Spirit Molecule, The (2010) Movie Script
I saw this city in the deep deep distance, it was dark green
and there were many lights flickering and clouds flowing over it.
And all this started after a tremendous geometric patterns
that are incredibly rapid that
You cannot it describe it to anybody, they are so fast
After this slown down I saw this city in the deep distance.
So I was sort of watching that and then that ball of light got right pass me, right in front of me, like
"What was that?" It didn't scare me except it was so close.
After that I started looking around and it's like you're in this place
and you're going "Why am I in this place?"
and then I noticed there is this woman off to my right with a real long nose, green skin
she was turning this dial and I realized she was turning the volume of lights up and down
on the city in the distance.
And as soon as I looked at her she noticed I was watching her and she said
"What else do you want?" I said, "What else do you have?"
"The Spirit Molecule"
This is the story of "DMT" or dimethyltryptamine.
A simple compound found throghout nature which has
profound effects on human consciousness.
One of the things besides what it does, one of things about DMT that
that always fascinated me was the fact that it is such a simple molecule.
DMT stands for Dimethyltryptamine. N-N-dimethyltryptamine.
If actually you look at the ring structure of DMT itself
will only have really four positions you can attach things to.
So, you can make diethyl, dipropyl, there are some other types of carbon change you can attach to that end
that do give you compounds that have activity, but very different from DMT.
Biosynthetically it's two steps from tryptophan. Right.
Two trivial enzymatic steps from tryptophan.
Well, tryptophan is an amino acid and it's everywhere.
So all organisms have tryptophan and all organisms have the two key enzymes that lead to synthesis of DM
and these enzymes are very ancient enzymes, the're all over the place, they are a gem part of basic metabolism.
So, theoretically, anything could synthesize DMT.
DMT is astonishingly widely available in plants and animals all around the world
but so far nobody knows why it's there! Or what its function is.
That is a 64 billion dollars question.
Why is DMT in our bodies? Why is it in plants, all sorts of mammals?
What is the role it plays in humans?
The conventional wisdom 30, 40 years ago was that
these things had no real function and they were just sort of
a physiological noise. That's a very naive understanding and
what we now understand is that these secondary compounds are,
in a sense, the language of plants.
These are 'messenger' molecules.
This is what plants use to mediate their relationships with other organisms in the environment.
Why is it that human beings' actual nervous systems
are wired to receive this experience?
Must be, that a, you know, there's important information to be learned.
So I don't think it's universally present in nature by accident.
It has a real function, we have co-evolved with these plants.
There is a purpose in it and a meaning to it.
So it really fits in with the notion, that DMT may be the common
molecular language.
Resonant language among all living beings on this planet
and maybe others as well.
I can't think of a more powerful tool
to explore the whole question of: What is consciousness?
These substances are tools that can be used
to expand awareness in all areas of life and
apply that expanded awareness for the betterment
of people's lifes, communities and families and all society.
The good news is that there is a growing number of westerners and
actually intellectuals, scientists, artists, movers and shakers, filmmakers and so on
who realize that this stuff is all too interesting
just to go on keeping it swept under the rug.
And meanwhile, the Inquisition was a long time ago
the birth of rationalism was a long time ago
At this point there is no good reason, apart from bad habit, to keep up these barriers.
With the help of two concepts, that are traditionally opposed:
Science and spirituality
we humbly re-introduce psychedelics back in to the cultural dialogue.
DMT - the spirit molecule, you know, it's a conundrum, it's a paradox.
The spirit is the inner world, the molecule is the external world.
So the psychedelics are entheogens, take us from the science to the spirit.
I was drown to the pineal gland, which is a very small organ
in the center of the brain, which has always been an object of interest
and even veneration for a lot of esoteric physiological disciplines.
I thought, you know, it wasn't totally crazy to presume a
pineal's sign of origin of DMT,
which, you know, fit in nicely with my theory that the pineal was somehow
involved in naturally accuring mystical states.
This hypothesis proposes that the pineal gland, in certain times, it's
under specific stress stimulation, it releases a significant amount of this hormone, DMT.
And that's that hormone that facilitates the entrying and exiting of the soul in the body.
This is what the Jewish sage mystics have been describing
in a coded language for literally thousands of years.
Through meditation, through fasting, chanting, any number of techniques
their might be a bourst of endogenous DM
that is correlated with mystical and near-death experiences .
I had this theory that there is a big similarity between psychedelics and
experiences that were possible with a lot of meditation.
And that was one of the original findings that led me to start looking for a "spirit molecule."
For a compound in the brain that released mystical experience.
I think there may be a role for DMT in explaining any number of
hallucinatory phenomena that man has experienced throughout his history.
Creativity, imagination, dream states,
changes that occur due to isolation,
trauma, starvation, all of which produce hallucinatory phenomena.
These hallucinatory phenomena are explainable
by the presence of compounds known to produce hallucinations.
And the only compounds we know are capable of doing this
are the class of compounds knows as hallucinogens.
When thinking about spiritual states,
I think endogenous hallucinogenic compounds and molecules
that the brain can potentially release
are probably very relevant to this topic because
on one hand, they may really help us to elucidate
what is the neuro-chemical mechanism of these experiences. I mean
if we can say that there is a release of endogenous opioids or we can say that there's a release
of dopamine or something like that
and we can measure that release and we can see where in the brain those different molecules go.
What receptors they activate or deactivate.
And hence we can learn really a lot more about what these experiences are
because it can really allow us to match up these experiences
that people have with hallucinogens
as well as understanding where are they related in the context of the brain's receptors
and the different parts of the brain that can merely not become active.
One of the other interesting things about the pharmacology of DM
is that it is actively transported into the brain,
and so you have to wonder about the world of DMT in just every day normal perceptual, you know, activity.
Too much DMT and things become very psychedelic or you know
not enough, you know, DMT and the brain can make things dull and flat and gray.
There's something that, for me, makes sense about DMT. You call it the "spirit molecule"
To me it must be called the "reality molecule"
Philosophically, it makes sense that something that would be so fundamental to em
the way we perceive reality, would be in..em out there in reality.
There was a sense about it was something special.
That it wasn't like anything else. That wasn't like other psychodelics.
Its intensity and speed was such that it really produced a different kind of response.
I mean, I remember almost getting the sense that is was a kind of like a, like a psychedelic bungee jump.
That there was a kind of raw leap into this rapidly changing environment
that was very different from the more gradual approaches of other psychedelics.
Smoking DMT is sort of like the drive-by shooting of psychedelics.
You're in one place, BANG, you're in another place and then BANG, you're back down.
So it doesn't leave a whole lot of room for that narrative of
"Who am I?" "What am I doing here?" "Why am I in this space?" "What am I learning?"
It's almost like there was too much information to process in a few minute span
to integrate once you're dropped back down.
Dimethyltryptamine, when is administrated, has a very rapid onset
and a very short duration of action.
This is because it is very rapidly broken down by the body so that it can be cleared.
DMT is rapidly degraded by an enzyme in the liver called monoamine oxidase (MAO).
That is the reason why is not active when you take it by mouth.
In contrast, psilocybin
when you take it by mouth, it is not broken down by monoamine oxidase very quickly at all
so it gets through the liver and passes on into the bloodstream and into the brain.
Yea, I'm very interested in Ayahuasca.
When I begun my studies in the early 1990's,
Ayahuasca was just starting make it roads into the West.
Obviously it has become a lot more popular in the last 10, 15 years.
And the visionary ingredient in Ayahuasca is DMT.
Through some amazing feed of preliterate chemistry, the Amazonian natives
stumbled upon or combined, whatever. I don't know how they did it but they
found one plant contains DMT and one plant containes an enzyme inhibitor.
Combine them and you can drink DMT and it's orally active.
So it starts working in half an hour, last 3 or 4 hours
and you can, you know, maneuver a lot more comfortably
within that state then you can when you're just smoking it injecting it.
Orally active Ayahuasca tends to pick you up and gently carry you into the space and hug you
and embrace you and clean you and
show you all sorts of mystical visions and then it very gently brings you back
like you're floating on a feather back to the ground.
As valuable as my DMT experiences have been, I, em,
I feel there is lot more enduring value, really, in this folk technology
which streches it out and makes a navigable space.
Our whole western, you know, European-drived tradition of destilling alcohols and
isolating chemicals and making everything stronger
and taking it and out of nature and putting it into the biggest punch that we can.
I do not think that, generally, that's the most useful way.
I think there's a reason that cultures have learned to turn a 5 minute experience
into a 5 hour experience.
It seems to me that Ayahuasca has had a plan and that its reached out
into the world and brough DMT into many many thousands of lives
much bigger canvas than it had reached for the last ten thousands or however many years,
and it has done very rapidly, and it has done with form to go with it.
The Ayahuasca is much harder
for the power structures that we have now, it's much harder for them to put down
because it has been a part of a legitimate religious and spiritual practice
for thousands of years, certainly in the Amazon.
And we can't just dismissal that as primitive mumbo-jumbo and superstition.
We have to get a grips with that on its own terms.
I think there is a growing number of people who feel this desire
get back in touch with nature
with plants, with animals and who know
that through the shamanic path, there is way of doing this and that
actually these tools, these psychoactive tools for plants like Ayahuasca is a very
direct way of doing this. Now
it may not be everybody's cup of tea and I think
a lot of people are actually, with a reason, afraid of it.
I think like a lot of people in my generation
I first heard about DMT through Terence McKenna
there was a very funny way to become aware of such a poweful and interesting
and anthropologically rich topic as a compound like DMT because
it really became more, it was more of a concept
then something that people were necessarily taking.
DMT flash makes it clear that a disembodied consciousness is a possibility.
I that think the whole tension of history and the tension of life seems to be about the shedding of the body.
Terence was very ... he was a good promoter.
Basically he said it's the ultimate metaphysical reality pill.
Even though it's not a pill but
I though that was a pretty good characterization after I took it.
It would seem to be of a different order then LSD and mescaline and some of other things that were around.
DMT really did seem to be a whole different level of experience.
I ask you to suspend any opinions, either negative or positive about these compounds.
Whatever you believe their value to be
they continue to have profound effects wherever we find their use,
whether it's contemporary Western culture or in the Amazon rainforest.
It was in the 50's that the Ayahuasca churches starting going public.
You know there was a kind of transition from indigenous Indians to mestizo people in cities
and then these churches - the Santo Daime church and then the UDV church later
started doing ceremonies that would made
the Ayahuasca accessable not just to Indians
but to urban people in big cities
who are as far from the shamans as we are.
