DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: An Interview with Rick Strassman
Psychiatrist Dr. Rick Strassman was the first scientist to conduct U.S. government-approved and funded human research with psychedelic drugs after the so-called War on Drugs. He has published dozens of peer-reviewed papers and is the author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule and DMT and the Soul of Prophecy.
Avi Solomon: Tell us a bit about yourself.
Dr. Rick Strassman: I was born and raised in southern California in the 1950s and 1960s, and attended college on the West Coast. I grew up in a Conservative Jewish home, and went through my bar mitzvah ritual after which I ended any formal affiliation or study within Judaism. In college I learned Transcendental Meditation and several years later began studying and practicing Soto Zen Buddhism under the supervision and guidance of a Western Zen order — a relationship that lasted from 1974 until 1996.
I obtained my MD in New York City, and returned to California for psychiatry training at UC Davis in Sacramento and a fellowship in clinical psychopharmacology research at UC San Diego. I moved to Albuquerque in 1984 where I worked at the University of New Mexico for 11 years. My first independent research project investigated the role of melatonin in humans in which we discovered the first known physiological effects of this pineal hormone. I then began the DMT study in 1990 and completed it in 1995. Family concerns prompted a moved to Canada and the Pacific Northwest for 5 years before I returned to New Mexico in 2000. I worked in clinical psychiatry — in both community mental health centers and private practice — from 1996 to 2008. Since then I have been writing full-time.
Avi: What got you into studying DMT?
Rick: Attending college on the West Coast in the late 60s and early 70s introduced me to a wide range of theories and experiences relating to consciousness. Gradually, my interests in Eastern religions, brain physiology, psychoanalytic psychology, and psychedelic drugs gelled into an interest in the biology of spiritual experience.
It seemed to me that there were significant similarities between descriptions of psychedelic drug effects and the effects of Eastern meditation practices. I thought these correspondences must reflect underlying biological processes common to both states.
DMT is an endogenous psychedelic substance, found in hundreds of plants and every mammal which has been studied, including humans. It’s been known to be made in mammalian — including human — lungs and is transported into the brain from the bloodstream. It was a logical candidate for an endogenous compound mediating spiritual experience—to the extent that its effects and those spiritual experiences overlapped.
Since completing my study, we now know that the gene and enzyme responsible for completing the synthesis is active in the retina and the pineal gland, and DMT has been found in living rodent pineal. Thus, some of the pineal speculations I offered in my original DMT book have been verified experimentally. In addition, the retina data suggest that DMT, besides mediating consciousness in general, as implied by its transport into the brain, also mediates visual perception.
There are other endogenous compounds with psychoactive effects, but since DMT had a track record of prior safe use in humans, I decided to begin with it, rather than other compounds that would require much more preliminary toxicology work to satisfy the regulators.
Avi: What surprised you in your DMT findings?
Rick: I expected particular types of experiences, as did my volunteers. We thought that mystical unitive enlightenment-like states would predominate. These are states are imageless, content-free, ego-dissolving states of being merged with a powerful but undifferentiated source of being. Instead, these types of experiences were very rare. Rather, volunteers described entering into a world of intensely saturated light, buzzing and morphing, full of “things” — all manner of objects, and oftentimes sentient beings who were awaiting them and interacted with them. Perhaps if I had used another compound for my studies with more unitive properties, such as 5-methoxy-DMT, my expectations would have been met more consistently. But, I studied DMT and this is what we found.
I also expected volunteers to be able to clearly apprehend the illusory, hallucinatory, “caused-by-a-drug” properties of the DMT effect. Instead, they returned with the unshakeable conviction that the drug allowed them to perceive something as real, or more real, than everyday reality. This flew in the face of all of my pre-existing models: the Buddhist, psychoanalytic, and psychopharmacologic.
Avi: What attracted you to the biblical model of prophecy as an vehicle for understanding the DMT visionary states?
Rick: I worked through various models’ methods of understanding the DMT volunteers’ experiences, and found them wanting. The Buddhist psychological model didn’t comport with the data — the interactive, fulsome nature of the state. And the “as or more real than real” element of volunteers’ experiences was incompatible with Buddhism’s teaching that these phenomena are generated by the mind on its more-or-less successful path to the formless unitive state. The “this is your brain on drugs” psychopharmacology model simply felt improbable and failed to suggest a satisfactory evolutionary explanation for the presence of DMT in the human body. I then rooted around some of the recent cosmological theories of dark matter and parallel universes. While these might provide theories regarding mechanisms of action for volunteers’ observations, it still lacked an answer for “why” the brain is so designed, and what we can learn from the content contained in those states.
I decided to emphasize the spiritual nature of these states, since “religion” also concerns itself with usually invisible worlds. In addition, it has labored to extract meaning from them, something that the scientific model is not designed to do. Shamanism was useful as a model since it takes into account the external, free-standing nature of the phenomena, but like Buddhism, is ostensibly atheistic, something I knew would stand in the way of a widely applicable Western religious model. In addition, shamanism’s ethical/moral shortcomings are certainly not an advance over those of Western traditions, and may even be more problematic. Finally, both Buddhism and shamanism are “novel imports,” not really part of the mainstream Western mentality, culture, and probably even biology.
