DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences

by Rick Strassman M. D.

  “What do you mean by ‘spirit’? It sounds to me like you are talking about your self-image, your identity.”

  Well, we could argue about terms.

  “When I think of spirit, it’s the unborn and the undying. That which is before and after and doesn’t depend on the body.”

  I’m used to the “I” that is the body, and I can leave that, so it’s not dependent on the body.

  Our conversation seemed to increase his enthusiasm.

  I saw who I am at a fundamental level. You know sonically or visually there is a certain spectrum that one can tune into that is one’s individual self? That was just totally bare and it was there.

  “Remember . . . this is only half of the big dose.”

  That’s a frightening thought.

  It was my turn: “Now you’re getting it!”

  Did he really want to take twice this amount of DMT? I would rather he quit now than all of us regret it later.

  “How do you feel about double this dose?”

  What is the value? How can this experience help me or humankind or my community? If I had brought back a wonderful truth, that would be great.

  I laughed and said, “Well, you’ve been talking twenty minutes nonstop about ‘nothing.’”

  However, as he finished up the rating scale, he said,

  I guess I will complete this study. I’ll take the 0.4 and then I’ll do the pindolol study. But I don’t think I will do anymore. I think that the shamans in South America use other plants to fill out and make the DMT more reasonable. Pure DMT seems empty or hollow.

  The morning of Carlos’s 0.4 mg/kg dose, he was sweating and shaking when I entered the room.

  Carlos said, “It’s a body fear primarily. It’s stress. This is no chance to build up to it. It’s just there so fast. With Datura, I have the fear of death but you can build up to it gradually. On that 0.2 dose last week, I thought you gave me the wrong drug, that I was poisoned, that I had died. The duress is terrible. I take substances to leave my body, not to put it under duress.”

  I tried to provide some consolation: “This dose will be more, but not qualitatively different.”

  He began chanting as I started giving him the drug. His chanting abruptly stopped halfway through the flush. He let out a big sigh at 2 minutes. He resumed chanting, more softly this time, at 3½ minutes.

  At 12 minutes he said,

  Please remove my eyeshades.

  Laura did so.

  It was really quite special. I wasn’t human for about three and a half minutes. This dose creates a level of stress that’s unparalleled in the annals of Carlos’s history.

  He cleared his throat and said,

  I met myself as the Creator.

  “Creator of . . . ?”

  The Creator of all. I’ve had that realization before, but not at this level.

  “One of our volunteers likes to say ‘You can still be an atheist until 0.4.’”

  This is true.

  Carlos took a deep breath and began telling us what had happened. It was difficult to keep up with his rate of sharing his incredible story.

  There was the sound of the entire universe, more like a hum. It was pervasive, overwhelming. I thought, “Holy moly, how did I get into this?” Things weren’t right and were getting more wrong all the time. Then my ability to perceive as a human being winked out. There were no more emotions, because emotions work only up to a certain point.

  I saw a man lying in a hospital room. He was naked with a person on either side of him, one female and one male. At first they didn’t look like anybody I knew. They were perfect generic human beings. I recognized, in context, that they were me, you, and Laura. The way of knowing was totally different from this reality. I didn’t know I was in a study of any kind.

  There was something wrong with him. He was there to get better. The hospital was a healing center. What was wrong with him was death. The naked person was dead. What killed the person was the stress from the DMT. None of my guardians or protectors made an appearance. They were out of the loop.

  He was healed, more than healed. He was reborn. He got cured from death, healed from death. And then he became the creator of a whole universe.

  I gradually became more and more solid and moved toward my everyday presence. I watched the universe’s creation down from fundamental mental energy to a vibratory rate to material things. I realized I was recreating the hospital and the room. As the world jelled more and more, I wanted to see it and asked to have the eyeshades taken off. I became fascinated with my fingers, like a newborn.

  I’ve taught classes on how the universe is a construct of your own mind. And here it was happening. My attitude was different when I knew you were my creations. I felt as close to you as to my own son and daughter.

  I would have to say my experience was a classical death/rebirth experience. I had done it before, but never in the same way as with DMT. It was spectacular in imagery, texture, and atmosphere and had incredible lighting and effects. Boil it down and it’s very, very classic.

  The 0.2 was harrowing—this was way beyond. I knew the boundary beyond life existed. I never thought I’d be there, though, at such an early age. It’s one of those things that old men talk about, like “once I got there.” It’s just the wrong place and time. I expect these sorts of things in the mountains with my friends in a more ceremonial setting.

  While I was impressed with the features of his session, I also wondered about other reasons for it. “Creating” Laura, me, and the hospital environment reversed the balance of power in the room. He no longer needed to fear us or the DMT. Nevertheless, there was no point in making such an interpretation. Carlos certainly would have seen little merit in it. Instead I simply dealt with the feelings that came through as he spoke.

  “You were surprised.”

  A true surprise.

