DMT: THE SPIRIT MOLECULE

This is in many ways a sad book. It details the very exciting research that Rick Strassman carried out on the chemical DMT, or dimethyltryptamine in human volunteers. He describes the lonely fight he had against licensing authorities and ethical committees to obtain permission to try out a psychedelic drug. He was very constrained by the ethical requirements, which resulted in the drug having to be given in a rather hostile clinical environment, which led away form the relaxing atmosphere in which one would hope to give a drug which significantly altered perception. However, he finally overcame the technical and administrative difficulties, and between 1990 and 1995 he injected 60 volunteers with DMT. His account in this book, which is written more for the layman than the specialist, is ground-breaking, and raises the interesting question as to what is truly a psychedelic experience. Is it the pulling aside of a rather thin veil which allows another reality to be seen, or is it the distortion of our current world view by the mind-changing chemical? Do we go for a shamanic journey or for a warping brain? Strassman's view is that DMT is a molecule secreted in a crisis, leading to transcendent states and he argues for it underpinning both spontaneous mystical states, and the near death experience. DMT is related to the hormone melatonin, and is a simple molecule with echoes in its structure that of LSD, Mescaline, Ecstasy (MDMA) and psilocybin, all powerful hallucinogenic agents. DMT is a chemical released by the pineal, says Strassman, when the individual is under severe stress, such as in crisis, during childbirth, or at any other time when facing the imminent possibility of death. The drug breaks out of the confines of the pineal gland where it is synthesised, and leads to the subjective quality of entering into a different reality. Its effects are very short-lasting, and within a matter of minutes are over, and the subject is ready to be debriefed. The world of the DMT journey is varied. Many subjects enter into a transcendent reality in which they are examined by huge, insect-like creatures. It is as if our world is being studied and these creatures are always there watching us, but we can't see them because of the thin wall separating our reality and theirs. "There were four or five of them. They were on me fast….they were flexible, fluid geometrical cacti. Not solid. They weren't benevolent, but they weren't non-benevolent. They probed, they really probed. They seemed to know time was limited. They wanted to know what I, this being who had shown up, was doing. I didn't answer. They knew." The subject went on to state, in a way that is reminiscent of the alien abductions described by John Mack "I felt like something was inserted into my left forearm, right here, about three inches below this chain-linked tattoo on my wrist. It was long. There was no reassurance with the probe. Simply business." Strassman goes on to report that there was a remarkable consistency amongst volunteers about these contacts with non-material beings. The highly intelligent beings of this other world are ready for the subject's arrival and rapidly get to work and state that the beings seemed to be loving, caring or professionally detached. They sometimes seemed to be trying to improve us, either biologically or as a race. Strassman reviews this idea of contact through the veil, and looks at death, dying, and mystical states. You need to read the book to get the full sweep of the experiences reported by his 60 volunteers. Some were transcendent and mystical, but most were of the type described above. Strassman argues that some of the experiences are close to the near death experience, and suggests a parallel between the excretion of DMT in a crisis and the rending aside of the veil in near death experiences. In fact, a detailed examination of the accounts that he gives leaves me quite certain that there is very little similarity between DMT experiences and NDEs, and I feel that Strassman is trying to force them together in a way which doesn't really fit. The saddest bit of the book is what happened to Strassman at the end, after he had collected all this data and spent five years investigating his volunteers. He had his own spiritual path with local Buddhist groups, but when they heard of his work transforming the mind by drugs, they rejected him. You don't mess about with the mind in artificial ways. The scientific community also rejected him. So one felt at the end of the book that despite his pioneering work, despite his significant examination of the nature of consciousness through the use of psychedelic drugs, despite his five hard years of work, that messing about with psychedelics had led him to become isolated and rejected by those around him. A sad end to a pioneer. But perhaps it is always the role of the pioneer to be rejected and find themselves alone. As A.R. Wallace one of the greatest western scientists said, new truths are never liked or accepted and they are always rejected by the scientific establishment. So perhaps it will be some time before we can integrate Strassman's original contribution to the current scientific ideas concerning the structure of consciousness. This is a book for every network member and I hope you will all have an opportunity to read it.