In the early 1990's, the UDV established
a branch of their church in the United States.
In the late 90's the U.S. customs department along with the DEA intercepted a shipment of ayahuasca.
The church protested the goverment action, they contented that it violated
the religious freedom restoration act.
And the case was heard in the U.S. Supreme Court, and in February 2006
their decision was announced and it was a unanimous decision on the side of the UDV.
Why is it that in the entire Western world, these substances that have been found to be
so interesting by a hundreds of cultures for thousands of years are prohibited?
How did these cultures that consider themselves to be enlightened
democratic and scientific get to declaring plants "illegal"?
It can seem weird, but there's clearly something deep and revealing
about the nature of these societes.
Our society values enlight problem solving and consciousness
devalues all other states of consciousness.
Any other kind of consciousness that is not related
to the production or consumption of material goods
is stigmatized in our society today.
Of course, we accept drunkenness.
We allow people some brief respite from the material grind.
A society that subscribes to that a model is a society
that is going to condamn the states of consciousness
that have nothing to do with the enlight problem-solving mentality.
And if you go back to the 1960s, when there was a tremendous upsearch of exploration of psychedelics
I would say that the huge backlash that followed that had to do with the fear on the part of the powers that be. That
if enough people went into those realms, had those experiences
the very fabric of the society we have today would be picked apart
and most importantly,
those in power at the top would not be in power at the top any more.
There was an optimism that was ungrounded, you know
the Vietnam was happening, all this real stuff was going on.
and that the psychodelic movement wasn't really addressing that
in a real way. And that Timothy and that, that bunch sold us a fuss, a bill of goods that didn't really work.
"We are now, whether we like it or not, is a psychochemical age.
In the future, it's not going to be what book you read, it's going to be what chemicals do you use
to open or close your conscienceness.
Chemicals can help us learn faster, chemicals can help us
expand or contract our consciousness."
The atmosphere in the 1960s was
"We're doing research here, we are dedicating our lives
to trying just about everything on the planet."
So we'd try it, the we would talk about it the we'd evaluated.
We regarded ourselves more or less as "spiritual pioneers."
The way I look at the 60s you can see as a kind of failed attempt
at a mass, cultural voyage of initiation.
People would, you know, try to go out to these other realities, but they didn't have a basis
there weren't wisdom traditions, elders, there weren't like connections of shamanic lineages.
People would grow out and they would like kinda smash apart.
Timothy Leary really so discredited a scientific approach to studying this
because we started off doing interesting research and then
got into advocating use in a way that was incredibly threatening. Culturally we reacted
and politically it became impossible to do this sort of research.
Funding agencies didn't make resources available, regulatory agencies
increased the practical hurtals for initiating this kind of research.
And I think people, who had interest in research
of this type largely were discredited because
of their interest in the research.
Social, political, scientific issues
that came together pushed these drugs out of the scientific marketplace.
The public opinion in many cases had become that psychedelic research was dangerous.
The wide public was uninformed about the true nature of these compounds
and what their importance may be in the understanding of perception itself.
One of the tragedies to me is that the clinical research
on these substances pretty much stopped
around 1970.
And for me it is especially tragic because
I really believe that these substances played a mayor role
on the development of our philosophy
and thinking throughout the world.
What a lot of people don't realize is that psychiatry up until the 50s
in the field in general had no concept that
neurochemistry played any role in emotion or behavior,
which today seems really bizarre. And the
discovery of LSD and its potent effects on the human psyche
occurred almost contemporaneously with the discovery of serotonin
as a molecule in the brain.
And it was really when people looked at the structure of serotonin
and compared it with LSD that they really began to think, you know
states". If LSD had not been discovered, I doubt we would have
any of the drugs we have or at least not as quickly
as we do have for treating depression and so forth.
Once these drugs became abused and scandalized, psychiatry had to really work hard
you know, to distance themselves from any valid scientific, you know, scientifically meritorious relationship with psychedelics.
Being a psychiatrist and saying you want to learn or study about psychedelics it's, you know, it's not that well received.
And a, And I made one mention, one time that
I was really discouraged from bringing it up again for actually a number of years.
For cultural reasons
the whole class of compounds got pulled of the clinical bench
and no research was going on for 40 years.
So scientifically, I can't imagine a more exciting area to be persuing
How does one go about studying these plants and compounds?
Plants and compounds which produce unimaginable experiences
and can put a shed of light on one of humanity's greatest mysteries
In order, to answer that question,
Dr. Strassman conducted the first
human psychedelic research in a generation.
One of the things that I had established early on was being able to descriminate
between studies in the scientific round and recreational use.
But in the early 1980s I reviewed all of that literature and could pretty well established
on that if people were really carefully screened
and supervised and then followed up that the incidents and adversary reactions to LSD
and related psychodelic drugs was extremely low.
The drug or the compound or the chemical that seemed like the best candidate
to sort of reopen the U.S. front on psychodelic research, would be DMT.
It was really exciting for me because I though this is the first study
in a generation, and not only that.
Despite the fact that DMT had been used safely in earlier studies
and it was a natural component of the brain
DMT is one of the most profound and potent psychedelics known.
So it wasn't just an initiation of clinical research
it was a reinitiation of clinical research with an extremely potent drug.
I was at a strong opinion that you could do this studies
and Rick agreed so we had a number of discussions
and at some point the discussion came up, you know
"Dave, what if I do all this paperwork and spend all this time
and get to end of things and I'm ready to go and I can't get the DMT? "
And that was a real possibility, because DMT, clinical gray DM
wasn't a chemical used by on shelves somewhere
And I told Rick: "If you get to that point, and no one will make it
then I will do it. "
And ultimately Rick got to that point, and I made it.
The design of the study was fairly straightforward:
give people DMT and measure as many variables as possible.
I had to sort of anticipate a lot of objections that would come my way
from the regulatory agencies that oversee this kind research.
So at that point began a two-year process of dealing with
not that many regulatory agencies, but fairly monolithic ones.
One sort of the side line of the protocol
was the involvement of a psychiatrist from UCLA named Daniel Freeman.
He was a kind of one of the grand old men of American psychiatry
and actually he was one of the people who in the 50 'and 60'
got their start with psychedelic research.
And the main thing that Daniel Freeman told Rick, told us, was
"Don't even get close to psychotherapy."
"Forget about treating mental illness or alcoholism or anything."
"Forget that. That's what roll the hysterias up, that's roll the fears get up."
"You're a scientist, Rick. Approach it as a scientist.
Do basic simple measurements, look at heart-rate, cardiovascular suppressors."
"You won't get in trouble doing that, you can get it founded and it's solid science."
Rick did what he said, be has then he still was able to get these, you know, accounts of what happened
That was not in the plan, was not what was really proposed in the studies that were founded
That wasn't what Danny talked about.
But those was the spin-off that really made it interesting.
Rick Strassman, was advertising in some magazine somewhere
about the wanting volunteers for a particular study
in you know,psychotropic, and I didn't, didn't know DMT from STP at that time.
I remember reading that and thinking "Oh my God, this is bad"
"I better get involved in this and make sure that somebody doesn't get hurt and
and at least there be some sensitivity towards what this stuff is really about."
I met Rick's research nurse at a party
and she heard me talking about that I had used peyote, ceremonially
and she took me aside and said "There's something that you might be interested in"
"We're looking for subjects, volunteer subjects for some unusual research."
I was a little concerned that the study participants might be a litte obnoxious
maybe that's not the right word but, you know, people that were just seeking to do a lot of drugs
they were very professional people.
They were varying degrees as to how much hallucinogen use they had been through. It seemed like
there were some people that felt like they had made it kind of their life mission
to experience every kind of substance out there.
And then other poeple who, I think, were just interested for their own personal growth and curiosity.
Once we actually got into the preparation for the actual trips,
Rick asked me about roller coasters.
"Do you like roller coasters?"
"You know, the sensation of going up really high and then slamming back down towards earth."
and I said "No, I hate them, their horrible"
and he said "Not good."
I just wanted to go with the experience, learn as much as I could, absorbe as much as I could
and be humble to it.
The idea of legally sanctioned psychedelics was just very compelling
Plus, you're in a hospital so should you get that
uncomfortable experience that you're dying, you're
with doctors in a very safe environment from that point of view.
I mean, this was very cutting edge, very, out there, very. It was high risk, and a
people knew what they were getting into, and they wanted to have the extra reassurance
and I was glad actually, to have a crash card in the room,
and a team in the hospital to respond any emergencies.
You're in this hospital room
and there's all the sounds and the smells and just
the prior experience is being in the hospital.
You know, all these negative things come back so there was the
whole environment to be overcomed
because little did I know that it didn't matter where I was,
I wasn't gonna be in my body, I was gonna be out in the universe
and it didn't matter where you watched from, it could be a hospital room, it could be
the jungle in the Amazon, it didn't matter where you were because you weren't gonna stay there.
"Set & setting" is so important,
it's even more important than the substance, more important than the substance
"Set & setting" is everything.
Now, what is the "set & setting" when you're blindfolded.
The "set & setting" is not what you're seeing, because you're not seeing anything
The "set & setting"is your internal self,
the things that you have learned, the capacities that you have achieved,
the conditions of your own psyche and psychology.
These are your "set & setting".
It's the medicine combined with the interacting with the "set & setting"
that creates an effect of safety, of trust, of comfort and of resourcefulness
and makes it possible for you to take some big leaps and receive some big gifts
and if that's not there, you just get terrified.
So I was, I didn't have really physical fear so much that they would die or have a stroke
I did have some fears about peoples' mental health, you know
especially with some of the higher doses.
We gave one genteman, who had a lot of experience with the drug,
one dose, and he didn't think it took him far enough
So then we gave him a higher dose and he was gone,
he was really gone, it reminded me of something from "The Exorcist", I mean
he just fuum, stood fold-up on the bed and his eyes opened up and they were completely dilated and black,
and I almost thought he was gonna turn his head completely around.
I remember looking at Rick and Rick looked at me and I thought "Oh my God, he's gone, I hope he comes" and he did.
The countdown was like, you know, cutting down for your.., preparing for your death, like waiting to surrender and...
You'd feel the coldness, the coldness just going through your veins and it's really indescribable, it's hard to..
you know, it's like ice going through your veins.
And the next thing that would happen, besides my racing heart,
is this burning sensation what happended on the back of my neck, I mean this was reliable, this is like clockwork, this happened every time that you shocked me up with DMT.