  Carlos did not have the type of near-death experience about which we hear so often in today’s popular clinical literature. Willow’s case exemplifies this more contemporary version of the NDE. However, Carlos’s highdose DMT session did partake of many features that practitioners of shamanism report as part of the initiation into the more advanced realms of their practice; that is, the death-rebirth experience.5

  Carlos experienced himself as dead rather than dying. He saw his lifeless body lying on the bed, although not quite the way he left it, as he was wearing all his clothes before the spirit molecule entered his brain. As he was reborn, so was his universe reconstituted. Here again we see a mystical culmination of the near-death experience. He experienced creation in a way similar to Sara’s first high-dose experience in the last chapter, and to Elena’s in the next: vast energy slowing to vibrations, finally resulting in matter. Carlos, feeling like a newborn, marveled at his fingers the way an infant is fascinated with his newly discovered body.

  There is a progression from the personal to the transpersonal series of experiences DMT elicits. It’s possible to work through one’s own psychological and psychosomatic problems with the spirit molecule’s light and power. The near-death encounter spells what seems to be the end of those concerns by simulating or foretelling what it’s like once our individual bodies fall away.

  Near-death experiences seem to have the greatest impact on those who take the next step within that mysterious experience—the leap to a mystical level of awareness. It was these realms, into which DMT might lead, that the volunteers and I believed held the greatest promise of significant personal transformation. It is into these fields of DMT’s sight that we now enter.

  16

  Mystical States

  One of the most compelling factors fueling my decision to make a career of psychedelic research was the similarity between high-dose psychedelic experiences and mystical experiences. Years later, it was these types of sessions I hoped to see, study, and understand in our New Mexico DMT volunteers.

  The debate regarding the spiritual relevance of psychedelic experiences has raged on for as lon
g as people have used these chemicals for their profound psychological effects. For example, books such as The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience make the obvious connection to William James’s early-twentieth-century book The Varieties of Religious Experience. Recently, Entheogens and the Future of Religion continues a long and controversial tradition of recommending that any deep spiritual practice include psychedelic sacraments.1

  In my early visits to the Zen Buddhist community at which I studied, I raised this question with many of the young American monks. Nearly everyone I asked at this training center answered that psychedelic drugs, especially LSD, first opened the doors to a new reality for them. It was the pursuit of stabilizing, strengthening, and broadening their initial psychedelic flash that led them to the discipline of a communal, meditation-based ascetic life.

  Naturally, I wondered if psychedelic drugs could speed up and simplify attainment of sublime states of mind free of the “side effects” of institutional practice, such as ritualistic behavior and withdrawal from the everyday world.

  The answer that did emerge from our New Mexico research was complicated. Yes, psychedelics could induce states similar to mystical experiences; but no, they didn’t have the same impact. Even more revealing than these relatively straightforward answers was my Buddhist community’s reaction to even asking and discussing these questions. However, I am getting ahead of myself.

  In order to establish the close similarities between spiritual experience and what is possible with the spirit molecule, I will first review briefly the features of a mystical experience.

  The three pillars of self, time, and space all undergo profound transfiguration in a mystical experience.

  There no longer is any separation between the self and what is not the self. Personal identity and all of existence become one and the same. In fact, there is no “personal” identity because we understand at the most basic level the underlying unity and interdependence of all existence.

  Past, present, and future merge together into a timeless moment, the now of eternity. Time stops, inasmuch as it no longer “passes.” There is existence, but it is not dependent upon time. Now and then, before and after, all combine into this exact point. On the relative level, short periods of time encompass enormous amounts of experience.

  As our self and time lose their boundaries, space becomes vast. Like time, space is no longer here or there but everywhere, limitless, without edges. Here and there are the same. It is all here.

  In this infinitely vast time and space with no limited self, we hold up to examination all contradictions and paradoxes and see they no longer conflict. We can hold, absorb, and accept everything our mind conjures up: good and evil, suffering and happiness, small and large. We now are certain that consciousness continues after the body dies, and that it existed long before this particular physical form. We see the entire universe in a blade of grass and know what our face was like before our parents met.

  Extraordinarily powerful feelings surge through our consciousness. We are ecstatic, and the intensity of this joy is such that our body cannot contain it—it seems to need a temporarily disembodied state. While the bliss is pervasive, there’s also an underlying peace and equanimity that’s not affected by even this incredibly profound happiness.

  There is a searing sense of the sacred and the holy. We contact an unchanging, unborn, undying, and uncreated reality. It is a personal encounter with the “Big Bang,” God, Cosmic Consciousness, the source of all being. Whatever we call it, we know we have met the fundamental bedrock and fountainhead of existence, one that emanates love, wisdom, and power on an unimaginable scale.

  We call it “enlightenment” because we encounter the white light of creation’s majesty. We may meet guides, angels, or other disembodied spirits, but we pass them all as we merge with the light. Our eyes now, finally, are truly open, and we see things clearly in a “new light.”

  The import and momentousness of the experience stands alone in our history. It may serve to focus the rest of our life toward the completion, filling out, and working through of the insights obtained.

