Currently through tests they’re doing at the Heffter Institute, the Buckley Foundation and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, they’re positing to the fact that a lot of psychoactive turn off certain regions of the default mode network in the brain, and the substances themselves aren’t necessarily causing hallucinogenic experiences, but are switching off these regions of the brain, and the brain itself is receiving a denser spectrum of consciousness. It’s just that we’ve had a reducing valve on the brain, which is Aldous Huxley’s theory; throughout his book The Doors of Perception: Heaven and Hell, he thought perhaps that the brain was perhaps a reducing valve, while there’s actually a vast spectrum of information that we’re just not seeing. So modern scientific testing is corroborating that, actually. So when taking a psychedelic, you’re being exposed to a wider spectrum of reality—it was always there, we just don’t see it.

If you take something like Ayahuasca, which many indigenous Central American tribes would use, they have a consensual paradigm of reality that they’re experiencing through the usage of Ayahuasca. Now, it’s very interesting because even Westerners who take Ayahuasca report seeing things like jaguars in the jungle, or nature, or totems and things like that. And people wonder, well why are those cultural archetypes present? There’s all of this computer terminology that helps to give framework to describe a psychoactive experience—so we can say that it’s almost like having a website page bookmarked. So if indigenous cultures are defining this “page” so to speak, who live in the jungle where they experience things like jaguars and boa constrictors, they’ve defined each one of those as an archetype that represents a deeper spiritual totem. So if over thousands of years, tens of thousands of people in these tribes have built up these archetypes on these energetic visionary frequencies, these frequencies are defined—we just don’t really see them. Just like the internet. You don’t really “see” the internet; it’s a spectrum of existence that is always there, but you only see it when you log onto it. So in a way, you’re “logging onto” a visionary frequency, but other cultures have been there before, building it. So in a way, their experiences are “bookmarked” so when Westerners take it, they might see a jaguar even if it’s not in their personal cultural archetype. And people are reporting anecdotally that, even having no connection to the Amazon, that they are seeing Amazonian imagery.

What science still cannot confirm nor deny is the root cause of consciousness. If consciousness is as Huxley said, are we acting as a transmitter of information, a receiver, or both? If we are a receiver—which the default mode mechanism that psychedelic studies are sort of pointing to at the moment, it means that there is a broadcast signal on which these archetypes exist. It’s like Plato’s allegory of the cave—there’s an archetypal realm from which our physical reality come from. One of the main Ayahuasca tribes in the Amazon called the Shipibo say that the Ayahuasca dream state is the original state of being, the originating source world, and that this world is a projection from that one. It’s very similar to what quantum theory calls the implicate and the explicate orders. Science says that these visions are all from within the brain. But what they’re not asking is what external forces shaped the brain to begin with, and is it receiving a spectrum of consciousness rather than just transmitting it.