And then there be a hum, and the hum will get louder and louder
and to the point where it broke apart, everything that I was or knew, it was just this [sound]
It was just louder and louder until you just had to surrender to the sound
and then you were.. there.
I would get a warmful feeling, a golden feeling in my chest, before it went to my head.
I feel this warm rod, about an inch and a half in diameter start growing up inside my spinal canal.
It would come up and sort of slow, warm up my chest, go up through my head
Slow down and put tremendous pressure on my sightednesses behind my eyes, slow down.
Start to grow and stand the skin behind my forehead about one inch behind my hairline when it and
I thought it was gonna pop-up the skin a few times, because it is a very physical feeling.
About and inch and a half, two inches above my skull.
when it pop through there then the psychedelic tripping started.
I thought I died.
I saw the white clouds,
Renaissance, white fluffy clouds, with the gods and the angels and that all stuff, that's what I saw.
I thought I was dying and going out but
I did take a quick look at Sindy and a quick look at Rick as I had my eyes open and
they were both there watching, looking very calmly.
And I thought "That's really good news, my body looks fine."
So I didn't know whether it was my birth, I was re-experiencing
my death which was yet to come because I, I know that
time crubmles, the linearity of time is totally meaningless in these states.
You are at the God-head, the point where all time folds in on itself.
More and more layers of my humanity start peeling off
finally
The last, you know, almost the last layer and I can not even describe what it is
but at some reaches way in there is like the last layer of that, which defines you as a human being
and it goes [khkk].
You're not longer a human being, in fact, you are no longer anything you can identify.
There is no concept of time, it was so disorienting
I was so terrified, I have never in my entire life, been so terrified.
To be blasted out of my body
To leave my body behind, to be going
at warp speed, backwards, through my own DNA,
out the other end, into the universe.
And so I went right under this white light.
As soon as I went into it, I lost any sense of being different.
Any sense of what I was doing, past, any sense of future.
It was absolutely blissful and euphoric and I just felt like
it wouldn't I. I was everything.
I was the light, there is no sense of separation, no shadows, no differences
no past, no future, it was all present and a white-yellow light.
Then I felt myself falling out of this light,
and as I felt out of it, I could feel the light was like a glow, like the sun with flames coming out.
Lapping out, and I could already start to feel this tremendous separation.
I reached across and it was suddenly I'm in the Universe, in this huge void
with these beings on the other side and I
put out my hands in this incredible rainbow of pink light, went between me and these entities.
And i was trying to make it be like a white light.
But it was this incredible pink light, this energy of love
that we, this capacity of love, that we as humans beings have, that I was trying to just send to them.
This meteorite trip through the infinite space of the interior consciousness is
up pops the picture puzzled pattern door and
I'm now whizzing through this sucker, like if it was nothing, I'm flying through it.
But now I know what the picture puzzled pattern door is.
The picture puzzled pattern door is the furthest reaches of your humanity.
This is the doorway into the, what defines you as a human being.
When you go pass that, you stop being human to a degree
and the further you get pass this point, the futher away you go from being a human being.
But right here this picture puzzled pattern door is everything, it's everything what defines you as a human being.
This is your ...
This picture puzzled pattern door is you!
This is like the actual core of where all of reality is emanating from.
This is where meaning comes from, symbols were pouring out, they were intertwined.
Every symbol and, or letter in every language
was pouring out of this point.
And I looked around in my environment and I was trying to absorb everything, to understand
but there were all of these machines or structures or things that
I had never seen before, that I had no idea what they were
I was like a caveman in a computer lab.
I didn't have any idea, but I knew in my intellectual awarness that this
was a very advanced civilization or
life forms or whatever they were,
they were, they were so far advanced from what we know here on Earth.
There's one state of, in it, I call it "the hobby horses"
and they're interlocking, articulating, vibrating hobby horses
and I use that and that's what they seem like to me. They interlock and
they form a visual pattern thats seems infinite in scape.
And then you on the inside, outside, inside, everyside.
And so it's less possible to use, you know, words sort of start to escape you.
The texture of the space was very much like an animated Mexican tile.
It seemed to be hyper vivid in color, in a technicolor sense.
But also very clay-like in earth, you know, like with an earthen
pointing towards Earth, but not really being on Earth.
There was no eye, there was just a sense of a witness.
Being suspended on this incredible vaulted space.
Like a cathedral made out of a stained glass of all imaginable colors.
Unbelievable brilliance and saturation of color.
Just this amazing pattern in this dome, this gigantic dome, it was.
It felt like, it was like the size of a small planet.
And were these winged beings, I don't remember exactly what they looked like.
Angels? Something like angels that were majestically kind of flying through the space.
But there was something about the quality of how they were flying, it was unique and I've never seen anything like it.
It was like a sense of another realm that was there.
My sense was at some point, there was this implicit sense: "This is the divine realm. This is the divine realm.".
It was not like a thought, but it like was this implicit kind of groaking (??) recognition.
It was all very, very impersonal
until I got to this space where I realized that I was in the area
where the souls await rebirth.
And I was there and I had been there
so many times before, I recognized it
and this incredible transcendent peace came over me, I have never in my life
ever felt such peace.
Everything was stripped away, every hope, every fear, every attachment
to the material world was completely stripped out of me.
I was free to just be the essence of a soul.
After the medicine wore off
There is that familiar sensation of kind of coming back into the body
I do remember that,
that was part of almost all these experiences, of, kind of
coalescing back into sensory awareness.
And a sense of having a body, and of that becoming a little more substantial
and "Oh yeah, here I am, I live in a body and I'm okay."
So Laura removes the eye shades
and I ask not really with my eyes open quite yet.
I ask: "How long I was gone?"
Because I needed to know.
And Rick chimes in like "15 minutes".
For a moment I'm shocked. I'm like, you know.
The mind has to try to catch up.
Because now whe whole cognitive dissonance of the experience has to, has to catch up.
I was gone for 15 minutes!
A thousand years of experience, in 15 minutes.
Well, to say the least, it was profound, it was, it was profound.
I mean, it's amazing, it's amazing what a human being can experience
in a hospital bed.
I mean they can experience almost the whole universe
you know, life, death, everything in between.
This is not some recreational thing
and I don't believe anybody should enter this lightly,
it is life-transformitive.
It will perhaps shake you enough to realize
you know, that you need to be awake to the fact that you don't know,
and that is the beginning of starting to know.
What we see here is such a tiny part of what is real.
I get really frustrated, because awcourse there is no way to prove that where I went
was deep space that I encountered, you know
other entities, other life forms that exist in this universe.
At some point maybe our civilization will become advanced enough and we will
through off these anchors of impossible thought that these things are impossible, that it's not, you know
everything that exists, exists where we can see it.
I wrapped-up the studies in the `95 and a
really just had to take a break for a couple of years.
I was aware of a growing sense of discomfort with what I was doing
because I just couldn't explain it and a
seemed to me if I couldn't model an explain of what was going on, that I was doing and just
you know, bring in people to the edge of these kinds of experiences, it seemed
like I ought to. I was a little irresponsible to be
sort of pushing people off the cliff like that,
without really knowing exactly where I was and accepting and understanding and feeling comfortable with that model and em,
you know, I think what began downing on me after a while since I stopped the study
was that I was really dealing with a spiritual phenomenon.
What do these experiences say about the nature of reality,
the nature of our minds
or the function of our brain that we can so quickly shift
into these alternate realities?
Let's take a step back and consider how these experiences inform us
about ourselves, our conscience and the symbiosis of the two.
It started seeming to me that what was happening with DM
particularly with respect to some of these
reports of entering parallel or alternative, free standing parallels
sorts of realms of existances, that indeed was what their consciousness was doing.
The chemistry of their brain, which is the organ of consciousness, was being changed by DM
in such a way that they could then receive information
that we weren't able to receive normally.
Yes, there's the experiences from DMT and ayahuasca, and they have their, their function
but if we also look at what it enables us to see.
It just reaps that filtering mechanism away for a few minutes
and for a few minutes you're emmersed in sort of this raw data sfere
of input, of sensory input, of memories, of associations, I mean
it seems like the brain builds reality out of these things,
what you're experiencing, what you have experienced and
how associate and synthesize these things together to tell youself a story, essentially
about what's going on, where you are in space and time.
It's the brain that helps to process all this information
and to create for us an audition of what our world is all about
but we're trapped within that brain.
However, in spiritual experiences where people feel
that they get beyond theirself.
In certain types of psychedelic experiences,
where you have incredible sensory and other types of phenomena
people really feel like they are able to kind of get outside of their brain.
We have to take a really big look at what is going on within them, when they have the experience
and try to understand how it happens physiologically
and try to make sense of it from the subjective perspective as well as from the objective perspective,
I don't think you can just say, "Let's just explain it away from on the basis of science."
What I was doing early on when I was hearing these reports
were interpreting them kind of psychological
or em brain chemistry aberrations or whatever.
There's a part of the brain was being dinged that was responsible for
the alien appearance phenomenon.
This is not a new phenomenon.
Entities in altered states have been recognized for
an extremaly long time in many cultures over the millennia.
Helpers, spirits, assistants, angels,
all of these different entities have been fairly common throughout
man's experiences of altered states
and through much of man's mythology.
I don't think it's a possibility that people are, in some way, interacting with some sort
of an intelligence or scenic being or something that exists
at some level that's not in this three-dimensional physical plane.
I'm looking at it from a sense of:
"Okay, is the drug healing you?"
"Is it helping you?"
and, and or, "is it, is it giving you the tools?", "what are bringing back?"
What you bring back, I think, has to be something more than
these entities out there.
The best psychedelic explorers,
are people who realize that even
the "truths" they see on a trip
are not "truths", but "new models", new "what-ifs" alternative frames.
Unless their is a map and a clear methodology
then one will just have a variety of different experiences.
All these various experiences that have been reported
from NDEs, near-death experiences,
alien abductions, alien encounters,
sexual ecstasy,
I believe all of these experiences, in fact, are fractals.
If we understand the concept of fractal geometry,
no matter how small it is,
it contains everything that is in the larger picture
and thus that validates, profoundly, all these various experiences.
Discount the phenomenon as hallucinatory or imaginary,
I think it's maybe more useful to look at the mechanism of action, you know,
If it is real than perhaps, how does it work?
Look, there's extraordinary regular phenomena
that come-up with these things, that are clearly linked
in many ways to these larger
human issues around mysticism or religious experiences
or encounters with other entities.
And here we have it.
And if you can't go in there, and really go in there and account for this material
inside your neuro-scientific framework,
you're leaving a huge gap.