  Some of these types of experiences occurred in our volunteers within the context of another more compelling category of encounter, such as mind-body healing, being contact, or near-death experiences. For example, Willow’s near-death experiences partook of a deep spiritual nature. And Cassandra’s DMT-tolerance sessions involved more than simply working through personal trauma; she also experienced the presence of deeply loving and healing beings. In this chapter, we’ll hear about spiritual experiences that predominated the volunteers’ sessions.

  These DMT sessions were some of the most satisfying of the research. Since Elena’s and Sean’s came relatively early in the studies, they supported the validity and importance of studying the spirit molecule’s more sublime properties. By the time Cleo’s spiritual experience took place, I had already begun the process of leaving the university. Therefore, I cast a somewhat less idealistic eye on her sessions. Nevertheless, if everyone’s encounters with DMT had been as rewarding as hers, there would have been less reason to stop the research when I did.

  Supervising these sessions was relatively easy, at least at first. I knew the territory based upon training, study, and experience. The difficulties emerged in the interpretation of these effects, and my sense of their importance. Were they “real” enlightenment experiences? How would I know? And with whom could I consult about them?

  While Cleo’s spiritual experience took place later than Elena’s and Sean’s, it was somewhat less complex than theirs. So I’d like to start with hers. It gives us a good introduction to where the other two subjects’ encounters will lead us.

  Cleo was forty years old when she started our study. She was legally blind due to a genetic eye disorder. Nevertheless, she had persevered, having earned an academic degree and massage therapy certification. She now was enrolled in a master’s program in counseling. Red-haired, petite, and with a fiery spirit, Cleo was born into a Jewish family but later began practicing nature-oriented rituals within the Wiccan faith. Once, while on LSD, Cleo saw a “past-life experience” in which she was burned at the stake for being a witch.

  Her father had molested her sexually when she was a child, memories of which emerged for the first time during a recent psilocybin mushroom trip. Curiously, Cleo had suffered from a phobia to snow as a child, hyperventilating and vomiting whenever she was out in it. She no longer was troubled by this irrational fear, having worked it through on psilocybin several years before. I usually don’t use the word “indomitable,” but Cleo is as close to exemplifying that attitude as few people I know.

  Her reasons for volunteering reflected her pioneering, altruistic spirit: “I am curious. I think I am ready for the next step. I believe in this type of research—from an academic stance—and believe there may be a valid clinical/therapeutic use for hallucinogens.”

  When I met Cleo in Room 531 the afternoon of her screening low dose, she was drawing tarot cards from her deck. The ones she picked were of butterflies and voyagers—optimistic themes.

  At 15 minutes after the injection, she commented,

  There was the lightest feeling of a beckoning for me to follow something. It was like a light on the horizon, like two roads merging with the horizon. There were some eyes looking at me, friendly. They wanted to see who was there, and seemed to say that I would follow them later.

  The next morning Cleo asked about the advice I had given her the day before regarding how to prepare for her large dose: “What did you mean when you suggested I ‘go through’ the colors?”

  I replied, “It seems like people can get entranced by the colors. If they can go through the curtain that the colors seem to represent, there often is more information and feeling than just the colors themselves.”

  At 19 minutes after her high-dose DMT injection, it started snowing outside. I recalled Cleo’s old phobia to snowflakes. Laura rose from her seat and turned up the thermostat. />
  Rick, I can see why you became a psychiatrist.

  “Why?”

  To give this to people.

  I told her she was right.

  I had the expectation that I would be going “out,” but I went in, into every cell in my body. It was amazing. It wasn’t just my body . . . themselves . . . themselves . . . it’s all connected. Oh, that’s what I did. Okay.

  She laughed at her inarticulateness.

  By 30 minutes, she spoke more clearly:

  I felt the DMT go in and it burned in my vein. It was hard to breathe into it. Then the patterns began. I said to myself, “Let me go through you.”

  At that point it opened, and I was very much somewhere else. I believe it was at that point that I went out, into the universe—being, dancing with, a star system.

  I asked myself, “Why am I doing this to myself?” And then there was, “This is what you’ve always been searching for. This is what all of you has always been searching for.”

  There was a movement of color. The colors were words. I heard what the colors were saying to me. I was trying to look out, but they were saying, “Go in.” I was looking for God outside. They said, “God is in every cell of your body.” And I was feeling it, totally open to it, and I kept opening to it more, and I just took it in. The colors kept telling me things, but they were telling me things so I not only heard what I was seeing, but also felt it in my cells. I say “felt,” but it was like no other “felt,” more like a knowing that was happening in my cells. That God is in everything and that we are all connected, and that God dances in every cell of life, and that every cell of life dances in God.

  In a letter she sent several days later, Cleo wrote,

  I am changed. I will never be the same. To simply say this almost seems to lessen the experience. I don’t think that anyone hearing or reading this can truly grasp what I felt, can really understand it deeply and completely. The euphoria goes on into eternity. And I am part of that eternity.