MDMA to a number of close friends; many of whom were psychologists and psychiatrists and who were just as impressed with their personal and profession experiences with this substance as Shulgin had been. The rest, as they say, is history.

Unfortunately, another historical truism was that as soon as a drug becomes popular with young people (because of the very effects that made is so effective in the mental health fields), the government outlaws its use. Thus today it is classified as a top-level Schedule 1 drug--along with hallucinogens--which are viewed as having absolutely no social or medicinal benefit to society.

Schedule 1 drugs are seen as more evil by government than drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamines, opium and its derivatives like morphine and heroin, oxycodone (known as hillbilly heroin and Rush Limbaugh's illegal drug of choice) and far above the Schedule 3 drugs that pharmaceutical companies have created a constant craving for in our society.

We must remember that our government has never had a great concern over the devastating effects of tobacco on the nation's health, or the huge social problems created by a nation that sees alcohol as a requirement in any personal, social or sporting event. Nor has our massive dependence on legally prescribed drugs of all types been something that the government thinks should be examined as to its cause.

Be that as it may, very recently studies have begun that have once again begun researching this substance more thoroughly. One of the brightest horizons for MDMA is in the treatment of PTSD--Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

This article highlights the hopes of health professionals in the treatment of this disorder; one that has been seen increasingly in military personnel returning from their psychologically traumatic tours in Iraq and Afghanistan; where time there has been described as nothing but hours of boredom interrupted by moments of stark terror.

I felt a bit apprehensive and sad as I approached the end of reading PIKHAL because of how thoroughly it had captured my interest. For some reason, I felt as if I'd never get into another book quite as much again. Yet, I'm fascinated to discover that each new book I've read has opened up brand new vistas for me. This happened again when I read the next book.

DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Dr. Rick Strassman.

While interesting in itself, the first half of the book is a thorough and very clinical retelling of what Dr. Strassman had to go through to get his research into DMT approved by not only his University and the state of New Mexico, but by the highly bureaucratic and relatively unfriendly DEA and FDA.

His experience really opened my eyes to the difficulty of studying substances which instead of having millions of dollars of Big Pharma money behind them, have a political seal of disapproval stamped on them.

Dr. Strassman first relates the tragedy of how many surprisingly beneficial studies of DMT, LSD and other psychedelic substances had been done in the 50's and 60's--especially in the mental health fields--and how all research was halted in the late 60's as the media and politicians freaked out about what they perceived as the dangerous misuse of these drugs by our children. As we know, in this nation as soon as our children (as opposed to their children) are the object of society's fears, all bets are off. When this occurs, extreme overreactions rule and the benefits these substances had shown in study after study are simply ignored; much like what is happening with the global warming "debate" today.

Finally, after years of trying to get approval for his renewed research on this one substance, DMT, the governmental agencies allowed it. For his research, Dr. Strassman was scrupulously careful to make sure that the most exacting clinical standards were followed in all aspects of his study.

Since set and setting have always been considered the most important factors in a psychedelic experience, Dr. Strassman felt that the highly sterile environment of a University hospital room and the intrusion of IV tubes would negatively affect the study. Even so, he wasn't allowed to conduct his research outside a hospital, in case a medical emergency were to occur.

Even under these less than optimal conditions, however, once the book begins to relate the experiences of the research subjects, the chapters are astounding and read like the most creative science fiction stories imaginable; which makes sense because what was being related by the subjects was not imaginable, but unimaginable!

I've read a number of books by now that attempt to present the mysteries of non-ordinary reality, but these 5 or 6 chapters in DMT: The Sprit Molecule superbly summarize the crystalline essence of so much of what propels me on my journey; which are the topics of spirituality, mysticism, consciousness, reality, time, DNA, God (and gods), the universe and much more.

What DMT: The Spirit Molecule did for me was to echo the question Terence McKenna asked so often in his inimitable rhetorical style. Why, when it is so easy to achieve, isn't everyone demanding his or her birthright to use this kind of gateway to a greater reality? A gateway, incidentally, that is produced by numerous plant species around the world as well as the human body itself!

Dr. Strassman says of this last point: "I was drawn to DMT because of its presence in all of our bodies. Perhaps excessive DMT production, coming from the mysterious pineal gland, was involved in naturally occurring "psychedelic" states. These might include birth, death and near-death, psychosis, and mystical experiences."

In my case, I am torn between two great conflicts. I know that my spirit/consciousness longs for proof or connection to the greater reality that seems just out of reach. This is why I continue to read and write about all of this. Yet my body--the ever-demanding ego-based physical organism--tells my consciousness that this reality is the most important thing in life, and that all the physical and psychic building blocks I've used to create a wall around my reality will not allow my spirit to escape until the organism lets go on its own.

I must admit here that it is fear, pure and simple, that keeps me from seriously entertaining this kind of journey. Will my heart stand it? Will my brain explode? Will I be lost forever in some kind of psychotic limbo? The mind's neuroses are strong and I'm envious of those who don't suffer from these insecurities, but I always have and perhaps always will.

Still, there are those psychonauts and adventurers like Terence McKenna and Sasha Shulgin who are consumed by this greater reality, and because of them I intend to continue my own studies.

I might be quite surprised where they will one day lead me.