You gotta account for this stuff the way you gotta account for dreams, the way you gotta account for
all sorts of psychoactive responses.
Using DMT is an explanatory model, as kind of a mediator between our consciousness and a
a consciousness of a non-corporeal sort of reality, you know. It's handy.
With DMT, there are no words
I would try to wrap mathematical vocabulary around the experience afterwards.
I
I specialize in the metaphor of vibration.
And how vibrations influence creative form.
That would be the key to the relationship between the spiritual realm and the ordinary realm.
This was the window that was opened by DMT.
Using psychedelic drugs or other types of pharmacological substances
can help to induce a state
where people feel that they
touch a deeper sensive reality.
Where they understand the reality on a more fundamental level.
And they gain a great deal of inside knowledge into the ways in which the world works
and how they are, as a human being, supposed to relate to that world.
DMT is somehow, seems to me in my experience
more of a break-through than LSD, mushrooms, peyote and so on.
It's instructive, it's more supportive of futury evolution and the creation of future
and it is in itself, more of a mistery.
How could this little stuff produce something that
has intelligence.
It is actually a doorway to another reality.
So, what is the nature of reality?
And what is the nature of how we, as human beings experience it?
Can we understand it better?
Are we capable of understanding reality on some very fundamental levels?
And what we need to do in order to prepare for that?
You know, there are parallel universes, it seems, at least that's the theory in modern physics.
There is dark matter, which is
a huge amount of the matter of the universe, perhaps 95% or more.
It's radical a ideas just a logical extension in some ways of a
instead of using a machine to see more than we normally can see,
we're using the brain.
There are fields which are undiscovered so far
which have nothing to do with anything that is discovered so far.
The gravitational field, you know,
was unknown before the year 1604.
The electromagnetic field
unknown before the year 1830 or something.
All of these, what we call fundamental fields of mathematical physics
are new discoveries.
Dark energy is even newer discovery and beyond that are
maybe more discoveries yet coming beyond our cosmos itself,
and higher dimensions as they say.
I still don't have very much use for the concept of God
but I do believe that there are higher levels, transcendent levels of reality
and I'm now actually now starting to really believe that
the brain is not the source of consciousness,
it's not really who we are but
it's more like a radio tuner for something way bigger.
Are these experiences "spiritual experiences" or
otherwise are they created by physiological processes or
is the brain itself responding to something that's going on?
And the fact that somebody may actually find a way of "turning on" their brain
to spiritual experiences.
Again, I'm not sure that this necessarily diminishes the reality
or the realness of what these experiences are about.
If the pharmacology or psychopharmacology of
psychedelic experiences turn up to be
essentially the same as religious or spiritual experiences,
it would help us to understand where these experiences are occuring within the human brain.
I'm actually quite, quite convinced
that we're probing the biological basis of moral and ethical behavior,
I think that these primary religious experiences
really are a bed rock of the world's religions.
The research and knowledge, speculation about the pineal body and DM
is in fact
the hand of God, that is interacting with our natural evolution
to stimulate and accelerate the process of redemption
of individual and of collective global enlightment.
Because of my ayahuasca experiences I consider myself a
spiritual person, I know things now that I could never have known otherwise.
These experiences, so familiar for a lot of different people
and it's so easily aquired
and so much information come with so little effort, that it is a kind of a miracle,
it's a miraculous way for us to transcend ordinary reality and obtain
maybe an intimation of what's necessary for survival.
Ranging from new forms of medical treatment
to a better understanding of the Universe
to life changing spiritual revelations,
these natural tools offer us the ability to seek greater knowledge.
Tools that can positively effect life on our planet.
Let's answer Dr Strassman's question.
If so ... so what?
Because of the collapse of consciousness
spiritual and scientific knowledge split apart.
Both these modes of knowing have to come together in order to science and technology
from a traditional religious perspective is not an extra,
it is part of the process by which humanity is going to evolve into its next stage.
How do we find like the right form for psychedelics in the future?
Asssuming that psychedelics are part of the human future
at the moment they're still, you know, generally repressed and suppressed and illegal.
If that were to change,
how would we begin to construct a kind of a
system that would allow for, for kind of rational and mature exploration of the psychedelics?
I think that the name of the game is to
show science the pertinence of this somewhat outlandish realm.
It's not just crazy stuff.
It shouldn't be considered as, let's say, not even worthy of interest or illegitimate,
I actually think because it's
declared off bounds, it just makes it interesting to with start.
But one doesn't want to throw the baby with the bath water
and I think it's really important to
stay faithful to science.
What does it mean? why is there a part of the brain that seems to be
for lack of a better word "a God-detector"? You know.
What's the evolutionary advantage to having some part of the brain
that seems to, you know,
trigger and mediate experiences of the transcendent?.
The Kabbalah is revealing to us that the pineal body is actually
is the very edge of the higher dimension that is
penetrating into our lower dimension, and it is located
precisely in the middle of the brain
I can remember reading about Descartes,
thinking that is was actually the interface between
the spiritual dimension and the dimension of matter.
I remember studying that as a foolish idea from our history
and now it seems actually like a very interesting idea.
What we are looking for out there
is really in here.
It is the doorway, it is the gate.
So we focus on the transformative effect of the psychedelics
but it's also true, the reverse is true that
it requires transformation in order to
embrace psychedelics. You know.
It's one of the tricky paradoxes of postmodernism,
that psychedelics both require and produce a transformative effect.
We have severed our connection to spirit.
That's what our society has done,
it is sort to persuade us that the material realm is the only realm,
and the only way we're going to recover it is to reconnect with spirit.
And I truelly believe we need the help of the plants in order to do that.
Part of our work is to respect these, these medicines and then
to change the culture enough that, that people
doing them can be respected and healed and
not everybody
needs to do them, not everybody should or wants to but
there it isn't pushed to the side and so part of that
does involve then research, because that's how in our
reductionist society we validate things.
With the passing of the years, and the opportunity for sober reflection, I think
there's a groving appreciation that there may be something to gain
from studying these compounds,
there's a lot we can learn and there
may very well be treatment models, particularly for patient populations
for whom conventional treatments are ineffective,
for whom the psychedelic model were utilized optimally, may provide great benefit.
I think the most important thing that we could do right now that would be
fairly straightforward to do is to
ask and answer the question of whether Ayahuasca could help
people who have drugs and alcohol abuse.
And given that we know that DMT and similiar alkaloids have a very strong effect
on the same receptors sites that are involved in depression.
And the notion that most people, in my experience,
who use drugs and alcohol are self-medicating a deep depression or an anxiety.
I've had permission now over the last years to utilize psilocybin
which is the active alkaloid in hallucinogenic mushrooms
in the treatment of patients with advanced staged cancer who have anxiety
for treating the anxiety, not the cancer.
Now, the psilocybin is 4-phosphorylixy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine so
obviously from the chemical structure point of view, you know, very similar to DMT.
Ultimately, what I want to do is
see these things used in a way they were used traditionally
to heal people, help people
and right now
helping people come to terms with dying.
It changes your whole relationship to your death, you're impending death,
believe it or not, you're gonna die.
And now with this tool with having crossed over already
you will, some of the fear around that will disappear.
Now I am beginning to wonder whether consciousness may actually survive biological death.
That maybe the model that we've been working under
in psychiatry and behavioural pharmacology model,
it's just wrong, it's backwards actually.
The consciousness is primarily in the universe and matter is a result of.
Utilizing substances like DMT or 5-methoxy-DM
may really help us prepare
by practicing a transcent dying experience.
As far we're observing,
very positive effects in regards to
the nature of the experience during the session,
and then subsequent effects on mood regulation,
and anxiety control, pain perception
and overall quality of life for cancer patients.
By large our subjects do quite well in the time they have remaining.
For those people who do come to terms with it,
part of this is a recognition that psychedelics have opened
a space that they weren't aware it existed
and sort of give them a vision of what could be pass death, as well as
a better perspective on the accomplishments they've made in life,
a better feeling about what they have done in their own lives.
What I think all people who have had psychedelic trips and meditations and so on are poking
more or less into the same higher realm
and receiving some information.
If we can develop this, into, this could absorbed into
ordinary science that we could approach with the scientific method and so on then
our intelligence, capability of survival on planet Earth,
would be increased.
We were a dying species, we
live on a dying planet, we're killing the planet
so our disease is extremely serious,
and therefore we're desperate to find new information, ideas and so on
that can transcend.
We have to evolve, and I think our intellectual evolution
may be predicated upon the psychedelic pioneers.
It's so easy to change the world, I mean
that's the kind of thing that you can see
on psychedelics.
If you don't get trapped in the beauty of the psychedelic experience itself.
You know, it's like looking through
the chandelier of reality from a different vantage point, you know
You can now project through those crystals in another way
and is beautiful.
But ...
Okay, now come back, you know, now come back.
I think if I ever were to resume giving people psychodelics, particularly DMT,
it wouldn't be just a kind of tinker with brain chemistry and just see what's happening.
I think one of the things I've also learned in the research
is that you just don't wanna give drugs and see what happens, that's a little
I don't know if calais is the right word but that's the first word that comes to mind, I think, if you really gonna
open people up like that, you need to do it for a purpose
not just for scientific curiosity and, you know, like to be helpful
rather that just sort of smart or clever.
To my mind are, is this kind of a two edge sword of simultaneously opening up to the new menious world
to the world of messages, the world of spirits, the world of entities.
And and the same time, rigorously, taking that material into the acid bath of neurology,
into sociology, into the ongoing construction of reality.
And that the wisdom that these things bring, is this kind of
a very tricky mixture of authentic religious experience
with gods, and messages and clear signs
and a sort of a remarkable mirror of the mind.
The curiosity, perhaps the uniqueness of the human creature
is that we live in both realms.
We have the ability for spiritual experience and
have the ability for physical experience.
The agenda of the spirit world, if there is an agenda
is to allow us to experience our full potential and to deliver our full potential
and maybe the choices that we are making right now
as a civilization of the society, rebound far beyond ourselves.
I think DMT is a forceable reminder that there's
a lot more about reality, the universe, ourselves,
the biosphere, whatever that we, there's a lot more to it than we imagine.
It seems our reality is not the only reality,
occasionally the cracks reveal themselves
and may even want to be discovered.
As humans, we are creatures that thirsts for knowledge.
We spend time, money and infinite energy searching for it
in schools, in churches, in business and in technology.
Knowledge is power and thus our greatest quest.
Dimethyltryptamine.
