potential is spread out in a silent market...” It was generally believed that with adequate spiritual preparation, ayahuasca could generate transcendent states that allowed access to ones inner being and the beings of other worlds that could serve as sources of mystical knowledge and healing. The Shams dervish of the 13" Century, wandering the Turkish portion of the Silk Road, used the word sohbet to describe the inner land of mystical conversations about mystical subjects that their turning meditation, whirling, and the shaman’s entheogenic compounds such as DMT give entrance. The question was whether our finding of DMT and its human brain enzyme had been an artifact, an accidental laboratory fluke. Members of my neurochemical research teams at the University of California Medical Schools in Irvine and La Jolla, notably Dr. Lee Poth, now a professor of pediatric endocrinology at the Uniform Services Medical School in Washington D.C., demonstrated that the DMT synthesizing enzyme existed in the brains of recent accident victims that as far as we were able to learn from their family and social histories, had been completely psychologically normal. More than a little bit startled by this finding and worried about making a sensational scientific mistake, we repeated the experiments with a variety of controls with the same findings. Though our original estimates of the human brain enzyme concentration were on the high side, we confirmed the general finding and published them in Science in 1969 and Nature in 1970. Our carboline work was published in the Journal of Neurochemistry in 1975. A year or so after our Nature paper was published, the Nobel Prize winning neuropharmacologist at the National Institutes of Mental Health, Julius Axelrod, confirmed the presence of the DMT biosynthetic enzyme that converted the tryptophan product, tryptamine, to DMT in mammalian brain tissue. We were both delighted and relieved. We speculate, perhaps too grandly, that this finding, al