IT’S YOUR BRAIN TRIPPING BALLS ON DMT – Across almost all religions, there’s always been a weird obsession with heaven and hell. It kinda feels like pious believers are spending most of their time in this life avoiding burning in eternal hell, instead of actually living it.

I remember that as a kid, I was brought to this Chinese folklore amusement park in Singapore and there was this “10 levels of hell” boat-ride that took us through a dragon’s mouth and showed me that if I masturbated excessively, I would go to hell and have my penis cut off and fed to rabid dogs. As a 6-year-old child, I was determined that my adult life would be a righteous, saintly, and highly non-sexual. When I hit puberty, I decided that my afterlife cock was a reasonable sacrifice for hours and hours of repeatedly watching Sharon Stone’s sex scene on a pirated video CD of Basic Instinct. Hell? Oh yea, bring it on!

As a teen, I was briefly introduced to Christianity. I went with my classmates to church because my classmates were cool and I thought I might meet other cool kids there. Instead, I freaked out. If you don’t believe that Mr J-C was your lord and saviour, you’re going to burn in eternal hell. Fuck no, I don’t want someone telling me that my parents are gonna be repeatedly prodded by devilish imps and thrown into flames.

So who the fuck came up with these terrible things we tell to children to make them behave?

Yes, it’s the human brain. More specifically, heaven and hell is a state of mind. Ok, so here’s where the science part comes in. When a person dies, the heart stops beating (no shit, Sherlock). But at this point, brain activity continues for about 6–8 minutes, producing copious amounts of the chemical called DMT, or N-dimethyltryptamine – the strongest psychedelic ever known to mankind. It is also the chemical responsible for you dreaming that you had 6 arms and was in a band called “The Band”. And Chuck Norris was your drummer.

So DMT is produced by our brains as some sort of a transitional buffer between life and death. We’ve all experienced a DMT trip, but not many of us would remember it, because it happened at the moment we were born. This potent psychedelic is now also available in smoke-able form at Psytrance festivals, or at your hippie neighbour’s backyard.

People who have smoked DMT have reported highly spiritual experiences. Some say they met God, some become God, and some emerge from these 15-minute trips claiming to have gone on a rollercoaster ride with God. For many, it just looks like this:

Picture from dmt-nexus.me

So back to the 6 minutes after you die. What does your brain do? It trips balls. While you’re looking back at your life, going through what you’ve experienced, how you’ve treated people, how you’ve loved them, and all that. You might recall the time you slapped Bob at the back of his head just because he was a fat kid and you were an asshole, and feel fucking bad about it.

Heaven then, would be your ego tripping balls to all the great stuff you’ve done. Hell would be you feeling guilty and blaming yourself for all the times you had been a dick. And what about eternity? Well, dreamtime is relative. Recall the last time you were dreaming and got woken up by your first alarm. You press the snooze button, go back to your dream, and spend what seemed like 8 millions years in there. Your alarm rings again. 2 minutes have passed.

So imagine in that 6 minutes of brain activity after you die, under the influence of hardcore DMT, whatever you’re going through, heaven or hell, can seem like an eternity. So yes, the bible is at least right about this one.

What happens after that then? The Buddhists believe in reincarnation. So you either become a pig destined to become bacon in a factory farm, or you become Orlando Bloom, depending on the points you’ve accumulated on your karma scorecard. The Christians haven’t thought much about that. They never came out of their DMT trip.

But yes, assuming that the DMT trip is over. Our brain finally dies. Our consciousness? Hmm… not sure about this one. But what we do know is that according to the most advanced quantum theories that our brains can comprehend, every particle that we are made up of is simply an energy field vibrating. This is not some hippie bullshit. It’s science.

And since energy cannot be created or destroyed, and it can only be transferred, the energy carried by our bodies need to go somewhere. Depending on how your DMT trip went, these energy fields would carry with it your dying wishes. Like people talk about good vibes and bad vibes, these are merely energy fields vibrating and interacting at different frequencies, see quantum entanglement. When someone gives you good energy, it simply means that their energy fields are vibrating at a similar frequency to yours.

Now what about reincarnation?

So after your death-DMT trip, your energy fields would vibrate at a certain frequency, depending on how traumatised they were. A good trip would result in them vibrating at one frequency, a bad one another. Naturally, they would be attracted to other energy fields vibrating at the same frequency, either in their vicinity, or a little further away, and go hang out with one another.

So after a few beers at the 432-hertz Pub, the energy fields (might contain similar fields from other stuff, like your neighbour who died of testicular cancer, and his pet rock) collectively go through some mysterious action that created our universe, and manifest either into matter, alive or not. Imagine a big pot of same-frequency energy fields, which we’ll call the “soul soup”. To make a new “soul”, you simply scoop out a spoonful of this stuff at random and serve it hot.

We doubt that there’s a full transfer of the soul from one body to another i.e. you (this life) becoming pig (next life). Because not all the energy fields contained within our bodies would vibrate at the same frequency. So what makes up our unique consciousness, or “soul”, is actually a group of same-vibe energy fields from all over the universe. This could be used to explain the phenomenon of déjà vu, or us dreaming of places that we’ve never been to. We’re simply taking a peek into someone else’s memory, which has been contained in the energy fields that made up our “soul”. And if we subscribe to this theory of the entire universe belonging to the same pot of “soul soup”, we’d see that indeed, we are all one.

So, reincarnation. If you’re lucky, you might become a sunflower. If not, you might manifest into some ceramic that eventually becomes a toilet. Talk about taking shit from other people.

What about enlightenment then? How do certain energy fields not manifest into matter, or escape the cycle of reincarnation? After the intense death-DMT trip, some energy fields would vibrate at a “I don’t want anything more to do with this fucking universe” frequency, or what Buddha might call “no desires”. These energy fields, too, float together into a secret place and remain inert forever. No desire, no activity, only nothingness. In my opinion, it’s a little boring. Buddha Mag has an article about this secret place, you should check it out.

So here we go. We’ve just cracked the code of “What happens in the afterlife” using our somewhat dodgy understanding of quantum theory. Let us know what you think?

Kai Teo
Writer & Editor @BuddhaMag

Self-proclaimed modern hippie from Singapore, he often immerses his head in thoughts about unicorns, talking mushrooms and machinegun wielding candles. Sometimes he has difficulties telling apart an orange and the moon.

He’s been a disgruntled copywriter who has written for brands such as Audi, Sony Mobile, Lenovo and Bona. Occasionally, he also writes articles for VICE.

“In today’s world, the easiest way of fucking with society is to be nice.”

kai@buddhamag.org