A molecule with a complex name and the simplest ability
to unlock the door to another dimension,
and perhaps, just perhaps, our future evolution.
and there were many lights flickering and clouds flowing over it.
And all this started after a tremendous geometric patterns
that are incredibly rapid that
You cannot it describe it to anybody, they are so fast
After this slown down I saw this city in the deep distance.
So I was sort of watching that and then that ball of light got right pass me, right in front of me, like
"What was that?" It didn't scare me except it was so close.
After that I started looking around and it's like you're in this place
and you're going "Why am I in this place?"
and then I noticed there is this woman off to my right with a real long nose, green skin
she was turning this dial and I realized she was turning the volume of lights up and down
on the city in the distance.
And as soon as I looked at her she noticed I was watching her and she said
"What else do you want?" I said, "What else do you have?"
"The Spirit Molecule"
This is the story of "DMT" or dimethyltryptamine.
A simple compound found throghout nature which has
profound effects on human consciousness.
One of the things besides what it does, one of things about DMT that
that always fascinated me was the fact that it is such a simple molecule.
DMT stands for Dimethyltryptamine. N-N-dimethyltryptamine.
If actually you look at the ring structure of DMT itself
will only have really four positions you can attach things to.
So, you can make diethyl, dipropyl, there are some other types of carbon change you can attach to that end
that do give you compounds that have activity, but very different from DMT.
Biosynthetically it's two steps from tryptophan. Right.
Two trivial enzymatic steps from tryptophan.
Well, tryptophan is an amino acid and it's everywhere.
So all organisms have tryptophan and all organisms have the two key enzymes that lead to synthesis of DM
and these enzymes are very ancient enzymes, the're all over the place, they are a gem part of basic metabolism.
So, theoretically, anything could synthesize DMT.
DMT is astonishingly widely available in plants and animals all around the world
but so far nobody knows why it's there! Or what its function is.
That is a 64 billion dollars question.
Why is DMT in our bodies? Why is it in plants, all sorts of mammals?
What is the role it plays in humans?
The conventional wisdom 30, 40 years ago was that
these things had no real function and they were just sort of
a physiological noise. That's a very naive understanding and
what we now understand is that these secondary compounds are,
in a sense, the language of plants.
These are 'messenger' molecules.
This is what plants use to mediate their relationships with other organisms in the environment.
Why is it that human beings' actual nervous systems
are wired to receive this experience?
Must be, that a, you know, there's important information to be learned.
So I don't think it's universally present in nature by accident.
It has a real function, we have co-evolved with these plants.
There is a purpose in it and a meaning to it.
So it really fits in with the notion, that DMT may be the common
molecular language.
Resonant language among all living beings on this planet
and maybe others as well.
I can't think of a more powerful tool
to explore the whole question of: What is consciousness?
These substances are tools that can be used
to expand awareness in all areas of life and
apply that expanded awareness for the betterment
of people's lifes, communities and families and all society.
The good news is that there is a growing number of westerners and
actually intellectuals, scientists, artists, movers and shakers, filmmakers and so on
who realize that this stuff is all too interesting
just to go on keeping it swept under the rug.
And meanwhile, the Inquisition was a long time ago
the birth of rationalism was a long time ago
At this point there is no good reason, apart from bad habit, to keep up these barriers.
With the help of two concepts, that are traditionally opposed:
Science and spirituality
we humbly re-introduce psychedelics back in to the cultural dialogue.
DMT - the spirit molecule, you know, it's a conundrum, it's a paradox.
The spirit is the inner world, the molecule is the external world.
So the psychedelics are entheogens, take us from the science to the spirit.
I was drown to the pineal gland, which is a very small organ
in the center of the brain, which has always been an object of interest
and even veneration for a lot of esoteric physiological disciplines.
I thought, you know, it wasn't totally crazy to presume a
pineal's sign of origin of DMT,
which, you know, fit in nicely with my theory that the pineal was somehow
involved in naturally accuring mystical states.
This hypothesis proposes that the pineal gland, in certain times, it's
under specific stress stimulation, it releases a significant amount of this hormone, DMT.
And that's that hormone that facilitates the entrying and exiting of the soul in the body.
This is what the Jewish sage mystics have been describing
in a coded language for literally thousands of years.
Through meditation, through fasting, chanting, any number of techniques
their might be a bourst of endogenous DM
that is correlated with mystical and near-death experiences .
I had this theory that there is a big similarity between psychedelics and
experiences that were possible with a lot of meditation.
And that was one of the original findings that led me to start looking for a "spirit molecule."
For a compound in the brain that released mystical experience.
I think there may be a role for DMT in explaining any number of
hallucinatory phenomena that man has experienced throughout his history.
Creativity, imagination, dream states,
changes that occur due to isolation,
trauma, starvation, all of which produce hallucinatory phenomena.
These hallucinatory phenomena are explainable
by the presence of compounds known to produce hallucinations.
And the only compounds we know are capable of doing this
are the class of compounds knows as hallucinogens.
When thinking about spiritual states,
I think endogenous hallucinogenic compounds and molecules
that the brain can potentially release
are probably very relevant to this topic because
on one hand, they may really help us to elucidate
what is the neuro-chemical mechanism of these experiences. I mean
if we can say that there is a release of endogenous opioids or we can say that there's a release
of dopamine or something like that
and we can measure that release and we can see where in the brain those different molecules go.
What receptors they activate or deactivate.
And hence we can learn really a lot more about what these experiences are
because it can really allow us to match up these experiences
that people have with hallucinogens
as well as understanding where are they related in the context of the brain's receptors
and the different parts of the brain that can merely not become active.
One of the other interesting things about the pharmacology of DM
is that it is actively transported into the brain,
and so you have to wonder about the world of DMT in just every day normal perceptual, you know, activity.
Too much DMT and things become very psychedelic or you know
not enough, you know, DMT and the brain can make things dull and flat and gray.
There's something that, for me, makes sense about DMT. You call it the "spirit molecule"
To me it must be called the "reality molecule"
Philosophically, it makes sense that something that would be so fundamental to em
the way we perceive reality, would be in..em out there in reality.
There was a sense about it was something special.
That it wasn't like anything else. That wasn't like other psychodelics.
Its intensity and speed was such that it really produced a different kind of response.
I mean, I remember almost getting the sense that is was a kind of like a, like a psychedelic bungee jump.
That there was a kind of raw leap into this rapidly changing environment
that was very different from the more gradual approaches of other psychedelics.
Smoking DMT is sort of like the drive-by shooting of psychedelics.
You're in one place, BANG, you're in another place and then BANG, you're back down.
So it doesn't leave a whole lot of room for that narrative of
"Who am I?" "What am I doing here?" "Why am I in this space?" "What am I learning?"
It's almost like there was too much information to process in a few minute span
to integrate once you're dropped back down.
Dimethyltryptamine, when is administrated, has a very rapid onset
and a very short duration of action.
This is because it is very rapidly broken down by the body so that it can be cleared.
DMT is rapidly degraded by an enzyme in the liver called monoamine oxidase (MAO).
That is the reason why is not active when you take it by mouth.
In contrast, psilocybin
when you take it by mouth, it is not broken down by monoamine oxidase very quickly at all
so it gets through the liver and passes on into the bloodstream and into the brain.
Yea, I'm very interested in Ayahuasca.
When I begun my studies in the early 1990's,
Ayahuasca was just starting make it roads into the West.
Obviously it has become a lot more popular in the last 10, 15 years.
And the visionary ingredient in Ayahuasca is DMT.
Through some amazing feed of preliterate chemistry, the Amazonian natives
stumbled upon or combined, whatever. I don't know how they did it but they
found one plant contains DMT and one plant containes an enzyme inhibitor.
Combine them and you can drink DMT and it's orally active.
So it starts working in half an hour, last 3 or 4 hours
and you can, you know, maneuver a lot more comfortably
within that state then you can when you're just smoking it injecting it.
Orally active Ayahuasca tends to pick you up and gently carry you into the space and hug you
and embrace you and clean you and
show you all sorts of mystical visions and then it very gently brings you back
like you're floating on a feather back to the ground.
As valuable as my DMT experiences have been, I, em,
I feel there is lot more enduring value, really, in this folk technology
which streches it out and makes a navigable space.
Our whole western, you know, European-drived tradition of destilling alcohols and
isolating chemicals and making everything stronger
and taking it and out of nature and putting it into the biggest punch that we can.
I do not think that, generally, that's the most useful way.
I think there's a reason that cultures have learned to turn a 5 minute experience
into a 5 hour experience.
It seems to me that Ayahuasca has had a plan and that its reached out
into the world and brough DMT into many many thousands of lives
much bigger canvas than it had reached for the last ten thousands or however many years,
and it has done very rapidly, and it has done with form to go with it.
The Ayahuasca is much harder
for the power structures that we have now, it's much harder for them to put down
because it has been a part of a legitimate religious and spiritual practice
for thousands of years, certainly in the Amazon.
And we can't just dismissal that as primitive mumbo-jumbo and superstition.
We have to get a grips with that on its own terms.
I think there is a growing number of people who feel this desire
get back in touch with nature
with plants, with animals and who know
that through the shamanic path, there is way of doing this and that
actually these tools, these psychoactive tools for plants like Ayahuasca is a very
direct way of doing this. Now
it may not be everybody's cup of tea and I think
a lot of people are actually, with a reason, afraid of it.
I think like a lot of people in my generation
I first heard about DMT through Terence McKenna
there was a very funny way to become aware of such a poweful and interesting
and anthropologically rich topic as a compound like DMT because
it really became more, it was more of a concept
then something that people were necessarily taking.
DMT flash makes it clear that a disembodied consciousness is a possibility.
I that think the whole tension of history and the tension of life seems to be about the shedding of the body.
Terence was very ... he was a good promoter.
Basically he said it's the ultimate metaphysical reality pill.
Even though it's not a pill but
I though that was a pretty good characterization after I took it.
It would seem to be of a different order then LSD and mescaline and some of other things that were around.
DMT really did seem to be a whole different level of experience.
I ask you to suspend any opinions, either negative or positive about these compounds.
Whatever you believe their value to be
they continue to have profound effects wherever we find their use,
whether it's contemporary Western culture or in the Amazon rainforest.
It was in the 50's that the Ayahuasca churches starting going public.
You know there was a kind of transition from indigenous Indians to mestizo people in cities
and then these churches - the Santo Daime church and then the UDV church later
started doing ceremonies that would made
the Ayahuasca accessable not just to Indians
but to urban people in big cities
who are as far from the shamans as we are.
In the early 1990's, the UDV established
a branch of their church in the United States.
