An excellent interview with Rick Strassman in which he talks about his new book, and reflects on his DMT research and experiences with Zen Buddhism with more hindsight than he did in his book DMT: the Spirit Molecule:
It’s a multi-authored book, non-fiction. It’s pretty much the brain-child of the second author, whose name is Slavic Wojtowicz, who is an oncology researcher for a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey, and who also happens to be a big science fiction buff and illustrator. He read my book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, and felt that there was a lot of overlap between the material we presented there and the kinds of things that people read and write about in science fiction. He felt it would be a fun and helpful thing to educate people in the science-fiction community about some of these overlaps and areas of similar interests.
He asked me if I’d like to collaborate with him, and I agreed. I asked another colleague of mine, Louis Eduardo Luna, who is a South American anthropologist who divides his time between Brazil and Helsinki and has been working with Ayahuasca for a few decades now. He has probably got one of the more balanced and sophisticated overviews of how to look at and apply the states and plant wisdom information that is associated with Ayahuasca. And so Louis Eduardo agreed to collaborate, and then Louis had a friend in Budapest Hungary named Ede Frecska, who is a Hungarian psychiatrist and has written a lot on new science views on shamanism – having to do with quantum mechanics and non-local theories of information transfer and storage – and so Louis Eduardo asked Ede if he’d like to collaborate. So that’s how the four of us came together to collaborate on writing the book.
Full Story: Reality Sandwich
See also: DMT and Extraterrestrial Communication at Brainsturbator.
And, of course, come to Esozone to hear Dennis McKenna talk about the role of entheogens in society, and Brainsturbator’s Thirtyseven talk about the end of reality.
A documentary based on the research of Rick Strassman is in the works, featuring interviews with Erik Davis, Alex and Allyson Grey, Dennis McKenna, Joe Rogan, Douglas Rushkoff, and, of course, Strassman himself.
More Info: Official Site
(via Dedroidify)
Buy DMT: The Spirit Molecule the book.
“I am deep in the Amazon rainforest, anxiously losing my mind as the world begins to disintegrate. Around me, all sense of distance is wrapping itself up like spatial origami, slowly shrinking until an entire dimension has disappeared. A moment ago, I was surrounded by 200 people dressed in white and singing like angels, but now they occupy the same space as me… if that makes any sense.
Wherever I look, that is where I am. I can see everything from every angle, all at the same time. In fact, I feel I am everywhere. Outside, in the forest, the thrum of frogs and cicadas drowns out the sound of shrieking monkeys. Below me, the floor is shimmering, vanishing in waves like a spent mirage. Behind, I feel a cold vibration on my neck and sense a growling malevolence. I turn and see a red door, bulging at the hinges. Overcome with dread, I push hard to keep it closed, and all the while I feel a horrible nausea.
When will this end, I am thinking. And, with sweat running down my forehead, how can I survive it? Welcome to the Church of Santo Daime, one of the fastest growing religions in the world. Its mixture of Christianity, South American shamanism and African animism is proving irresistible to thousands of new believers across the globe. But it is its central sacrament, ayahuasca, a powerful hallucinogenic brew made from rainforest plants – a brew that I have just drunk – that makes the Church so appealing to some yet so controversial to others.”
(via the Times Online)
(Santo Daime site)
Scientific American is running a broad overview of past and present research with hallucinogens:
Before 1972, close to 700 studies with psychedelic drugs took place. The research suggested that psychedelics offered significant benefits: they helped recovering alcoholics abstain, soothed the anxieties of terminal cancer patients, and eased the symptoms of many difficult-to-treat psychiatric illnesses, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder.
For example, between 1967 and 1972 studies in terminal cancer patients by psychiatrist Stanislav Grof and his colleagues at Spring Grove State Hospital in Baltimore showed that LSD combined with psychotherapy could alleviate symptoms of depression, tension, anxiety, sleep disturbances, psychological withdrawal and even severe physical pain. Other investigators during this era found that LSD may have some interesting potential as a means to facilitate creative problem solving.
Between 1972 and 1990 there were no human studies with psychedelic drugs. Their disappearance was the result of a political backlash that followed the promotion of these drugs by the 1960s counterculture. This reaction not only made these substances illegal for personal use but also made it extremely difficult for researchers to get government approval to study them.
Things began to change in 1990, when ‘open-minded regulators at the FDA decided to put science before politics when it came to psychedelic and medical marijuana research,’ says Rick Doblin, a public policy expert and head of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). ‘FDA openness to research is really the key factor. Also, senior researchers who were influenced by psychedelics in the sixties now are speaking up before they retire and have earned credibility.’ Chemist and neuropharmacologist David E. Nichols of Purdue University adds, ‘Baby boomers who experienced the psychedelic sixties are now mature scientists and clinicians who have retained their curiosity but only recently had the opportunity to reexplore these substances.’