The Hebrew Bible’s model of prophecy is appealing because it comports well with the reports of the DMT volunteers. One’s sense of self is maintained, there is an external free-standing independent-of-the-observer spiritual world that all-of-a-sudden appears. One relates to the content of the experience, rather than being merged with it. There are concepts and images which are the “stuff” of the prophetic state rather than the “detritus” of the mystical one. One is “with” God rather than being “one with” God.
The Hebrew Bible as a spiritual text also has the advantage of being our bread and butter within Western civilization. Its impact is everywhere, conscious or not: in our economics, law, art, science, architecture, literature, theology, ethics/morality. So, we don’t need to go native or start bowing to statues of, or praying to, Buddhas and bodhisattvas to delve into it.
It seems that many people are drawn to the unitive-mystical state because they either don’t need to articulate its content and relevance; or they can make up whatever they wish in that regard. It can be an easy way out, since the template for the “relational spiritual experience” is highly content-laden, and one needs to address that content. That content includes, among other thorny issues, the nature of God and providence, morality and ethics, and the linear nature of history.
It’s tempting to speculate that just as the latent prophetic state is embedded in the brain-consciousness matrix, so is the prophetic message. Once we have the vocabulary of prophecy more in mind, I think we can start to explore the psychedelic experience using that lens. By doing so, I believe we will be able to integrate the spiritual properties of the psychedelic drug experience in a way that neither Buddhism nor shamanism has allowed up until now.
Avi: What is the role of “angels” in visionary states?
Rick: The medieval Jewish philosophers — whom I rely upon for understanding the Hebrew Bible text and its concept of prophecy — describe angels as God’s intermediaries. That is, they perform a certain function for God. Within the context of my DMT research, I believe that the beings that the volunteers saw could be conceived of as angelic; that is, previously invisible, incorporeal spiritual forces that are engarbed or enclothed in a particular form. That form is determined by the psychological and spiritual development of the volunteers. That form transmits a particular message or experience to that volunteer.
Avi: Is interactivity crucial to the visionary states accessed using DMT?
Rick: In most cases, yes. Only one volunteer had a classic mystical experience. Even in that case, he was led, helped, pulled, and pushed toward that state by what appeared to be angelic aides. Relatedness as a property of the spiritual experience, and of the DMT one, became clear during my phenomenological comparison of prophecy and the DMT experience. In fact, that’s the category of effects that started to tilt the balance towards prophecy as a more highly developed and content-rich experience than the psychedelic/DMT one.
The unitive-mystical experience is currently the default position for academic research with psychedelics, and seems to be as well for underground users, for a variety of reasons. In my opinion, the most important element is a more-or-less unconscious rejection of our Biblical roots that manifest in notions such as God, proper thoughts and behavior, theodicy, and so on. Heschel talks about the “embarrassing stigma” of prophecy, which for him involved these concepts. In addition, emphasis on the formless void-states of bliss and ineffability also make it easier to avoid the embarrassing presence of the “beings” in both the Biblical literature and the DMT states.
Avi: What prospects do you see for the use of DMT in mainstream healing modalities?
Rick: Smoked or injected DMT is hard to work with. It starts almost instantly, peaks in 2 minutes, and is over in about 20–30 minutes. Nevertheless, I’ve gotten many e-mails describing psychological benefits such as disruption of addictions, resolution of mood disorders, benefit with respect to PTSD, with the use of smoked DMT. For most people, though, it’s all they can do to hold on and remember what happens during that 15 minute period.
Ayahuasca, which contains DMT in an orally active form, is much more manageable. Effects begin in 30–45 minutes, peak at 2–3 hours, and are resolved in 4–6 hours. There are countless field reports of healing of physical, emotional, and addictive problems within the context of ayahuasca use, either in syncretic churches, medical clinics, or shamanic use. More and more literature is appearing in this regard, and more sophisticated scientific studies are now beginning to appear.
Psychedelic drug-assisted healing or therapy raises interesting etiological questions, which so far are focused entirely on psychological and biological effects. The new model I develop and present in DMT and the Soul of Prophecy is “theoneurology” rather than the dominant “neurotheology” paradigm for understanding the interface between neuroscience and spiritual experience. Mine is a top-down rather than bottom-up model. I propose that God and divine intermediaries work through the aegis of the brain to communicate with us. Neurotheological proposes that certain stimuli activate a brain reflex that generates the impression of that communication. The two models aren’t incompatible by any means, but mine provides a theocentric counterpoint, a higher level of abstraction and organizing principles.
Healing with psychedelics, to the extent they elicit a spiritual experience, in my model would propose that external agents that now have access to the brain-mind-body matrix are effecting those benefits. The death of cancer cells, relief from mental problems, cessation of drug abuse are the objective manifestations of the working of invisible forces modifying biological and psychological processes.
Avi: What role do you see for personal, experiential knowledge vs. the limits of textual or testimonial knowledge?
Rick: They are interdependent. One’s experiences become more fulsome with more education. And one’s education takes on greater urgency as a result of experience.
