The following are excerpts from Dr. Rick Strassman's work, The Spirit Molecule:
"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 long 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.
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."
"...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."
DMT