Damer described himself as a “distinctly non-psychedelic kid” who avoided drugs including cannabis and even caffeine due to sensitivity.

“I was a little bit on the spectrum, pretty quiet and internal in a lot of ways,” he said. “And so, psychedelics or drugs of any sort were never very appealing. I thought… maybe they’ll mess up the visionary machinery that I already have. I don’t want to corrupt my system—to shatter this fragile eggshell mind of mine.”

Yet he had a vivid visual imagination from a young age, experiencing “technicolour object-filled landscapes” in hypnogogic states behind closed eyes.

“When I was 9 or 10 years old, I began having regular access to these states, and they became my own private TV channel,” he said, adding, “I discovered that the signals would come in much more clearly if I could somehow turn down my mind.”

His first psychedelic experience came at the “rather advanced age” of 37 after meeting Terence McKenna, who provided him the source for a heroic dose of psilocybin mushrooms. Years later, beginning in 2011, Damer participated in a series of yearly ayahuasca ceremonies in the Amazon—an experience he described as a “complete life-changer”. The initial intention of these sessions was to heal birth trauma he experienced as an adopted child.

As his healing journey progressed, he gradually began to believe that perhaps these insights could extend beyond psycho-spiritual realms into his professional work. The timing was advantageous—at UC Santa Cruz, Damer and Deamer had reached an impasse in their origins of life research.

“We had come up to a point in the lab where we could form polymers from the building blocks of RNA, and through wet-dry cycling under simulated hot spring conditions get them encapsulated into lipid compartments forming ‘protocells’—candidates for the most primitive ancestors of living cells. While this was a pretty significant result, we had not kickstarted anything resembling evolution or something like genetic material to encode traits. We just couldn’t see a path forward to any of that.”

Facing this formidable mental block, Damer recognised he needed a “huge leap in mental capacity” to get beyond his constrained thinking, and seek solutions in a “novelty-generating complexity landscape”. In 2013 he returned to Peru for another set of ayahuasca sittings, this time applying the amplified cognition experienced on the psychedelic tea to his scientific problem.

“Over a decade of psychedelic exploration after my first trip in 1999, I had found that I could open up realms that were inaccessible to my waking state of consciousness,” Damer said. “And by 2013 I was familiar enough with these realms that I could go in and creatively engage in psychedelic space, in my case with a really tough problem in science.”

That journey found Damer “in a warm, little hot spring pool on the ancient Earth after traveling back metaphorically through four billion years”.

“Searching for protocells, I found my way into that pool. And then, surprisingly to me, I died and was reborn as that first protocell attempting its own division, at the very threshold of the living world.”

“As the tearing apart of the protocell was underway, I looked around and within my temporarily transformed body, I witnessed interacting polymers, and the code of life being read and written. The most confusing part of this vision was that the protocell division failed, and instead of birthing its twin, a black, dead compartment floated away. It was a huge mystery. It wasn’t a solution to the origin of life but instead it catalysed a new perspective and a reframing of the question.”

“Months later I realised that reframing, telling myself: ‘Don’t look at the pathway to the origin of life as solely a process of building from simple molecules to complex ones. Look at it from the very moment that the first cells become able to divide and work backwards from that point.’ It was a huge new insight but merely a first step.”

Realising the full potential of this epiphany required patience. It wasn’t until after a later “endo” trip triggered by a pranayama breathwork session that he experienced his eureka moment. (Damer distinguishes between “endogenous” or “endo” trips—heightened states of consciousness originating naturally from within the body—and “exogenous” or “exo” trips induced through psychoactive or other stimulants.)

“Three months later, I had an endo trip—an hour-long download—and a fully formed insight landed.”

“For me, there were four initial stages to this insight: first, the priming of the question through research, next the psychedelic-assisted or catalysed visionary experience, an incubation period, and then came the endo trip, initiated by breathwork, where it all was able to flow in full complexity.”

“The fifth stage was of course to translate these visionary insights into science—from my abstract sketches and notes into chemistry, and then into testable experiments in the laboratory and out into the field at hot springs around the world. The sixth and seventh stages came through peer review and publications and the resultant pushback and, hopefully, replication by colleagues.”

“I have been fortunate, through the unwavering support of my colleague Dave Deamer, to contribute to a breakthrough that has swept the field of astrobiology,” Damer continued. “While Dave brought in the wet-dry cycling chemistry of protocell formation in hot springs, my big picture visionary view contributed the full cycling evolutionary system and I attribute that to a combined use of ayahuasca and mindfulness practices.”