Dr. Rick Strassman conducted FDA- and DEA-approved clinical research at the University of New Mexico in the 1990's where he injected sixty volunteers with DMT, a compound found in the human body. Strassman found that the volunteers often had experiences similar to near-death experiences (NDEs). Dr. Rick Strassman completed an interview with Examiner.com, and this article contains the full text of that interview.
DMT, a powerful hallucinogen, is ound in hundreds of plants, and every mammal studied so far. It is also manufactured by the human body. In Dr. Strassman's studies, it produced out-of-body, near-death experiences (NDEs), and mystical experiences.
DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences (Park Street Press, 2001) is Dr. Strassman's description of his DMT research. Read more about the book here in Examiner.com's top ten books: DMT: The Spirit Molecule...
Who is Dr. Rick Strassman?
Rick Strassman, M.D., Rick Strassman was born in Los Angeles, California in 1952. He attended the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in the Bronx, New York, where he obtained his medical degree with honors in 1977.
At University of New Mexico, Dr. Strassman performed clinical research investigating the function of the pineal hormone melatonin in which his research group documented the first known role of melatonin in humans. His website is rickstrassman.com. His research with DMT was the first new US study with these drugs in a generation. He currently is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Taos, New Mexico.
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Here is the full text of Examiner.com's interview with Dr. Rick Strassman.
Examiner.com: You are currently Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine – what does that entail (ie mostly teaching, mostly research?)
Dr. Strassman: This is a “nominal” appointment. I publish the occasional article, collaborate with other researchers, and have access to the UNM libraries and statistical services. I don’t teach right now, and am not doing research right now.
Examiner.com: What is the focus of your current research?
Dr. Strassman: I’m not doing clinical research. I’m writing a book on prophecy from the Old Testament point of view, using the lens of endogenous hallucinogens to make sense out of both the descriptions of prophetic consciousness in the Bible, as well as the prophetic message brought back by the prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Zechariah. I set up the Cottonwood Research Foundation as an entity by which I would like to establish a “university of consciousness research,” but this is biding its time while I am working on my book.
Examiner.com: How did you get involved with your DMT study?
Dr. Strassman: I have had a long-standing interest in the biology of mystical states, and when I found out about the presence of DMT as an endogenous hallucinogen, this seemed to be the most likely candidate for a biological basis of spiritual experience. I had begun my clinical research career hoping to determine psychoactivity of the pineal gland, but an exhaustive analysis of melatonin’s effects failed to demonstrate much in the way of endogenous hallucinogenicity.
Examiner.com: Summarize for me the most significant findings of that research?
Dr. Strassman: A slew of biological markers went up in a dose-dependent manner when we administered pure intravenous DMT to a group of healthy experienced hallucinogen users – including prolactin, cortisol, beta-endorphin, heart rate, body temperature, oxytocin, core temperature. We also developing a new rating scale to quantify the subjective effects, based on Buddhist psychology, and this was quite sensitive and efficient.
Subjectively, the most interesting results were that high doses of DMT seemed to allow the consciousness of our volunteers to enter into non-corporeal, free-standing, independent realms of existence inhabited by beings of light who oftentimes were expecting the “volunteers,” and with whom the volunteers interacted. While “typical” near-death and mystical states occurred, they were relatively rare.
Examiner.com: Can you explain your comment in DMT -- " in some ways I was, and in others I wasn't, ready for where the spirit molecule would lead us. We succeeded in opening a door that had remained tightly locked for a generation. However, the box, like Pandora's, once opened, let out its force with its own agenda and language. It was a power that healed, hurt, startled, and was indifferent in wild and unpredictable ways. At every turn, I heard it call out in a voice that was tender, challenging, engaging, and frightening." I guess this experience changed your life and the lives of others involved in the project?
Dr. Strassman: I have a background and training in psychoanalysis, psychopharmacology, psychiatry, Zen Buddhism – and had the idea that DMT would lead to the sorts of states I believed it played a role in producing naturally – such as near-death and mystical states – ones that were rather “unitive” in their spiritual orientation. What was surprising to me was how “relational” the experiences were. I think I was suffering from the preconception that the psychedelic state shared more with Buddhist models of spirituality than Western ones – the latter being more relational, while the former are more unitive.
