"I saw this city in the deep deep distance that was dark green and all these lights flickering and clouds flowing over it." "And this all started after tremendous geometric patterns that are incredibly rapid" "You cannot describe it to anybody, they are so fast" "After those had slowed down I saw this city in the deep distance." "So I was sort of watching that and then this ball of light goes right past 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" ""So, 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 throughout nature which has profound effects on human consciousness." "One of the things besides what it does, one of things about DMT that always fascinated me was the fact that it's such a simple molecule." "DMT stands for Dimethyltryptamine." "N-N-dimethyltryptamine." "If you actually look at the ring structure of DMT itself you only have really four positions you can attach things to." "So, you can make diethyl or dipropyl, there are some other types of carbon chains 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." "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 the synthesis of DMT and these enzymes are very ancient enzymes, they're all over the place, they are, again, 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 dollar 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 physiological noise." "That's a very naïve 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' central nervous systems are wired to receive this experience?" "Must be, that 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 lives, 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 into 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 drawn 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, it wasn't totally crazy to presume a pineal site of origin of DMT, which fit in nicely with my theory that the pineal was somehow involved in naturally occurring mystical states." "This hypothesis proposes that the pineal gland, in certain times, when it's under specific stress stimulation, it releases a significant amount of this hormone, DMT." "And it's that hormone that facilitates the entering 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 there might be a burst of endogenous DMT that 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 elicited 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 neurochemical mechanism of these experiences." "if we can say that there is a release of endogenous opiates 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 they are related in the context of the brain's receptors" "and the different parts of the brain that may or may not become active." "One of the other interesting things about the pharmacology of DMT is that it is actively transported into the brain, and so you have to wonder about the role of DMT in just every day normal perceptual activity." "Too much DMT and things become very psychedelic or not enough DMT and the brain can make things dull and flat and gray." "There's something that, for me, makes sense about DMT." "You called it the "spirit molecule"" "It might almost be called the "reality molecule"" "Philosophically, it makes sense that something that would be so fundamental to the way we perceive reality, would be imbued out there in reality." "There was a sense around it that there was something special." "That it wasn't like anything else." "That it wasn't like other psychedelics." "Its intensity and speed was such that it really produced a different kind of response." "I mean, I remember almost getting the sense that it was kind of 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 that few minutes' span to integrate once you're dropped back down." "Dimethyltryptamine, when administered, 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." "Whereas 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." "Yeah, I'm very interested in Ayahuasca." "When I begun my studies in the early 1990's," "Ayahuasca was just starting to make inroads into the West." "But it has obviously 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 that one plant contains DMT and one plant contains an enzyme inhibitor." "Combine them and you can drink DMT and it's orally active." "So it starts working in half an hour, lasts 3 or 4 hours and you can maneuver a lot more comfortably within that state than 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 down" "like you're floating on a feather back to the ground." "As valuable as my DMT experiences have been, I feel there is lot more enduring value, really, in this folk technology which stretches it out and makes it a navigable space." "Our whole western, European-derived tradition of distilling alcohols and isolating chemicals and making everything stronger and taking it 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 it's reached out into the world and brought DMT into many many thousands of lives much bigger canvas than it had reached for the last ten thousand or however many years," "and it has done very rapidly, and it has done with form to go with it." "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 part of a legitimate religious and spiritual practice for thousands of years, certainly in the Amazon." "And we can't just dismiss all that as primitive mumbo-jumbo and superstition." "We have to get to grips with that on its own terms." "I think there is a growing number of people who feel this desire to 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, 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 reason, afraid of it." "I think like a lot of people in my generation" "I first heard about DMT through Terence McKenna it was a very funny way to become aware of such a powerful 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." "The DMT flash makes it clear that 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 thought 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 the other things that were around." "DMT really did seem to be a whole other level of experience." "I ask that you 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 started going public." "There was a kind of transition from the indigenous" "Indians in South America to mestizo people in the cities and then these churches - the Santo Daime church and then the UDV church later started doing ceremonies that would make the Ayahuasca accessible not just to Indians but to urban people in the big cities in Brazil" "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 government action, they contended 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 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 societies." "Our society values alert, problem-solving consciousness and it devalues all other states of consciousness." "Any 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 condemn the states of