“The idea of administering psychedelics to the terminally ill is to me appallingly dangerous. It comes about as close to ‘playing God’ as anything I’ve seen in the mental health professions;
“An attempt to induce enlightenment experiences by chemical means can never, will never, succeed. What it will do is badly confuse people and result in serious consequences for you.”
Gwendolyn’s letter arrived next.
“[Your research] constitutes wrong livelihood according to the Buddha’s teachings;
“That DMT might elicit enlightenment experiences is delusional and contrary to the teachings of the Buddha;
“Hallucinogens disorder and confuse the mind, impede religious training, and can be a cause of rebirth into realms of confusion and suffering;
“This is the teaching and viewpoint of myself, [the abbot], [the order], and the whole of Buddhism.
“We urge you to cease all such experiments.”
I reminded these monks of the years of dialogue I’d had with them regarding my interest in and performance of psychedelic research. I also pointed out the continuous interest in my work by members of the community, and the absence of any prior recommendations to avoid or stop it. If anything, there was enthusiasm and encouragement to use these interests as grist for going deeply into my own spiritual relationship to the outside world. I recalled the many conversations I’d had with monks who’d validated the importance of their psychedelic experiences as leading to their first inklings of enlightenment.
Additionally, I was eager to discuss some of their concerns. These included the obvious problems associated with thinking that certain knowledge was accessible only with an outside agent; that is, a drug. I also accepted the theoretical possibility raised by Gwendolyn that someone might mistake a real enlightenment experience for a psychedelic “flashback.”
However, none of these attempts at enlarging the dialogue met with any success.
What was going on?
The abbot was dying, and he was making sure the teachings he left behind were as unsullied by controversy as possible. In addition, senior monks were lobbying for elected posts that would determine the future of the community. Who was the most zealous defender of the teaching? Those whose positive psychedelic experiences had led them to Buddhism in the first place had to remain silent, and close rank behind those without such backgrounds. Psychedelics could not become a divisive issue at this crucial moment in the monastery’s existence.
And then the Fall 1996 issue of Tricycle, The Buddhist Review came out with my article calling for a discussion of integrating psychedelics into Buddhist practice.
In that article I presented Elena’s first high-dose session, which we’ve read in chapter 16, “Mystical States.” Her experience served as an example of the type of spiritual breakthrough possible with DMT in someone open to them—that is, a person with a serious meditation practice, solid psychological mindedness, and a deep reverence and respect for drugs like DMT. I also raised the concern that isolated experiences, occurring without any sort of spiritual or therapeutic context, were not especially effective in producing long-term serious change in our volunteers. I therefore concluded with the following:
“I believe there are ways in which Buddhism and the psychedelic community might benefit from an open, frank exchange of ideas, practices, and ethics. For the psychedelic community, the ethical, disciplined structuring of life, experience, and relationship provided by thousands of years of Buddhist communal tradition have much to offer. This well-developed tradition could infuse meaning and consistency into isolated, disjointed, and poorly integrated psychedelic experiences. The wisdom of the psychedelic experience, without the accompanying and necessary love and compassion cultivated in a daily practice, may otherwise be frittered away in an excess of narcissism and self-indulgence. While this is also possible within a Buddhist meditative tradition, it is less likely with the checks and balances in place within a dynamic community of practitioners.
“On the other hand, dedicated Buddhist practitioners with little success in their meditation, but well along in moral and intellectual development, might benefit from a carefully timed, prepared, supervised, and followed-up psychedelic session to accelerate their practice. Psychedelics, if anything, provide a view. And a view, to one so inclined, can inspire the long hard work required to make that view a living reality.”5
This article sealed my fate within the monastic community. My lifelong affiliation with the order would implicate it as contributing to these ideas. Gwendolyn sent copies of the Tricycle article to members of my new meditation group as well as to other groups and the monastery. In it she scribbled comments she remembered I made during what I believed was our confidential pastoral counseling session. She wrote to the local congregation, telling them not to enter my house because there might be psychedelic drugs kept in it.
Her behavior brought these issues to the boiling point. I lodged a formal complaint against this breach of confidence. As much as calling Gwendolyn’s behavior into question, I wanted a definitive statement from the order regarding their attitude about my research. They complied on both counts.
The monastic review agreed she had indeed broken confidence, but it was for a “greater good.” That is, it was done to “prevent mistakes from being made in the name of Buddhism.” One could not be a proper Buddhist and consider psychedelics to play any part in it.
There was little I could do. Holiness had won out over truth. This particular brand of Buddhism was no different from any other organization whose survival depended upon a uniformly accepted platform of ideas. Only they could determine what were permissible questions, and what were not.
Later I learned that the monastic community had elected Margaret head of the order. The two monks who had taken psychedelics years before with my New Mexico friend also did well in the elections. One was elected abbot of the monastery, the other his chief assistant. So political ambitions also took on greater importance than a truthful dialogue. It was unlikely that the organization could admit and openly discuss that their three leading teachers were former LSD users, or that they had decided to enter a monastic life after drug-induced inspiration.