I don’t come out strongly in the DMT book for a beneficial effect of volunteers’ participation – more that it was a wash. But, in the course of filming our DMT documentary, I had the opportunity to interview over a half-dozen of the volunteers, some nearly 20 years after their participation in the study. I was quite impressed with the powerful positive effects their participation had on their lives, and realized that the effects needed a much longer time to manifest than I had originally believed.
Examiner.com: Do you propose releasing DMT to the public as a prescribed medication for use with a spiritual or psychological practitioner? If yes or no, why?
Dr. Strassman: Well, you’re putting “prescription,” “spiritual,” and “psychological” all in one sentence. While some of us might find this relatively easy to do, most of us don’t. There is no model in Western medicine for a prescription being used for spiritual effects. I think the effects of DMT and any other psychedelic depend upon set and setting – the intention and preparation and mental state of the participant, as well as those of the people administering and supervising the effects of the drug. DMT can be used to understand how the brain works, or it can be used to help cure addictions, or lead to spiritual insights. It all depends on set and setting. DMT is incapacitating in high doses, and shouldn’t be available for use by people who aren’t mightily prepared and carefully supervised and followed-up.
Examiner.com: Does DMT have military applications?
Dr. Strassman: Not that I know of.
Examiner.com: You have a new book – how did that come about and how is it different than your book on DMT?
Dr. Strassman: Inner Paths to Outer Space is the brain child of the second author, Slawek Wojtowicz, who’s a oncology research physician with a long-standing interest in science fiction. He read the DMT book and thought the sci-fi reading community should know about the overlap between the subject matter of the DMT book and that which sci-fi enthusiasts occupy themselves with. He should have been first author, but since my DMT book has done so well, the publisher wanted me to be the first author, which is how it turned out. I asked my friend Luis Eduardo Luna, an anthropologist with vast experience with ayahuasca (a DMT containing plant brew) to write about his perspective on the nature and effects of DMT in this form; and he subsequently asked his friend, Ede Frecksa, an Hungarian psychiatrist with a hugely expansive view of consciousness as a manifestation of quantum mechanical processes, to contribute his viewpoint. Thus, the four-author nature of the book.
Examiner.com: Would you say you are Timothy Leary of the new millennium? [author's note: Timothy Leary was a psychedelic researcher and psychoanalyst from the 1960's who coined the term "Turn on, tune in, drop out. For more information, click here... ] How is your work different than his?
Dr. Strassman: I read about Tim and his work very carefully and was quite alert to doing things very differently than he did. I avoided the media and big political events, I didn’t take any of my own drugs, I studied no undergraduates, and I studied only one graduate student per department (so as not to set up cliques). Our personalities are quite different, too – I’m more of an introvert.
Examiner.com: What about your spiritual beliefs? What do you believe now and has that changed since you completed the DMT research study?
Dr. Strassman: I had a long-standing relationship with a Western Zen order, over 20 years, and was ordained as a layman, helped found and run an affiliated meditation group, was married at the monastery, contributed to their journal. However, Buddhism a) shuns “drugs” as intoxicants and b) tends to look at all the contents of conscious experience as originating within the mind. The free-standing, autonomous nature of our DMT volunteers challenged that view, and I began seeking alternative models, finally settling on my own birth-religion, which is Judaism. I’ve spent the last 14 years re-teaching myself Biblical Hebrew, reading all the English translations of the major medieval and later commentators, and working on establishing a definition of God that I can both live with, understand, and articulate. The idea of prophecy as the highest state of spiritual evolution possible within a Western model is very appealing, because of our familiarity with the ideas, stories, and people of the Old Testament. Of course, most of us have strong negative emotional reactions to many of these things, but that doesn’t change the fact that they affect us and our culture to such a great extent, oftentimes unconsciously. The Bible is the foundational spiritual text of nearly half the world’s population. We’re foolish to ignore what’s in it because of what we were taught as children, or what unscrupulous politicians and clerics have used it for. There’s tremendous power in it, and we can have access to that power just as much as bad people can – in fact, it’s incumbent for us to wrest back control of the power of the Old Testament. I believe a broad understanding of the psychedelic state may help us do that.
Examiner.com: And now to the heart of my interest – near-death experiences. What was your familiarity with these before your DMT research?