consciousness that have nothing to do with the alert problem-solving mentality." "And if you go back to the 1960s, when there was a tremendous upsurge of exploration of psychedelics" "I would say the huge backlash that followed that had to do with a fear on the part of the powers that be." "That if enough people went into those realms and 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 the Vietnam was happening, all this real stuff was going on." "and the psychedelic movement wasn't really addressing that in a real way." "And Timothy and that bunch sold us a false bill of goods that didn't really work." "We are now, whether we like it or not, in 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 consciousness." "Chemicals can help us learn faster, chemicals can help us expand or contract our consciousness." "The atmosphere in the 1960s was" ""We are doing research here, we are dedicating our lives to trying just about everything on the planet."" "So we would try it, then we would talk about it, then we would evaluate it." "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 try to go out into these other realities, but they didn't have a basis there weren't wisdom traditions, elders, there weren't connections of shamanic lineages." "People would go out and they would kind of smash apart." "Timothy Leary really so discredited a scientific approach to studying this because he 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 hurdles 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 lay 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 major 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" ""Maybe, neurochemistry plays a role in brain chemistry and, and behavioral 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 to distance themselves from any valid scientifically meritorious relationship with psychedelics." "Being a psychiatrist and saying you want to learn or study about psychedelics it's not that well received." "I made one mention, one time that" "I was discouraged from really bringing it up again for actually a number of years." "For cultural reasons the whole class of compounds got pulled off the clinical bench and no research was going on for 40 years." "So scientifically, I can't imagine a more exciting area to be pursuing" "How does one go about studying these plants and compounds?" "Plants and compounds which produce unimaginable experiences and appear to shed light on some 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 discriminate between studies in the scientific realm and recreational use." "But in the early 1980s I reviewed all of that literature and could pretty well establish on that if people were really carefully screened and supervised and then followed up that the incidents and adverse reactions to LSD and related psychedelic 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 psychedelic research, would be DMT." "It was really exciting for me because I thought 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 re-initiation of clinical research with an extremely potent drug." "I was of a strong opinion that you could do these studies and Rick agreed so we had a number of discussions and at some point the discussion came up" ""Dave, what if I do all this paperwork and spend all this time and get to the 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 grade DMT wasn't a chemical you just buy off the shelf 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 a sidelight of the protocol was the involvement of a psychiatrist from UCLA named Daniel Freedman." "He was kind of one of the grand old men of American psychiatry and actually he was one of the people who in the 50s and 60s got their start with psychedelic research." "And the main thing that Daniel Freedman 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 where all the hysteria is at, that's where all the fears get up."" ""You're a scientist, Rick." "Approach it as a scientist." "Do basic simple measurements, look at heart-rate, cardiovascular parameters."" ""You won't get in trouble doing that, you can get it funded and it's solid science."" "Rick did what he said, be has then he still was able to get these accounts of what happened" "That wasn't in the plan, wasn't really what was proposed in the studies that were funded" "That wasn't what Danny talked about." "But those were the spin-off that really made it interesting." "Rick Strassman was advertising in some magazine somewhere about wanting volunteers for a particular study in psychotropic, and I 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 little obnoxious maybe that's not the right word but, people that were just seeking to do a lot of drugs they were very professional people." "There 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 people 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?"" ""The sensation of going up really high and then slamming back down towards earth."" "and I said "No, I hate them, they're horrible"" "and he said "Not good."" "I just wanted to go with the experience, learn as much as I could, absorb 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." "It was high risk, and 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 to any emergencies." "You're in this hospital room and there's all the sounds and the smells and just the prior experiences of being in a hospital." "All these negative things come back so there was the whole environment to be overcome because little did I know that it didn't matter where I was," "I wasn't going to be in my body, I was going to be out in the universe and it didn't matter where you launched 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 going to 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 are 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 or 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." "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, especially with some of the higher doses." "We gave one gentleman, who had 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, sat 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 looking at me and I thought "Oh my God, he's gone, I hope he comes back" and he did." "The countdown was like, counting down for your.., preparing for your death, waiting to surrender and..." "You'd feel the coldness just going through your veins and it's really indescribable, it's hard to.." "it's like ice going through your veins." "And the next thing that would happen, besides my racing heart, is this burning sensation would happen on the back of my neck," "I mean this was reliable, this is like clockwork, this happened every time that you shot me up with DMT." "And then there would be a hum, and the hum would get louder and louder and to the point where it broke apart, everything that I was or