Although I could see beyond the hypocrisy that motivated much of the monastery’s repudiation of my work, it took its toll. Combined with the events and circumstances I described in the last chapter, my energy to continue with the research flagged considerably. After completing two long-distance research trips to Albuquerque, the extra pressure exerted by my spiritual community broke down the last remnant of my desire to continue. It was time to stop.
I resigned from the university and returned the drugs and the last year’s worth of grant money to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. I wrote closing summaries on all of the projects and sent copies to the boards and committees who had been working with me for the past seven years. The pharmacy weighed all our drugs, packed them up, and mailed them to a secure facility near Washington, D.C. The supplies of DMT, psilocybin, and LSD remain there to this day.
Part VI
What Could and Might Be
21
DMT: The Spirit Molecule
It is almost inconceivable that a chemical as simple as DMT could provide access to such an amazingly varied array of experiences, from the least dramatic to the most unimaginably earth-shattering. From psychological insights to encounters with aliens. Abject terror or nearly unbearable bliss. Near-death and rebirth. Enlightenment. All of these from a naturally occurring chemical cousin of serotonin, a widespread and essential brain neurotransmitter.
It is just as fascinating to ponder why Nature, or God, made DMT. What is the biological or evolutionary advantage to having various plants and our bodies synthesize the spirit molecule? If DMT is indeed released at particularly stressful times in our lives, is that a coincidence, or is it intended? If it is intended, for what purpose?
In the case reports, we’ve seen how strikingly similar volunteers’ experie
nces are to naturally occurring psychedelic states of consciousness. It’s difficult to ignore the overlap of research subjects’ descriptions of highdose DMT sessions with those from people who have undergone spontaneous near-death, spiritual, and mystical states. While I was not expecting contact with nonmaterial beings to be especially common before starting our work, the resemblance between those occurring “in the field” and in Room 531 is also undeniable.
The similarities between naturally occurring and DMT-induced phenomena support my suggestion that spontaneously occurring “psychedelic” experiences are mediated by elevated levels of endogenous DMT. In chapter 4, “The Psychedelic Pineal,” I presented a series of biological scenarios in which the pineal may synthesize DMT, and I speculated about the metaphysical and spiritual implications of these possibilities.
How then might this spirit molecule, whether produced from the inside through these presumed biological pathways, or taken from outside as in our studies, modify our perceptions so radically? In this chapter we will give our imaginations free rein to consider any and all possibilities.
Most of us, including the most hard-nosed neuroscientists and nonmaterialistic mystics, accept that the brain is a machine, the instrument of consciousness. It is a bodily organ made up of cells and tissues, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. It processes raw sensory data delivered by the sense organs using electricity and chemicals.
If we accept the “receiver of reality” model for brain function, let’s compare it to another receiver with which we’re all familiar: the television. By making the analogy of the brain to the TV, it’s possible to think of how altered states of consciousness, including psychedelic ones brought about by DMT, relate to the brain as a sophisticated receiver.
The simplest and most familiar levels of change to which the spirit molecule provides access are the personal and psychological. These effects may be like fine-tuning the television image, adjusting the contrast, brightness, and color scheme. These “images” consists of feelings, memories, and sensations that are not at all unusual or unsuspected. There is nothing especially new, but what is there is now seen much more clearly and in finer detail.
Low doses of DMT brought about these types of responses in our volunteers. They sometimes also occurred at higher doses in those whose personal needs and makeup required a deeper reworking of their own lives and relationships.
In performing these consciousness adjustments, DMT does not differ much from other drugs or processes used in the psychotherapeutic process. Stimulants, especially the amphetamines and amphetamine-like drugs like MDMA, enhance mental processes in a potentially helpful way. They make it easier to remember and think. By magnifying and clarifying the feelings attached to those memories and thoughts, they make it possible for us to face and accept those emotions, and move on.
Many of the same mechanisms apply to a deep psychotherapeutic setting. The persistence and support of the therapist in dredging up painful memories and managing the powerful emotions they evoke have similarly beneficial effects. In our DMT work, we saw drug-induced effects on the normal everyday mind combine with supportive and encouraging attitudes on our part to produce new and powerfully felt personal insights.
For example, Stan could feel more acutely and directly the anxiety and stress of his divorce and its effect on his daughter. Marsha, through her dreamlike sessions in which she saw caricatures of Anglo beauty, faced the pain of her husband’s difficulty accepting who she really was—physically and culturally. And Cassandra finally felt the relationship between her brutal rape and the abdominal pain she carried around with her for so many years, and thereby began to release it.
There also may be biological components to some of the personal clearing, therapeutic, and healing effects we saw in these types of sessions.