Full Story: Scientific American.
(via Nerdshit).
Do people meet alien entities on DMT because they expect to meet alien entities? It’s not an idle question, it’s grounds for a fun experiment, too. From the Rodruigez paper:
To validate or falsify this hypothesis, the experimenter should perform a single blind study in which human subjects are used who have never heard of DMT and its extraordinary effects on the human psyche. These subjects are told that DMT inebriation will provide them solely a visual and auditory hallucination. By simply defining the experience as that experienced in front of the veil, the ill-informed subject will have no preconception as to what is possible given the right conditions for entering into the DMT-induced alternate reality. If subjects continually return only to describe the world in font of the veil, then it can be concluded that the DMT experience can be influenced by biasing the subject. In this sense, the hallucination is driven by preconceptions and therefore may be understood solely as an inconsistent subjective hallucination. On the other hand, if the inexperienced human subjects return with testimonies of encounters with alien beings, then DMT is responsible for alien entity experiences. It is noted that this experiment has already been implemented with positive results. Dr. Strassman’s work used unassuming human subjects that did, in fact, return from DMT inebriation with entity experiences (Strassman 2001).
Full Story: Brainsturbator.
The young woman went to doctors to have them probe her brain, to root out where her seizures came from. But unexpectedly, their investigations and the procedure they performed led her to experience the creepy illusion of a person standing behind her, where nobody was actually present.
The patient described the illusory person as young and of indeterminate sex, a “shadow” who did not speak or move. “He is behind me, almost at my body, but I do not feel it,” she reported.
Full Story: Live Science.
(via LVX23).
The buzz around the fringeblogosphere today:
The Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that a small congregation in New Mexico can use hallucinogenic tea in its religious rituals.
It’s the first religious freedom decision under Chief Justice John Roberts. In the ruling, Roberts wrote that federal drug agents should have been barred from confiscating the tea.
Full Story: KRON,
I’ve got a new article up at Key 23… I’ve had this idea for years, but I’ve never published it. I’ve always thought it seemed rather obvious, but having never come across anything that really spelled it all out, I thought I’d publish this.
What follows is not a scientific document, my background in science is mediocre at best. I?m simply trying to organize my own ideas about one possible explanation of magical phenomena, and share the ideas with curious parties.
It goes a little something like this: memes are actual particles with physical properties, similar to Stephen Hawking?s descriptions of gravitons and photos (which is apparently not very accurate which Hawking admits himself, but do nicely for our purposes). They act like both particles and waves, and are undetectable by any current scientific instrumentation. However, some part of the human brain can tune into the information contained in these particles or waves. I suspect the pineal gland acts as a meme antennae and translates broadcasts and transmissions to and from the rest of the brain using the neurotransmitter Dimethyltryptamine (DMT).
Link.
“There is no difference in principle between sharpening perception with an external instrument, such as a microscope, and sharpening it with an internal instrument, such as one of these…drugs. If they are an affront to the dignity of the mind, the microscope is an affront to the dignity of the eye and the telephone to the dignity of the ear. Strictly speaking, these drugs do not impart wisdom at all, any more than the microscope alone gives knowledge.”
A rather interesting look at DMT and Hyperspace: (Chemical Experiences of a Hyperspatial Nature)
“DMT in the pineal glands of Biblical prophets gave God to humanity and let ordinary humans perceive parallel universes.”
Link (via Techno?hamanic)
Abstracts of studies concerning DMT and other psychedelics present in urine. Most studies found that schizophrenic patients were no more likely than control to excrete DMT, but this one is interesting:
Studied the excretion of dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in 122 recently admitted psychiatric patients and 20 normal Ss. DMT was detected in the urine of 47% of those diagnosed by their psychiatrists as schizophrenic, 38% of those with other nonaffective psychoses, 13% of those with affective psychoses, 19% of those with neurotic and personality disorders, and 5% of the normal Ss. 99 of the patients were interviewed in a semistandardized fashion, and also categorized according to a variety of operational definitions of the psychoses. The operational definitions failed to reveal any group significantly more correlated with urinary DMT than did the hospital diagnosis of schizophrenia, but a discriminant function analysis of symptomatology could be used to define a group of 21 patients of whom 15 (71%) excreted detectable DMT. There was a general relationship between psychotic symptoms and urinary DMT, but specifically schizophrenic symptoms did not appear to be major determinants of DMT excretion.
Link (via Techno?hamanic)
More medical psychedelia from Plastic! This time the Plastic details information about
Dr. Rick Strassman’s research on DMT (the first legally conducted psychedelic research in over 30 years). Check it out.
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