knew, it was just this:" "It just got louder and louder until you just had to surrender to the sound and then you were.. there." "I would get a warm, full feeling, a golden feeling in my chest, before it went to my head." "I'd feel this warm rod, about an inch and a half in diameter start growing up inside my central channel." "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 sinuses behind my eyes, slow down." "Start to grow and distend the skin behind my forehead about one inch behind my hairline" "I was afraid it was going to pop my skin a few times, because it was a very physical feeling." "About and inch and a half, two inches above my skull." "when it popped 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 Cindy 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 know that time crumbles, the linearity of time is totally meaningless in these states." "You are at the Godhead, the point where all time folds in on itself." "More and more layers of my humanity start peeling off finally" "The last, 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 wasn'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 fell 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 suddenly I'm in the Universe, in this huge void with these beings on the other side and I put out my hands and 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 this capacity of love, that we as human beings have, that I was trying to just send to them." "This meteor-like trip through the infinite space of the interior consciousness is.." "up pops the picture puzzle 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 puzzle pattern door is." "The picture puzzle pattern door is the furthest reaches of your humanity." "This is the doorway into what defines you as a human being." "When you go past that, you stop being human to a degree and the further you get past this point, the further away you go from being a human being." "But right here this picture puzzle pattern door is everything, it's everything, it's what defines you as a human being." "This is your ..." "This picture puzzle 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 letter in every language was pouring out of this point." "And I looked around at 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 of what they were" "I was like a caveman in a computer lab." "I didn't have any idea, but I knew in my intellectual awareness 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 in it, I call it "the hobby horses"" "and they're interlocking, reticulating, vibrating hobby horses and I use that and that's what they seem like to me." "They interlock and they form a visual pattern that seems infinite in scape." "And then you're 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, like with an earthen.." "pointing towards Earth, but not really being on Earth." "There was no "I", there was just a sense of a witness." "Being suspended in this incredible vaulted space." "Like a cathedral made out of stained glass of all imaginable colors." "Unbelievable brilliance and saturation of color." "Just this amazing pattern in this dome, this gigantic dome." "It felt like the size of a small planet." "And were these winged beings, I don't remember exactly what they were 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 the sense of another realm that was there." "At some point, there was this implicit sense:" ""This is the divine realm."" "It was not like a thought, but it was like this implicit kind of grokking recognition." "It was all very, very impersonal until I got to this space where I realized that I was in the area where 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 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." "The mind has to try to catch up." "Because now the whole cognitive dissonance of the experience 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." "I mean, it's amazing what a human being can experience in a hospital bed." "I mean they can experience almost the whole universe life, death, everything in between." "This is not some recreational thing and I don't believe anybody should enter this lightly, it is life-transformative." "It will perhaps shake you enough to realize 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 of course there is no way to prove that where I went was deep space that I encountered other entities, other life forms that exist in this universe." "At some point maybe our civilization will become advanced enough and we will throw off these anchors of impossible thought that these things are impossible, that it's not.." "everything that exists, exists where we can see it." "I wrapped-up the studies in `95 and 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 it seemed to me if I couldn't model and explain what was going on, that I was doing and just" "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." "I think what began dawning on me after a while once 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 consciousness and the symbiosis of the two." "It started seeming to me that what was happening with DMT particularly with respect to some of these reports of entering parallel or alternate or free standing parallel sorts of realms of existences, that that indeed was what their consciousness was doing." "The chemistry of their brain, which is the organ of consciousness, was being changed by DMT 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 function but if we also look at what it enables us to see." "It just rips that filtering mechanism away for a few minutes and for a few minutes you're immersed in sort of this raw data sphere 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 you associate and synthesize these things together to tell yourself a story, essentially about what's going on, where you are in space and time." "It's the brain that helps us to process all this information and to create for us a rendition 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 the self." "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 very 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 on the basis of science."" "What I was doing early on when I was hearing these reports interpreting them, calling them psychological or 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 extremely long time in many cultures over the millennia." "Helpers, spirit 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 an impossibility that people are, in some way, interacting with some sort of an intelligence or sentient 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?"" "or, "is it giving you the tools?", "what are you bringing back?"" "What you bring back, I think, has to be something more than" ""there are 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 there is a map and a clear methodology then one will