For example, the euphoria brought on by DMT helped volunteers more unflinchingly look at their lives and conflicts. These ecstatic feelings may be, in part, related to the powerful DMT-induced surge of the morphinelike brain chemical beta-endorphin. DMT also stimulated a massive rise in the brain hormones vasopressin and prolactin. Scientists believe these compounds are important in feelings of bonding, attachment, and comfort with other members of the species. Perhaps the elevations in these brain chemicals made it easier for our volunteers to trust us, relax into the drug effects, and share powerfully personal issues in ways that previously were impossible.
What happens when the spirit molecule pulls and pushes us beyond the physical and emotional levels of awareness? We enter into invisible realms, ones we cannot normally sense and whose presence we can scarcely imagine. Even more surprising, these realms appear to be inhabited.
At a certain point, I decided to accept at face value volunteers’ reports. This thought experiment replaced my original tendency to explain away, interpret, or reduce their experiences into something else, such as a disordered brain’s hallucinations, dreams, or psychological symbolism. Now, after several years of additional study and reflection, I think it’s worth considering seriously whether it’s possible that these experiences indeed were exactly what they seemed to be.1
I have struggled personally and professionally with developing the following radical explanations for our volunteers’ apparent contact with nonmaterial beings. Even after stating them, I remain skeptical about their merit. Why couldn’t I stick with tried and true biological or more traditional psychological models?
At a brain science level, maybe what our volunteers encountered was a vivid hallucinatory experience, resulting from DMT activation of brain centers responsible for vision, emotion, and thought. After all, people dream and are completely swept up in the reality of the experience at the time. The rapid eye movements that sometimes took place in our subjects may have indicated the presence of a “waking” dream state.
However, volunteers were convinced that there were differences between what they experienced during DMT-induced contact with beings and their typical dreams. Observing the same things with eyes opened or closed, in an alert, awake state of consciousness, also made it difficult for them to accept that it was “just a dream.” Neither did I feel the same way listening to their stories of encounters as I do when one normally relates a dream to me in psychotherapy. Our volunteers’ reports were so clear, convincing, and “real” that I repeatedly thought, “This sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard about in my therapy patients’ dream life. It is much more bizarre, well-remembered, and internally consistent.”
In addition, a biological explanation along the lines of a waking dream or hallucination usually brought on a certain resistance within the volunteer. A subtle friction might develop between us that limited the depth of their sharing and disclosure that was so valuable in our work together. A research subject might say in so many words, “No, that wasn’t a dream, or a hallucination. It was real. I can tell the difference. And if that’s what you think it is, then I’ll keep the strangest aspects of my session to myself!”
Even more prone to cause a volunteer to dismiss my interpretations as inaccurate or inappropriate was any attempt to use psychological explanatory models. Freudian psychoanalytic systems would understand the experience of contact with beings as an expression of unconscious conflicts over aggressive, sexual, or dependency impulses. There were certainly times I used this approach in reacting to particular dreamlike sessions. However, I could not in good conscience suggest that any repressed unconscious infantile drives were behind the experimental manipulations by, or communication with, these beings.
Jungian psychology includes a broader perspective on the language of the unconscious, and builds upon and incorporates the fields of mythology, art, and religion more than the Freudian school usually does. Nevertheless, it is a psychological model, not a physical or biological one. For example, Jung referred to the image of “unidentified flying objects” as a yearning for wholeness as represented by the circle. Responding to beings as mental constructs or projections, no matter how large the scale, cont
inues to convert the experience into “something else.” It does not address the overwhelming and convincing sense of certainty felt by the person having the experience.
Beyond these intellectual concerns, I was continually faced with the emotional challenge of the developing relationship between the volunteers’ experiences and my ability to respond to them. My study, background, and experience meshed well with research subjects’ descriptions of personal and transpersonal sessions, such as “feeling and thinking,” near-death and rebirth, and mystical states. I understood these experiences, volunteers felt I was appropriately tracking and responding to them, and there was little conflict.
However, whenever I tried to react to being-contact sessions with anything I knew or believed previously, it just didn’t work. I was stuck. So, I decided to engage in the thought-experiment to which I refer at the end of chapter 13, Contact Through the Veil: 1. That is, I tried responding to volunteers’ reports of contact with beings as if they were true. At first, this involved simply listening, and asking for clarification. Later on, as more tales accumulated, I could refer to other people’s accounts in an empathic manner that made it easier for volunteers to feel I understood and accepted what they had to say. That way they could share with me their most unusual and almost embarrassingly unexpected encounters.
Therefore, let’s consider the proposal that when our volunteers journeyed to the further bounds of DMT’s reach, when they felt as if they were somewhere else, they were indeed perceiving different levels of reality. The alternative levels are as real as this one. It’s just that we cannot perceive them most of the time.
In making this suggestion, I’m not discarding the brain-chemistry and psychological models. Rather, I wish to add to the options we entertain in attempting to develop explanations that are helpful to volunteers, intellectually satisfying to researchers, and perhaps even testable using methods not yet invented but theoretically possible.
DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences Page 33