Dr. Strassman: I had read some of Raymond Moody’s, Ken Ring’s, and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s work, and met and got to know Ken. I believed that endogenous DMT might mediate some of the features of the NDE, and expected exogenous (IV) DMT to mimic some of those features. I read about the white light, the encounter with dead relatives/friends, the tunnel, the out-of-body movement of consciousness, the beneficial effects of many NDE’s and their relationship to non-NDE spiritual experiences.
Examiner.com: How has your research added to the body of knowledge on NDEs?
Dr. Strassman: DMT levels in lab animals rise with stress, and the NDE is a highly stressful event – so I have proposed that stress-related DMT rises in the NDE, and this may mediate some of its effects. However, this remains speculative, as we don’t know what happens in normal people as they approach death, or die, in terms of endogenous DMT levels. That’s one of the functions of our new assay being developed at LSU to measure endogenous levels of DMT and related compounds.
To the extent exogenous DMT elicits an altered state that shares features with the NDE, perhaps endogenous DMT is involved –e.g., the contact with beings, the out-of-body consciousness, the free-standing nature of the an alternative reality, the incredibly powerful and compelling emotional effects, the conviction that life continues after consciousness separates from the body, the long-term beneficial effects – all of these occur with exogenous DMT, and the NDE – so we just need to learn more about the biology of these states.
It’s likely there is a complicated mix of endogenous compounds mediating the NDE – including DMT, 5-methoxy-DMT, and other related and unrelated compounds, such as ketamine- and salvinorin-like molecules, all of which are capable of eliciting out-of-body and highly novel altered states.
Examiner.com: Is an NDE brain chemistry or something more?
Dr. Strassman: It’s all brain chemistry – your reading this letter is all brain chemistry. DMT states are not near-death; and near-death is not death. So, it’s all rather slippery. I think as we approach death, our brain chemistry changes, and our normal consciousness changes. We feel ourselves leaving our bodies – perhaps the brain chemistry changes reflect what happens when our consciousness leaves the body. Perhaps the brain chemistry makes us feel as if our consciousness is leaving our body. However, the latter idea doesn’t satisfy me much, as why in the world would our brains create such a fantastic and bizarre set of experiences as we die, rather than just cloak us in darkness? I tend to believe that the brain chemistry is the means by which our consciousness moves to the next non-corporeal level – but to scientifically establish this as fact would require technology much more sophisticated than we presently possess – that is, technology that could a) make consensually observable the consciousness of another person; b) make consensually observable one’s life force outside of the body.
Examiner.com: Are NDEs, alien abductions and Out of body experiences essentially the same and if not how are they different?
Dr. Strassman: They share features. NDE’s include out of body sensations and contact with “beings.” Alien abductions involved contact with “beings.” Out of body experiences are just that.
Examiner.com: How do you react to some Christian skeptic’s opinion that NDE’s are brought on by the devil or demons and they are promises of something that does not exist?
Dr. Strassman: Seraphim Rose wrote a great book about this: The Soul After Death (1998). He takes that viewpoint, and he argues it so persuasively and articulately that I have had to pay attention. I think what his book did for me is to even more strongly assert that set and setting are crucial to both *using* the altered states brought on by near-death, hallucinogens, and similar circumstances, and in *perceiving* them. That is, if we don’t know what we’re looking for, or looking at, then we’re very easily misled. Thus, I now believe the need for a very strong and sophisticated understanding of spirituality is even more important than I did before reading Rose’s book.
Examiner.com: What is the significance of NDE’s to mankind?
Dr. Strassman: I think public knowledge and discourse about NDE’s and similar states enlarges our views of reality. For example, DMT is made in our bodies at all times, and the brain seems to require DMT for normal function. What does this say about the solidity of our “version” of reality? The fact that there seem to be ongoing parallel levels of reality that are just a heartbeat away has to give us pause if we are to seriously consider the implications of the DMT, near-death, and other types of spiritual states that suggest incorporeal levels of reality as seemingly real and coherent as this one.
Examiner.com: And what is the significance of your research to mankind?
Dr. Strassman: I think that DMT and other endogenous hallucinogens are a fascinating set of molecules that reflect perhaps the most spiritual of the physical, and the most physical of the spiritual, and by using this concept, we can start to break down the dichotomy between spiritual and physical. How can there be any difference ultimately? This is a roundabout way of saying that I think my DMT work will be seen as providing a subtle, but powerful, move towards reconciling the spiritual and the physical. I hope my prophecy book does so even more.