just have a variety of different experiences." "All of 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." "If it is real then perhaps, how does it work?" "Look, there's extraordinarily regular phenomena that come-up with these things, that are clearly linked in many ways to these larger human issues around mysticism or religious experience 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've got to account for this stuff the way you've got to account for dreams, the way you've got to account for all sorts of psychoactive responses." "Using DMT as an explanatory model, as kind of a mediator between our consciousness and a consciousness of a non-corporeal sort of reality." "It's handy." "With DMT, there are no words" "I would try to wrap mathematical vocabulary around the experience afterward." "I specialized 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 sense of reality." "Where they understand the reality on a more fundamental level." "And they gain a great deal of insight and 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 breakthrough than LSD, mushrooms, peyote and so on." "It's instructive, it's more supportive of future evolution and the creation of the future and it is in itself, more of a mystery." "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 do 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, maybe 95% or more." "While radical as an idea, it's just a logical extension in some ways of 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 was unknown before the year 1604." "The electromagnetic field unknown before the year 1830 or something." "All of these, what we call the fundamental fields of mathematical physics are new discoveries." "Dark energy is an 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 that necessarily diminishes the reality or the realness of what these experiences are about." "If the pharmacology or psychopharmacology of psychedelic experiences turn out to be essentially the same as religious or spiritual experiences, it would help us to understand where these experiences are occurring 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 at the bed rock of the world's religions." "The research and knowledge, speculation about the pineal body and DMT 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 enlightenment." "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 acquired 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 our 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 could 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." "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?" "Assuming that psychedelics are part of the human future at the moment they're still 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 rational and mature exploration of 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 start with." "But one doesn't want to throw out 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"?" "What's the evolutionary advantage to having some part of the brain that seems to 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." "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 has sought to persuade us that the material realm is the only realm, and the only way we're going to recover is to reconnect with spirit." "And I truly believe we need the help of the plants in order to do that." "Part of our work is to respect these medicines and then to change the culture enough that people doing them can be respected." "Not everybody needs to do them, not everybody should or wants to but that 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 growing 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 when 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 drug and alcohol abuse." "And given that we know that DMT and similar alkaloids have a very strong effect on the same receptor 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 few years to utilize psilocybin which is the active alkaloid in hallucinogenic mushrooms in the treatment of patients with advanced stage cancer who have anxiety we're treating the anxiety, not the cancer." "Now, psilocybin is 4-phosphoryloxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine so obviously from the chemical structure point of view, very similar to DMT." "Ultimately, what I want to do is see these things used in the 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 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 behavioral pharmacology model, it's just wrong, it's backwards actually." "That consciousness is primary in the universe and matter is a result of." "Utilizing substances like DMT or 5-methoxy-DMT may really help us prepare by practicing a transient dying experience." "Thus far we're observing, very positive effects in regards to the nature of 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 and large our subjects do quite well in the time they have remaining." "For those people who do come to terms with it, part of it is a recognition that these psychedelics open up a space that they weren't aware existed and sort of give them a vision of what could be past 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 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 are 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 if that's the kind of thing that you can see on psychedelics." "If you don't get trapped in the beauty and awe of the psychedelic experience itself." "It's like looking through the chandelier of reality from a different vantage point." "You can now project through those crystals in another way and it's beautiful." "But ..." "Okay, now come back, now come back." "I think if I ever were to resume giving people psychedelics, particularly DMT, it wouldn't be just to tinker with brain chemistry and just see what's happening." "I think one of the things I 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 callous is the word but that's the first word that comes to mind, I think, if you're really going to open people up like that, you need to do it for a purpose" "not just for scientific curiosity and like to be helpful rather that just sort of smart or clever." "To my mind is this kind of a two edge sword of simultaneously opening up to the numinous world to the world of messages, the world of spirits, the world of entities." "And at 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 very tricky mixture of authentic religious experience with gods, and messages and clear signs and a sort of 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 we 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 a society, rebound far beyond ourselves." "I think DMT is a forcible reminder that there's a lot more about reality, the universe, ourselves, the biosphere, whatever, 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."