In the late 90's the U.S. customs department along with the DEA intercepted a shipment of ayahuasca.
The church protested the goverment action, they contented that it violated
the religious freedom restoration act.
And the case was heard in the U.S. Supreme Court, and in February 2006
their decision was announced and it was a unanimous decision on the side of the UDV.
Why is it that in the entire Western world, these substances that have been found to be
so interesting by a hundreds of cultures for thousands of years are prohibited?
How did these cultures that consider themselves to be enlightened
democratic and scientific get to declaring plants "illegal"?
It can seem weird, but there's clearly something deep and revealing
about the nature of these societes.
Our society values enlight problem solving and consciousness
devalues all other states of consciousness.
Any other kind of consciousness that is not related
to the production or consumption of material goods
is stigmatized in our society today.
Of course, we accept drunkenness.
We allow people some brief respite from the material grind.
A society that subscribes to that a model is a society
that is going to condamn the states of consciousness
that have nothing to do with the enlight problem-solving mentality.
And if you go back to the 1960s, when there was a tremendous upsearch of exploration of psychedelics
I would say that the huge backlash that followed that had to do with the fear on the part of the powers that be. That
if enough people went into those realms, had those experiences
the very fabric of the society we have today would be picked apart
and most importantly,
those in power at the top would not be in power at the top any more.
There was an optimism that was ungrounded, you know
the Vietnam was happening, all this real stuff was going on.
and that the psychodelic movement wasn't really addressing that
in a real way. And that Timothy and that, that bunch sold us a fuss, a bill of goods that didn't really work.
"We are now, whether we like it or not, is a psychochemical age.
In the future, it's not going to be what book you read, it's going to be what chemicals do you use
to open or close your conscienceness.
Chemicals can help us learn faster, chemicals can help us
expand or contract our consciousness."
The atmosphere in the 1960s was
"We're doing research here, we are dedicating our lives
to trying just about everything on the planet."
So we'd try it, the we would talk about it the we'd evaluated.
We regarded ourselves more or less as "spiritual pioneers."
The way I look at the 60s you can see as a kind of failed attempt
at a mass, cultural voyage of initiation.
People would, you know, try to go out to these other realities, but they didn't have a basis
there weren't wisdom traditions, elders, there weren't like connections of shamanic lineages.
People would grow out and they would like kinda smash apart.
Timothy Leary really so discredited a scientific approach to studying this
because we started off doing interesting research and then
got into advocating use in a way that was incredibly threatening. Culturally we reacted
and politically it became impossible to do this sort of research.
Funding agencies didn't make resources available, regulatory agencies
increased the practical hurtals for initiating this kind of research.
And I think people, who had interest in research
of this type largely were discredited because
of their interest in the research.
Social, political, scientific issues
that came together pushed these drugs out of the scientific marketplace.
The public opinion in many cases had become that psychedelic research was dangerous.
The wide public was uninformed about the true nature of these compounds
and what their importance may be in the understanding of perception itself.
One of the tragedies to me is that the clinical research
on these substances pretty much stopped
around 1970.
And for me it is especially tragic because
I really believe that these substances played a mayor role
on the development of our philosophy
and thinking throughout the world.
What a lot of people don't realize is that psychiatry up until the 50s
in the field in general had no concept that
neurochemistry played any role in emotion or behavior,
which today seems really bizarre. And the
discovery of LSD and its potent effects on the human psyche
occurred almost contemporaneously with the discovery of serotonin
as a molecule in the brain.
And it was really when people looked at the structure of serotonin
and compared it with LSD that they really began to think, you know
states". If LSD had not been discovered, I doubt we would have
any of the drugs we have or at least not as quickly
as we do have for treating depression and so forth.
Once these drugs became abused and scandalized, psychiatry had to really work hard
you know, to distance themselves from any valid scientific, you know, scientifically meritorious relationship with psychedelics.
Being a psychiatrist and saying you want to learn or study about psychedelics it's, you know, it's not that well received.
And a, And I made one mention, one time that
I was really discouraged from bringing it up again for actually a number of years.
For cultural reasons
the whole class of compounds got pulled of the clinical bench
and no research was going on for 40 years.
So scientifically, I can't imagine a more exciting area to be persuing
How does one go about studying these plants and compounds?
Plants and compounds which produce unimaginable experiences
and can put a shed of light on one of humanity's greatest mysteries
In order, to answer that question,
Dr. Strassman conducted the first
human psychedelic research in a generation.
One of the things that I had established early on was being able to descriminate
between studies in the scientific round and recreational use.
But in the early 1980s I reviewed all of that literature and could pretty well established
on that if people were really carefully screened
and supervised and then followed up that the incidents and adversary reactions to LSD
and related psychodelic drugs was extremely low.
The drug or the compound or the chemical that seemed like the best candidate
to sort of reopen the U.S. front on psychodelic research, would be DMT.
It was really exciting for me because I though this is the first study
in a generation, and not only that.
Despite the fact that DMT had been used safely in earlier studies
and it was a natural component of the brain
DMT is one of the most profound and potent psychedelics known.
So it wasn't just an initiation of clinical research
it was a reinitiation of clinical research with an extremely potent drug.
I was at a strong opinion that you could do this studies
and Rick agreed so we had a number of discussions
and at some point the discussion came up, you know
"Dave, what if I do all this paperwork and spend all this time
and get to end of things and I'm ready to go and I can't get the DMT? "
And that was a real possibility, because DMT, clinical gray DM
wasn't a chemical used by on shelves somewhere
And I told Rick: "If you get to that point, and no one will make it
then I will do it. "
And ultimately Rick got to that point, and I made it.
The design of the study was fairly straightforward:
give people DMT and measure as many variables as possible.
I had to sort of anticipate a lot of objections that would come my way
from the regulatory agencies that oversee this kind research.
So at that point began a two-year process of dealing with
not that many regulatory agencies, but fairly monolithic ones.
One sort of the side line of the protocol
was the involvement of a psychiatrist from UCLA named Daniel Freeman.
He was a kind of one of the grand old men of American psychiatry
and actually he was one of the people who in the 50 'and 60'
got their start with psychedelic research.
And the main thing that Daniel Freeman told Rick, told us, was
"Don't even get close to psychotherapy."
"Forget about treating mental illness or alcoholism or anything."
"Forget that. That's what roll the hysterias up, that's roll the fears get up."
"You're a scientist, Rick. Approach it as a scientist.
Do basic simple measurements, look at heart-rate, cardiovascular suppressors."
"You won't get in trouble doing that, you can get it founded and it's solid science."
Rick did what he said, be has then he still was able to get these, you know, accounts of what happened
That was not in the plan, was not what was really proposed in the studies that were founded
That wasn't what Danny talked about.
But those was the spin-off that really made it interesting.
Rick Strassman, was advertising in some magazine somewhere
about the wanting volunteers for a particular study
in you know,psychotropic, and I didn't, didn't know DMT from STP at that time.
I remember reading that and thinking "Oh my God, this is bad"
"I better get involved in this and make sure that somebody doesn't get hurt and
and at least there be some sensitivity towards what this stuff is really about."
I met Rick's research nurse at a party
and she heard me talking about that I had used peyote, ceremonially
and she took me aside and said "There's something that you might be interested in"
"We're looking for subjects, volunteer subjects for some unusual research."
I was a little concerned that the study participants might be a litte obnoxious
maybe that's not the right word but, you know, people that were just seeking to do a lot of drugs
they were very professional people.
They were varying degrees as to how much hallucinogen use they had been through. It seemed like
there were some people that felt like they had made it kind of their life mission
to experience every kind of substance out there.
And then other poeple who, I think, were just interested for their own personal growth and curiosity.
Once we actually got into the preparation for the actual trips,
Rick asked me about roller coasters.
"Do you like roller coasters?"
"You know, the sensation of going up really high and then slamming back down towards earth."
and I said "No, I hate them, their horrible"
and he said "Not good."
I just wanted to go with the experience, learn as much as I could, absorbe as much as I could
and be humble to it.
The idea of legally sanctioned psychedelics was just very compelling
Plus, you're in a hospital so should you get that
uncomfortable experience that you're dying, you're
with doctors in a very safe environment from that point of view.
I mean, this was very cutting edge, very, out there, very. It was high risk, and a
people knew what they were getting into, and they wanted to have the extra reassurance
and I was glad actually, to have a crash card in the room,
and a team in the hospital to respond any emergencies.
You're in this hospital room
and there's all the sounds and the smells and just
the prior experience is being in the hospital.
You know, all these negative things come back so there was the
whole environment to be overcomed
because little did I know that it didn't matter where I was,
I wasn't gonna be in my body, I was gonna be out in the universe
and it didn't matter where you watched from, it could be a hospital room, it could be
the jungle in the Amazon, it didn't matter where you were because you weren't gonna stay there.
"Set & setting" is so important,
it's even more important than the substance, more important than the substance
"Set & setting" is everything.
Now, what is the "set & setting" when you're blindfolded.
The "set & setting" is not what you're seeing, because you're not seeing anything
The "set & setting"is your internal self,
the things that you have learned, the capacities that you have achieved,
the conditions of your own psyche and psychology.
These are your "set & setting".
It's the medicine combined with the interacting with the "set & setting"
that creates an effect of safety, of trust, of comfort and of resourcefulness
and makes it possible for you to take some big leaps and receive some big gifts
and if that's not there, you just get terrified.
So I was, I didn't have really physical fear so much that they would die or have a stroke
I did have some fears about peoples' mental health, you know
especially with some of the higher doses.
We gave one genteman, who had a lot of experience with the drug,
one dose, and he didn't think it took him far enough
So then we gave him a higher dose and he was gone,
he was really gone, it reminded me of something from "The Exorcist", I mean
he just fuum, stood fold-up on the bed and his eyes opened up and they were completely dilated and black,
and I almost thought he was gonna turn his head completely around.
I remember looking at Rick and Rick looked at me and I thought "Oh my God, he's gone, I hope he comes" and he did.
The countdown was like, you know, cutting down for your.., preparing for your death, like waiting to surrender and...
You'd feel the coldness, the coldness just going through your veins and it's really indescribable, it's hard to..
you know, it's like ice going through your veins.
And the next thing that would happen, besides my racing heart,
is this burning sensation what happended on the back of my neck, I mean this was reliable, this is like clockwork, this happened every time that you shocked me up with DMT.
And then there be a hum, and the hum will get louder and louder
and to the point where it broke apart, everything that I was or knew, it was just this [sound]
It was just louder and louder until you just had to surrender to the sound
and then you were.. there.