Examiner.com: I recently had a reader comment “so what?” How does this help me be a better person? My thought is that your research is amazing, interesting and thought-provoking, but how can reading and understanding your research help us in our daily lives? Can you recommend how a layperson might become more familiar with these concepts?
Dr. Strassman: One of the chapters in my DMT book is “If so, so what?” That’s what my book on prophecy is intended to answer. If, in this case, the prophetic state is embedded within the brain-consciousness matrix, waiting to be unlocked by means of increasingly well-understood mechanisms, such as DMT and related compounds, then so might be the prophetic message embedded in the brain-consciousness matrix. To the extent that precipitating prophetic consciousness is possible using pharmacology, so it’s important to learn about the prophetic message, which is one that is absolutely geared towards making the world a better place: don’t take bribes, have honest scales and balances, look after the widow and orphan, don’t hate, and particularly the Golden Rule and all of its corollaries.
To the extent that prophecy reflects brain state changes, it reflects objective reality, and those who rely upon scripture can point to our work as validating (in some ways) what they’ve believed in all along. However, this is where science and religion need to work together. There’s a lot of crazy stuff being passed off as genuine religion, which is, if not frankly evil, then sorely deluded. This is where scientists needs to familiarize themselves with scripture, and religionists with science when it comes to discussing such complex concepts as spiritual experience and spiritual information. Science has peer-review and the scientific method, which religion tends not to have; religious schools deal with moral issues, introspection, an interest in ultimate beginnings and endings, and non-physical (at least at this point in our technology) realities, which science struggles with.
Examiner.com: Can you comment on your thoughts around a comment that I another NDE author wrote: that people’s lives improve when they read about NDE’s? Do you think this is possible and how might this be?
Dr. Strassman: I think anything that provides hope, solace, a larger view of reality and what’s possible, can make some people feel better sometimes. Other people might get scared.
Examiner.com: What’s a day like in the life of Dr. Rick Strassman?
Dr. Strassman: Well, I’m not doing research, as in going to the hospital giving people intravenous DMT anymore. I read, write, correspond, and so some weaving and spinning in my spare time.
Examiner.com: Can you recommend any activities, books, seminars, websites, shows, videos to us?Dr. Strassman: My DMT book is full of interesting information and ideas. The second book, Inner Paths, is a development of the DMT work in a particular direction. My website (www.rickstrassman.com) has a lot of related links. I don’t have many videos out there. A DMT documentary called DMT-The Spirit Molecule (www.thespiritmolecule.com) is in the works, and will be a fascinating and thorough snapshot of how we now look at the relationship between psychedelics and consciousness at this moment. My foundation (www.cottonwoodresearch.org), while rather fledgling and not too active right now while I’m writing the prophecy book, is a powerful and novel idea – and I may turn to it once this book is finished.
Examiner.com: What are your plans for the future?
Dr. Strassman: Finish the book. Weave some rugs. Perhaps move towards making Cottonwood Research Foundation a real place.
Examiner.com: Where can people see you or hear you lecture?
Dr. Strassman: I don’t travel or speak much right now. I do the occasional radio interview, and I note them on my website.
We want to thank Dr. Rick Strassman for the wonderful information contained in this interview. For more information on Dr. Strassman and his work, please visit his website at www.rickstrassman.com
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Comments
Great article. I've had a couple of near death experiences. I was Agnostic before and still am. The human brain is a very complicated part of our anatomy. Brain chemistry is still a very mysterious subject despite the research that's been done (in re to your previous article about NDE and Athiests).
I don't believe the things experience under such circumstances either proves or disproves the existence of a god(s). It only validates that there is as little understanding of "inner space" as there is of outer space. But, if an experience, whether it occurs naturally or induced artificially, has a long ranging positive effect on people... it's definitely worth further research and exploration. Who knows? It might lead to a one time "shot" to treat people suffering from serious depression... or to treat former meth addicts who find it difficult to rehab because of the serious "down" effects they have when attempting to quit the drug.
Please put me on your email list i whant to know more please!
And keep up whith te good work!!
fanie@tacbob.co.za
South africa
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