Alex Tsakiris: All the folks, virtually all of the near-death experience researchers, come to the conclusion sooner or later that consciousness must exist outside of the brain. How do we process that?
Dr. Richard Strassman: Well, it isn’t a new idea. Obviously spiritual traditions have believed it and taught it and have practiced it. It is a new idea within the Western scientific model, so one of the analogies that I make in the DMT book is the brain is a receiver as opposed to a generator of a particular channel of consciousness, Channel Normal, as it were.
Under extreme situations then the channel switches and as a result of being given DMT is the brain is now able to perceive channels of information that it couldn’t before. If you change your perspective on the relationship between the brain and consciousness then things start to become a bit clearer, but at the same time have been more mind-boggling, too.
Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome Dr. Richard Strassman, author of DMT – The Spirit Molecule. Rick is also a distinguished academic and researcher, having received an MD in psychiatry, a Postgraduate Fellowship in Pharmacology and having a distinguished teaching and research career at the University of New Mexico. Rick, welcome to Skeptiko.
Dr. Richard Strassman: Thanks for having me.
Alex Tsakiris: I want to jump right into the middle of this. I was just saying in the little bit of time we had before this interview, I’m sure a lot of people are familiar with your work and particularly this book about DMT. If they’re not, then they’re going to have to kind of brush up on it on their own because we’re going to jump into the middle of this. But let me give a very short introduction, and correct anything that I might get wrong.
In the 1990s you were a researcher at the University of New Mexico and you received approval, which is an amazing story in itself, to inject volunteers with this psychedelic drug, DMT, and then to evaluate the effects. Here’s part of what you said about the results of those experiments. This is a quote from you in another interview I found. It’s a great quote.
“The most interesting results were that high doses of DMT seemed to allow the consciousness of our volunteers to enter an out-of-body, freestanding, independent realm of existence, inhabited by beings of light who oftentimes were expecting the volunteers and with whom the volunteers interacted.”
Alex Tsakiris: So correct me if any of that’s wrong. Also, if you want to elaborate on that, that’s quite a lot for people to wrap their minds around right from the beginning.
Dr. Richard Strassman: Right, right. Well, that’s pretty much the case. It’s true, everything you said. That’s a good summary, too, actually.
Alex Tsakiris: So tell us a little bit about that research. I’m sure you’ve done that a million times, but the elevator speech-what was that all about?
Dr. Richard Strassman: I performed my studies between 1990 and 1995 and ostensibly it was a study to investigate effects and the mechanisms of action of a drug of abuse, which was DMT. I had ulterior motives, though, at the same time. These were to understand better the biology of spiritual experience, especially naturally-occurring spiritual experience, which might take place through meditation or as a result of a close brush with death. Even psychotic states sometimes partake of spiritual properties.
I was drawn to DMT because it’s a naturally-occurring compound in the human body. It also occurs in every other mammal which has been investigated to date. It also is found in either hundreds of plants or even thousands of plants. So as a candidate for a compound in a human body which could produce a mystical or spiritual experience, DMT seemed like a reasonable candidate.
Along the lines of the ulterior motives for my study I was interested in comparing the responses to giving DMT to people to descriptions of spontaneous spiritual experiences which occur without the drug. If I was able to determine significant overlaps or similarities in those two states, then to that extent I could argue for the possibility of involvement of andoginous DMT in those spontaneous, non-drug induced experiences.
Alex Tsakiris: I’m just going to interject. One thing I found interesting is you said that you hope your work-and I don’t know if this was at the time or later-but it might break down the dichotomy between the spiritual and the physical. I think that’s a very, very interesting point and I want to get into that.
But I just want to frame up the DMT research one little bit more and have you comment on it because what your research wound up doing, and I don’t know if this was your intent or not, but to a certain degree you provided independent confirmation of some aspects of this experience that many indigenous people around the world for hundreds of years have talked about.
A lot of people know about Iowaska and the Amazon and that people who experience Iowaska have the experience that you just talked about, leaving the body for another realm. What really intrigued me was it seems like where your research led you, and I guess the question is, did you see this coming that DMT seemed to lift the veil to some kind of inner dimensional reality that we don’t understand? Did you at all see that coming when you started this research?
Dr. Richard Strassman: Well, I kind of did and I kind of didn’t. I was more expecting the kinds of experiences more typical of Zen enlightenment experiences, without form, without ideas, without concepts, without images. Also without an interacting sense of self.
And I think a lot of the current interest in brain/spirituality issues either consciously or unconsciously is taking on kind of a Buddhist point of view, which is all of this spiritual content is a product of the mind as opposed to being perceived by the mind.
The part I didn’t expect was the more interactive ego maintenance types of experiences which were full of content and full of images. You know, the personality of the volunteer could still interact quite willfully with what was going on in their DMT state. So it was a spiritual experience for the volunteers but the type of spiritual experience or the quality of it was what caught me unaware.
Alex Tsakiris: I think I heard you say that you found it surprising that it was relational…
Dr. Richard Strassman: Right.
Alex Tsakiris: …versus that unifying all through nothing kind of Buddhist kind of interpretation of it. Do you want to elaborate on that?
Dr. Richard Strassman: Yeah. The experience of enlightenment, to what I understand of it anyway, is it’s unformed and uncreated and un-interacting in a way. You interact with it but the interaction is more of a beholding and a merging as opposed to willfully making decisions about what to ask and how to respond to these entities or being which one perceives in the DMT state.
Alex Tsakiris: I want you to dig into that a little bit. For the skeptical-minded folks that come and say, “What do you mean that’s reality-based?” I mean we’ve got a bunch of problems in pulling that apart. It’s all subjective, but then we do have this consensus reality that people can come back and report a lot of things that are similar. We say, “Yeah, that’s real.” Tear that apart. What do you mean these DMT experiences were real?
Dr. Richard Strassman: That’s a good question. There are a number of criteria. One is a sense of temporal continuity, both in what’s going on in that state-in other words, B follows A and C follows B-and you can track what’s going on in the world around you. That’s one of the criteria, anyway. Also there’s the maintenance of a sense of self in that state so that also is a criteria which is mapped, I think, in the DMT state.
Ultimately, though one kind of ends up defining what’s real based on overall gestalt of it feeling real. Does this feel real compared to other real experiences that somebody’s had? Ultimately that was the criterion on which the DMT volunteers based their statement of the DMT state being so real.
They even described it as being more real than real. They could clearly distinguish it from a dream or other kinds of auditory or visual types of unusual experiences which they may have had in the past. But also compared to everyday reality it just felt more real than their everyday reality.
Alex Tsakiris: Okay, so reality we kind of covered. What about the other word we’ve been kicking around, spiritual? Are DMT experiences by nature spiritual? Do they always create a spiritual experience? What is a spiritual experience? How do we define that?
Dr. Richard Strassman: Oh, well, Aristotle defined spiritual as non-corporeal, non-physical. In some ways that’s a good start because the kinds of experiences that the DMT volunteers underwent were the perceptions and interactions with non-corporeal things.
Most of the time, people don’t think of light as corporeal. I suppose you can but most of the time as compared to things like wood or stone or things like that, light is incorporeal or relatively incorporeal. Also, spiritual experience in some ways is an extension, like a qualitative extension of everyday reality. There are more intense emotions as opposed to being happy or feeling sad is ecstasy or terror. So those are more quantitative changes relative to everyday experience.
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