The Fear of Darkness

I recently watched "The Fear of Darkness". The subject of this film is related to a psychoactive product and a terrible, unloved event. Every time I was watching this film, I had decided that psychoactive product called with DMT acronym was just a fictional drug invented to serve the scenario of this film in mystery and horror style. But this time I was curious to consult the Internet about it. I wanted to find out if the screenplay is based on something inspired by reality or not. On wikipedia there are articles in English and Romanian about this chemical compound. DMT is a substance found abundantly within biological organisms, both plants and animals. The human body produces this substance as a biological hormone through the pineal gland in the brain, although the first DMT secretion in the human body occurs at the embryonic stage, that is, when the brain and the pineal gland do not seem to be ready for that. DMT would also be guilty for producing dreams, but also for their content and intensity. The largest quantity released by DMT seems to be during human death or around it that generates major psychological experiences for the person concerned. The most intriguing part is that this psychedelic substance would be more intense than drugs considered as powerful enough as cocaine or ecstasy, and at the same time it is produced by the human body itself in the amount it sets. Reading something on this theme of reflection, I was thinking that this film could be inspired by reality and perhaps even inspired by real facts. However, its creative team did not want to mention such a thing so the film would be purely fanciful.

On wikipedia.ro I found an article on this subject who informed that there is a documentary called "DMT: The Spirit Molecule". I used the link provided by the article and watched the movie. This is basically a series of interviews with researchers and subjects who tested DMT in medical experiments. During the documentary material are presented the opinions / speculations of the subjects, as well as the results of the medical researches undertaken. DMT remains a substance as controversial as human culture. I watched this film and I realized that there is a major problem when the human factor makes an effort to understand some phenomena that concern it. To be more explicit I will mention the speculations that are made in this film. Some human civilizations such as Amazonian aborigines and others have discovered how they can prepare from plants or other sources, products containing DMT. These products were used regularly in ceremonies or rituals, especially by shamans or sacerdots. The reasons behind these practices are not known precisely, but that documentary film suggests that there were reasons of spiritual evolution and the conclusion is that we should know and pursue some shamanic traditions and some religious traditions in the name of our spiritual evolution. For objectivity and a bit of rational rigidity I must point out that in order to accept the need for contemporary man's interconnection with some shamanic traditions and some religious traditions we must prove that DMT truly produces spiritual evolution. The shaman or sacerdot who would have produced those healing miracles for the members of its tribe could have created hypnosis or placebo effect, so its psychic powers could not be linked with any spiritual evolution. Scientific experiments in favor of what I have said were made in the contemporary era: "Therapeutic Touch Experiment", conducted by Emily Rosa psychology researcher at the age of nine. The scientific study was published in 1998 in the "Journal of the American Medical Association". For those who believe in chakras, feng shui, Tao, yin and yang, alchemy or the soul from pineal glande, I have bad news: none of this really exists! They are just some cultural and philosophical products that have appeared throughout human history - a self-defense psychological form in the face of ignorance or misunderstanding, and are expired products! Democritus, an ancient thinker, predicted the existence of atoms without any direct empirical research, for example, but science needed two thousands of years to prove empirically the existence of these particles. The same is true of Oriental ancient cultures and not only: no matter how refined the cosmogonic philosophy of those Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Hebrew, conceptions and so on, they can not be considered scientific truths, and the speculations made by the media today about the relationship between them and quantum mechanics is an aberration and an insult adressed to Western science (the truly creator of atomic physics). If all these were real phenomena, then it would have certainly been asserted without the support of quantum mechanics. These speculations (own and documentary material discussed) are more about the eternal human tendency to receive the answers it want to the questions it are bound to ask.

I do not want to say in all of these that miracles do not exist but they exists with a scientific explanation. The chakras or those electromagnetic energy vortexes have not been scientifically proven, so it is no longer relevant to read all those wonderful articles about them in women's journals with key words: beauty, style, trend, etc. or esoteric magazines. Instead, it has been scientifically demonstrated the existence of an electromagnetic field around the human body, but also the existence of bio-photons in living beings beyond those Hindu precepts of how electromagnetic bioenergy (in chakras and nadis) would be placed in the body.

I can not refrain from saying that science and culture / history should always go in separate ways. For me it is a waste of time people's attempts to produce this union between culture and science, but also the search for the reasons to create that interconnection / interdependence in an artificial way. Events are interconnected in a natural way with or without human intervention. Trying to bring some cultural traditions back to life to validate an archaic pseudo-science, the stepsister of modern science, seems to be a retrograde act, a stubbornness of standing in the same place. Of course, human cultures / civilizations need to be studied, but their integration into the modern world is not very similar to capitalizing on human historical potential, especially when observations and artifacts emphasize a cumbersome and painful transition from magical / metaphorical thinking to rational thinking once man was born with the curse of not knowing what the world around it is and what own conscience is. We can also accept the hypothesis of advanced human civilizations that existed in the past and perished without too many traces. Of course, we can admit more subject lines in history. However, for at least one of them, we know that a tragic human destiny of accumulation of knowledge and psychic abilities was valid in order to form what today we call empirically reasoned thinking and until then there was culture and well-crafted forms of philosophy masked the knowledge gap.

Coming back to DMT and what could be this chemical compound: substancte to promote spiritual development or just distort the psyche, I think there are pros and cons. Firstly, if the human body invented a preparation capable of altering mental and sensory perception, it would probably be a function given to it. Secondly, it has been observed that psychoactive substances can accelerate / modify / expand mental functions. Their influence on the psyche is both positive and negative, they produce benefits but also side effects. It also observed the implicit need to have a psychological training as well as an education in use of psychoactive products in order to better control the mechanism of action of these psychoactive hormones but also of any other psychoactive preparation (medicines for psychic / psychological problems but also other substances with restricted or even prohibited consumption). At present, scientific research into psychoactive substances is in full swing and justified by the major psychic potential of influencing the human body. As for another aspect of the effects of DMT - distortion of the human psyche; statements from medical subjects, statements from online sources, and even from the above-mentioned film ("The Fear of Darkness"), tell of a similar psychic experience to all those who would try to consume DMT, namely: visiting another world and meeting a divine being who has a voice feminine and would answer to the question who I am. The answer is always the same: "you are infinite love!". This answer raises questions because most human cultures have adopted this philosophical message to fall asleep the human tendency to understand. For me, the expression: "you are infinite love!" does not mean something. I do not really see how relevant it is to the question: who am I? It seems more like a kind of compliment to a child crying to its parent, and in turn tells it something nice to calm it down. If this scene of infinite love (whatever means infinite love) is an idea fixed in human consciousness then we can explain why it happens the same scene for different people. According to my version, that divine being that says with voice of nymph: "you are infinite love!", it is the parent or the human unconscious so there is no spiritual revelation here but a psychic process. Unless that heavenly being would share some original knowledge with the initiate then I would be tempted to think that it is anything else but not the human unconscious. For example, if would answer for: what's inside the black holes? or what is dark matter in the universe? or any other challenge for a scientist genius. To my regret, even in the documentary material "DMT: The Spirit Molecule", the subjects who tested DMT on the hospital bed tell only about their travel in a multicolored world and about encountered angelic faces there. Their testimonies are much like the paradisiac or infernal fantasies of human cultures, and may be that is why the generic of the film discussed at the beginning was chosen to be "The Fear of Darkness".