I would get a warmful feeling, a golden feeling in my chest, before it went to my head.
I feel this warm rod, about an inch and a half in diameter start growing up inside my spinal canal.
It would come up and sort of slow, warm up my chest, go up through my head
Slow down and put tremendous pressure on my sightednesses behind my eyes, slow down.
Start to grow and stand the skin behind my forehead about one inch behind my hairline when it and
I thought it was gonna pop-up the skin a few times, because it is a very physical feeling.
About and inch and a half, two inches above my skull.
when it pop through there then the psychedelic tripping started.
I thought I died.
I saw the white clouds,
Renaissance, white fluffy clouds, with the gods and the angels and that all stuff, that's what I saw.
I thought I was dying and going out but
I did take a quick look at Sindy and a quick look at Rick as I had my eyes open and
they were both there watching, looking very calmly.
And I thought "That's really good news, my body looks fine."
So I didn't know whether it was my birth, I was re-experiencing
my death which was yet to come because I, I know that
time crubmles, the linearity of time is totally meaningless in these states.
You are at the God-head, the point where all time folds in on itself.
More and more layers of my humanity start peeling off
finally
The last, you know, almost the last layer and I can not even describe what it is
but at some reaches way in there is like the last layer of that, which defines you as a human being
and it goes [khkk].
You're not longer a human being, in fact, you are no longer anything you can identify.
There is no concept of time, it was so disorienting
I was so terrified, I have never in my entire life, been so terrified.
To be blasted out of my body
To leave my body behind, to be going
at warp speed, backwards, through my own DNA,
out the other end, into the universe.
And so I went right under this white light.
As soon as I went into it, I lost any sense of being different.
Any sense of what I was doing, past, any sense of future.
It was absolutely blissful and euphoric and I just felt like
it wouldn't I. I was everything.
I was the light, there is no sense of separation, no shadows, no differences
no past, no future, it was all present and a white-yellow light.
Then I felt myself falling out of this light,
and as I felt out of it, I could feel the light was like a glow, like the sun with flames coming out.
Lapping out, and I could already start to feel this tremendous separation.
I reached across and it was suddenly I'm in the Universe, in this huge void
with these beings on the other side and I
put out my hands in this incredible rainbow of pink light, went between me and these entities.
And i was trying to make it be like a white light.
But it was this incredible pink light, this energy of love
that we, this capacity of love, that we as humans beings have, that I was trying to just send to them.
This meteorite trip through the infinite space of the interior consciousness is
up pops the picture puzzled pattern door and
I'm now whizzing through this sucker, like if it was nothing, I'm flying through it.
But now I know what the picture puzzled pattern door is.
The picture puzzled pattern door is the furthest reaches of your humanity.
This is the doorway into the, what defines you as a human being.
When you go pass that, you stop being human to a degree
and the further you get pass this point, the futher away you go from being a human being.
But right here this picture puzzled pattern door is everything, it's everything what defines you as a human being.
This is your ...
This picture puzzled pattern door is you!
This is like the actual core of where all of reality is emanating from.
This is where meaning comes from, symbols were pouring out, they were intertwined.
Every symbol and, or letter in every language
was pouring out of this point.
And I looked around in my environment and I was trying to absorb everything, to understand
but there were all of these machines or structures or things that
I had never seen before, that I had no idea what they were
I was like a caveman in a computer lab.
I didn't have any idea, but I knew in my intellectual awarness that this
was a very advanced civilization or
life forms or whatever they were,
they were, they were so far advanced from what we know here on Earth.
There's one state of, in it, I call it "the hobby horses"
and they're interlocking, articulating, vibrating hobby horses
and I use that and that's what they seem like to me. They interlock and
they form a visual pattern thats seems infinite in scape.
And then you on the inside, outside, inside, everyside.
And so it's less possible to use, you know, words sort of start to escape you.
The texture of the space was very much like an animated Mexican tile.
It seemed to be hyper vivid in color, in a technicolor sense.
But also very clay-like in earth, you know, like with an earthen
pointing towards Earth, but not really being on Earth.
There was no eye, there was just a sense of a witness.
Being suspended on this incredible vaulted space.
Like a cathedral made out of a stained glass of all imaginable colors.
Unbelievable brilliance and saturation of color.
Just this amazing pattern in this dome, this gigantic dome, it was.
It felt like, it was like the size of a small planet.
And were these winged beings, I don't remember exactly what they looked like.
Angels? Something like angels that were majestically kind of flying through the space.
But there was something about the quality of how they were flying, it was unique and I've never seen anything like it.
It was like a sense of another realm that was there.
My sense was at some point, there was this implicit sense: "This is the divine realm. This is the divine realm.".
It was not like a thought, but it like was this implicit kind of groaking (??) recognition.
It was all very, very impersonal
until I got to this space where I realized that I was in the area
where the souls await rebirth.
And I was there and I had been there
so many times before, I recognized it
and this incredible transcendent peace came over me, I have never in my life
ever felt such peace.
Everything was stripped away, every hope, every fear, every attachment
to the material world was completely stripped out of me.
I was free to just be the essence of a soul.
After the medicine wore off
There is that familiar sensation of kind of coming back into the body
I do remember that,
that was part of almost all these experiences, of, kind of
coalescing back into sensory awareness.
And a sense of having a body, and of that becoming a little more substantial
and "Oh yeah, here I am, I live in a body and I'm okay."
So Laura removes the eye shades
and I ask not really with my eyes open quite yet.
I ask: "How long I was gone?"
Because I needed to know.
And Rick chimes in like "15 minutes".
For a moment I'm shocked. I'm like, you know.
The mind has to try to catch up.
Because now whe whole cognitive dissonance of the experience has to, has to catch up.
I was gone for 15 minutes!
A thousand years of experience, in 15 minutes.
Well, to say the least, it was profound, it was, it was profound.
I mean, it's amazing, it's amazing what a human being can experience
in a hospital bed.
I mean they can experience almost the whole universe
you know, life, death, everything in between.
This is not some recreational thing
and I don't believe anybody should enter this lightly,
it is life-transformitive.
It will perhaps shake you enough to realize
you know, that you need to be awake to the fact that you don't know,
and that is the beginning of starting to know.
What we see here is such a tiny part of what is real.
I get really frustrated, because awcourse there is no way to prove that where I went
was deep space that I encountered, you know
other entities, other life forms that exist in this universe.
At some point maybe our civilization will become advanced enough and we will
through off these anchors of impossible thought that these things are impossible, that it's not, you know
everything that exists, exists where we can see it.
I wrapped-up the studies in the `95 and a
really just had to take a break for a couple of years.
I was aware of a growing sense of discomfort with what I was doing
because I just couldn't explain it and a
seemed to me if I couldn't model an explain of what was going on, that I was doing and just
you know, bring in people to the edge of these kinds of experiences, it seemed
like I ought to. I was a little irresponsible to be
sort of pushing people off the cliff like that,
without really knowing exactly where I was and accepting and understanding and feeling comfortable with that model and em,
you know, I think what began downing on me after a while since I stopped the study
was that I was really dealing with a spiritual phenomenon.
What do these experiences say about the nature of reality,
the nature of our minds
or the function of our brain that we can so quickly shift
into these alternate realities?
Let's take a step back and consider how these experiences inform us
about ourselves, our conscience and the symbiosis of the two.
It started seeming to me that what was happening with DM
particularly with respect to some of these
reports of entering parallel or alternative, free standing parallels
sorts of realms of existances, that indeed was what their consciousness was doing.
The chemistry of their brain, which is the organ of consciousness, was being changed by DM
in such a way that they could then receive information
that we weren't able to receive normally.
Yes, there's the experiences from DMT and ayahuasca, and they have their, their function
but if we also look at what it enables us to see.
It just reaps that filtering mechanism away for a few minutes
and for a few minutes you're emmersed in sort of this raw data sfere
of input, of sensory input, of memories, of associations, I mean
it seems like the brain builds reality out of these things,
what you're experiencing, what you have experienced and
how associate and synthesize these things together to tell youself a story, essentially
about what's going on, where you are in space and time.
It's the brain that helps to process all this information
and to create for us an audition of what our world is all about
but we're trapped within that brain.
However, in spiritual experiences where people feel
that they get beyond theirself.
In certain types of psychedelic experiences,
where you have incredible sensory and other types of phenomena
people really feel like they are able to kind of get outside of their brain.
We have to take a really big look at what is going on within them, when they have the experience
and try to understand how it happens physiologically
and try to make sense of it from the subjective perspective as well as from the objective perspective,
I don't think you can just say, "Let's just explain it away from on the basis of science."
What I was doing early on when I was hearing these reports
were interpreting them kind of psychological
or em brain chemistry aberrations or whatever.
There's a part of the brain was being dinged that was responsible for
the alien appearance phenomenon.
This is not a new phenomenon.
Entities in altered states have been recognized for
an extremaly long time in many cultures over the millennia.
Helpers, spirits, assistants, angels,
all of these different entities have been fairly common throughout
man's experiences of altered states
and through much of man's mythology.
I don't think it's a possibility that people are, in some way, interacting with some sort
of an intelligence or scenic being or something that exists
at some level that's not in this three-dimensional physical plane.
I'm looking at it from a sense of:
"Okay, is the drug healing you?"
"Is it helping you?"
and, and or, "is it, is it giving you the tools?", "what are bringing back?"
What you bring back, I think, has to be something more than
these entities out there.
The best psychedelic explorers,
are people who realize that even
the "truths" they see on a trip
are not "truths", but "new models", new "what-ifs" alternative frames.
Unless their is a map and a clear methodology
then one will just have a variety of different experiences.
All these various experiences that have been reported
from NDEs, near-death experiences,
alien abductions, alien encounters,
sexual ecstasy,
I believe all of these experiences, in fact, are fractals.
If we understand the concept of fractal geometry,
no matter how small it is,
it contains everything that is in the larger picture
and thus that validates, profoundly, all these various experiences.
Discount the phenomenon as hallucinatory or imaginary,
I think it's maybe more useful to look at the mechanism of action, you know,
If it is real than perhaps, how does it work?
Look, there's extraordinary regular phenomena
that come-up with these things, that are clearly linked
in many ways to these larger
human issues around mysticism or religious experiences
or encounters with other entities.
And here we have it.
And if you can't go in there, and really go in there and account for this material
inside your neuro-scientific framework,
you're leaving a huge gap.
You gotta account for this stuff the way you gotta account for dreams, the way you gotta account for
all sorts of psychoactive responses.
Using DMT is an explanatory model, as kind of a mediator between our consciousness and a
a consciousness of a non-corporeal sort of reality, you know. It's handy.
With DMT, there are no words
I would try to wrap mathematical vocabulary around the experience afterwards.
I
I specialize in the metaphor of vibration.
And how vibrations influence creative form.
That would be the key to the relationship between the spiritual realm and the ordinary realm.
This was the window that was opened by DMT.
Using psychedelic drugs or other types of pharmacological substances
can help to induce a state
where people feel that they
touch a deeper sensive reality.
Where they understand the reality on a more fundamental level.
And they gain a great deal of inside knowledge into the ways in which the world works
and how they are, as a human being, supposed to relate to that world.
DMT is somehow, seems to me in my experience
more of a break-through than LSD, mushrooms, peyote and so on.
It's instructive, it's more supportive of futury evolution and the creation of future
and it is in itself, more of a mistery.
How could this little stuff produce something that
has intelligence.
It is actually a doorway to another reality.
So, what is the nature of reality?
And what is the nature of how we, as human beings experience it?
Can we understand it better?
Are we capable of understanding reality on some very fundamental levels?
And what we need to do in order to prepare for that?
You know, there are parallel universes, it seems, at least that's the theory in modern physics.
There is dark matter, which is
a huge amount of the matter of the universe, perhaps 95% or more.
It's radical a ideas just a logical extension in some ways of a
instead of using a machine to see more than we normally can see,
we're using the brain.
There are fields which are undiscovered so far
which have nothing to do with anything that is discovered so far.
The gravitational field, you know,
was unknown before the year 1604.
The electromagnetic field
unknown before the year 1830 or something.
All of these, what we call fundamental fields of mathematical physics
are new discoveries.
Dark energy is even newer discovery and beyond that are
maybe more discoveries yet coming beyond our cosmos itself,
and higher dimensions as they say.
I still don't have very much use for the concept of God
but I do believe that there are higher levels, transcendent levels of reality
and I'm now actually now starting to really believe that
the brain is not the source of consciousness,
it's not really who we are but
it's more like a radio tuner for something way bigger.
Are these experiences "spiritual experiences" or
otherwise are they created by physiological processes or
is the brain itself responding to something that's going on?
And the fact that somebody may actually find a way of "turning on" their brain
to spiritual experiences.
Again, I'm not sure that this necessarily diminishes the reality
or the realness of what these experiences are about.
If the pharmacology or psychopharmacology of
psychedelic experiences turn up to be
essentially the same as religious or spiritual experiences,
it would help us to understand where these experiences are occuring within the human brain.
I'm actually quite, quite convinced
that we're probing the biological basis of moral and ethical behavior,
I think that these primary religious experiences
really are a bed rock of the world's religions.
The research and knowledge, speculation about the pineal body and DM
is in fact
the hand of God, that is interacting with our natural evolution
to stimulate and accelerate the process of redemption
of individual and of collective global enlightment.
Because of my ayahuasca experiences I consider myself a
spiritual person, I know things now that I could never have known otherwise.
These experiences, so familiar for a lot of different people
and it's so easily aquired
and so much information come with so little effort, that it is a kind of a miracle,
it's a miraculous way for us to transcend ordinary reality and obtain
maybe an intimation of what's necessary for survival.
Ranging from new forms of medical treatment
to a better understanding of the Universe
to life changing spiritual revelations,
these natural tools offer us the ability to seek greater knowledge.
Tools that can positively effect life on our planet.
Let's answer Dr Strassman's question.
If so ... so what?
Because of the collapse of consciousness
spiritual and scientific knowledge split apart.
Both these modes of knowing have to come together in order to science and technology
from a traditional religious perspective is not an extra,
it is part of the process by which humanity is going to evolve into its next stage.
How do we find like the right form for psychedelics in the future?
Asssuming that psychedelics are part of the human future
at the moment they're still, you know, generally repressed and suppressed and illegal.
If that were to change,
how would we begin to construct a kind of a
system that would allow for, for kind of rational and mature exploration of the psychedelics?
I think that the name of the game is to
show science the pertinence of this somewhat outlandish realm.
It's not just crazy stuff.
It shouldn't be considered as, let's say, not even worthy of interest or illegitimate,
I actually think because it's
declared off bounds, it just makes it interesting to with start.
But one doesn't want to throw the baby with the bath water
and I think it's really important to
stay faithful to science.
What does it mean? why is there a part of the brain that seems to be
for lack of a better word "a God-detector"? You know.
What's the evolutionary advantage to having some part of the brain
that seems to, you know,
trigger and mediate experiences of the transcendent?.
The Kabbalah is revealing to us that the pineal body is actually
is the very edge of the higher dimension that is
penetrating into our lower dimension, and it is located
precisely in the middle of the brain
I can remember reading about Descartes,
thinking that is was actually the interface between
the spiritual dimension and the dimension of matter.
I remember studying that as a foolish idea from our history
and now it seems actually like a very interesting idea.
What we are looking for out there
is really in here.
It is the doorway, it is the gate.
So we focus on the transformative effect of the psychedelics
but it's also true, the reverse is true that
it requires transformation in order to
embrace psychedelics. You know.
It's one of the tricky paradoxes of postmodernism,
that psychedelics both require and produce a transformative effect.
We have severed our connection to spirit.
That's what our society has done,
it is sort to persuade us that the material realm is the only realm,
and the only way we're going to recover it is to reconnect with spirit.
And I truelly believe we need the help of the plants in order to do that.
Part of our work is to respect these, these medicines and then
to change the culture enough that, that people
doing them can be respected and healed and
not everybody
needs to do them, not everybody should or wants to but
there it isn't pushed to the side and so part of that
does involve then research, because that's how in our
reductionist society we validate things.
With the passing of the years, and the opportunity for sober reflection, I think
there's a groving appreciation that there may be something to gain
from studying these compounds,
there's a lot we can learn and there
may very well be treatment models, particularly for patient populations
for whom conventional treatments are ineffective,
for whom the psychedelic model were utilized optimally, may provide great benefit.
I think the most important thing that we could do right now that would be
fairly straightforward to do is to
ask and answer the question of whether Ayahuasca could help
people who have drugs and alcohol abuse.
And given that we know that DMT and similiar alkaloids have a very strong effect
on the same receptors sites that are involved in depression.
And the notion that most people, in my experience,
who use drugs and alcohol are self-medicating a deep depression or an anxiety.
I've had permission now over the last years to utilize psilocybin
which is the active alkaloid in hallucinogenic mushrooms
in the treatment of patients with advanced staged cancer who have anxiety
for treating the anxiety, not the cancer.
Now, the psilocybin is 4-phosphorylixy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine so
obviously from the chemical structure point of view, you know, very similar to DMT.
Ultimately, what I want to do is
see these things used in a way they were used traditionally
to heal people, help people
and right now
helping people come to terms with dying.
It changes your whole relationship to your death, you're impending death,
believe it or not, you're gonna die.
And now with this tool with having crossed over already
you will, some of the fear around that will disappear.
Now I am beginning to wonder whether consciousness may actually survive biological death.
That maybe the model that we've been working under
in psychiatry and behavioural pharmacology model,
it's just wrong, it's backwards actually.
The consciousness is primarily in the universe and matter is a result of.
Utilizing substances like DMT or 5-methoxy-DM
may really help us prepare
by practicing a transcent dying experience.
As far we're observing,
very positive effects in regards to
the nature of the experience during the session,
and then subsequent effects on mood regulation,
and anxiety control, pain perception
and overall quality of life for cancer patients.
By large our subjects do quite well in the time they have remaining.
For those people who do come to terms with it,
part of this is a recognition that psychedelics have opened
a space that they weren't aware it existed
and sort of give them a vision of what could be pass death, as well as
a better perspective on the accomplishments they've made in life,
a better feeling about what they have done in their own lives.
What I think all people who have had psychedelic trips and meditations and so on are poking
more or less into the same higher realm
and receiving some information.
If we can develop this, into, this could absorbed into
ordinary science that we could approach with the scientific method and so on then
our intelligence, capability of survival on planet Earth,
would be increased.
We were a dying species, we
live on a dying planet, we're killing the planet
so our disease is extremely serious,
and therefore we're desperate to find new information, ideas and so on
that can transcend.
We have to evolve, and I think our intellectual evolution
may be predicated upon the psychedelic pioneers.
It's so easy to change the world, I mean
that's the kind of thing that you can see
on psychedelics.
If you don't get trapped in the beauty of the psychedelic experience itself.
You know, it's like looking through
the chandelier of reality from a different vantage point, you know
You can now project through those crystals in another way
and is beautiful.
But ...
Okay, now come back, you know, now come back.
I think if I ever were to resume giving people psychodelics, particularly DMT,
it wouldn't be just a kind of tinker with brain chemistry and just see what's happening.
I think one of the things I've also learned in the research
is that you just don't wanna give drugs and see what happens, that's a little
I don't know if calais is the right word but that's the first word that comes to mind, I think, if you really gonna
open people up like that, you need to do it for a purpose
not just for scientific curiosity and, you know, like to be helpful
rather that just sort of smart or clever.
To my mind are, is this kind of a two edge sword of simultaneously opening up to the new menious world
to the world of messages, the world of spirits, the world of entities.
And and the same time, rigorously, taking that material into the acid bath of neurology,
into sociology, into the ongoing construction of reality.
And that the wisdom that these things bring, is this kind of
a very tricky mixture of authentic religious experience
with gods, and messages and clear signs
and a sort of a remarkable mirror of the mind.
The curiosity, perhaps the uniqueness of the human creature
is that we live in both realms.
We have the ability for spiritual experience and
have the ability for physical experience.
The agenda of the spirit world, if there is an agenda
is to allow us to experience our full potential and to deliver our full potential
and maybe the choices that we are making right now
as a civilization of the society, rebound far beyond ourselves.
I think DMT is a forceable reminder that there's
a lot more about reality, the universe, ourselves,
the biosphere, whatever that we, there's a lot more to it than we imagine.
It seems our reality is not the only reality,
occasionally the cracks reveal themselves
and may even want to be discovered.
As humans, we are creatures that thirsts for knowledge.
We spend time, money and infinite energy searching for it
in schools, in churches, in business and in technology.
Knowledge is power and thus our greatest quest.
Dimethyltryptamine.
A molecule with a complex name and the simplest ability
to unlock the door to another dimension,
and perhaps, just perhaps, our future evolution.