DMT Isn’t Enlightenment… It’s Something Else: Biblical (Rick Strassman)

Michael Hoffman June 6, 2025

Contents:

Video: DMT Isn’t Enlightenment… It’s Something Else | Dr. Rick Strassman [YMTP]

Video title:
DMT Isn’t Enlightenment… It’s Something Else | Dr. Rick Strassman [YMTP]
“YMTP” probably means “Your Mate Tom Podcast”
YouTube ch: Your Mate Tom
June 2, 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AXIl-lsaF4 –

Desc:

“Dr. Rick Strassman returns to the Your Mate Tom Podcast to talk DMT, Prophecy, and the Nature of Reality.

“Is DMT a shortcut to God, or something far stranger?

“In this rare interview, Dr. Rick Strassman — author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule — joins me to explore what people actually experience during powerful DMT trips.

“From visions of non-human entities to biblical-level encounters, this conversation will shake up everything you think you know about spirituality, science, and consciousness.

“We talk about:

  • Why DMT experiences aren’t always blissful.
  • Biblical visions (like Ezekiel’s) and DMT parallels.
  • Whether these beings are “real” or archetypal.
  • How Strassman’s views have evolved since his original research.
  • What this all means for the Psychedelic RenaissanceTM.”

Transcript of Strassman Video Interview

Cleaned up by Michael Hoffman. Ignore spurious “you” (short for “you know”).

Rick Strassman dmt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AXIl-lsaF4 —

0:00

If you read the first chapter of Ezekiel it’s it’s completely wild.

He’s standing by a river, the heavens open, he falls down, an angel grabs him by the hair it pulls him through space.

Beings with wings and eyes on their wings , they spin without moving

It’s completely DMT-like.

Many talk about DMT like it’s a shortcut to enlightenment.

[saying “that psychedelics are a shortcut to enlightenment” shows that you are completely wrong about your entire network of presuppositions. 

In fact: Psychedelics are the way to enlightenment, enlightenment when done the only possible way is not that short of a way

It is hard work over multiple sessions.

The psychedelic (ie, the only) way to enlightenment is the authentic, only, and original way.

The purpose of non-psychedelic alleged pretended ways, is for the purpose of avoidance of the one way that works.  A substitute Atman project.  Ken Wilber writes about The Atman Project – actually, non-drug Advaita meditation is specifically the main Atman Project. -mh] 

0:24

The mystical unitive state — but what if DMT is something much stranger?

0:29

Pioneering DMT researcher Dr Rick Strassman returns to the Your Mate Tom podcast sharing his decades-long knowledge of DMT.

0:36

What he found was strange ancient and even biblical.

0:49

What do you think DMT is

A number of years ago I thought about the naturally occurring DMT as being the endomatrix

0:57

It’s what regulates our everyday consensus reality.

DMT vs religious/mystical experiences

1:04

Based on your extensive research with DMT, what are the key similarities and differences between these mystical experiences in these religious traditions?

[REALITY CHECK: WE KNOW NOTHING AT ALL ABOUT MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES, SO COMPARING TO DRUGS IS COMPARING THE COMPLETELY UNKNOWN TO THE COMPLETELY UNKNOWN]

1:11

you mean their relationship to the DMT state?

1:18

yeah the similarities but also maybe some differences as well between that peak DMT experience and the mystical experience in religious traditions.

[TRADITION IS EMPTY WORTHLESS MEANINGLESS WORD, WE DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT TRADITION RE: ESOTERIC EXPERIENTIAL PEAK EXPERIENCE]

Unitive vs. Relational Mystical Experience

1:31

It’s useful to characterize spiritual experiences in two ways:

One would be kind of the classical mystical unitive state where one feels that all is one; there’s no personality, there’s no time or space, there’s no concepts, there’s no words; there’s awe.

That could be referred to as a mystical unitive state.

Its trademark is unitive.

It’s the feeling that all is one.

2:08

At the other end of the spectrum would be the interactive relational state which is full of content.

One maintains their personality; there’s interaction between the content and the experiencer; it’s verbal: oftentimes there’s like telepathic or felt communication between you and the contents of that state, even though time and space are pretty distorted; they still exist as opposed to being obliterated in the unitive state.

2:49

The spiritual platform I went into the DMT research with was the Zen Buddhist model of Kencho, which is much more typical of the unitive mystical state.

In the scripture of great wisdom it’s described as no form feeling consciousness perception or understanding understanding

it’s completely empty of normal everyday mental contents

3:27

So I was expecting that kind of experience; most of my volunteers were as well, because the majority were practicing some kind of eastern meditation.

3:33

But only one of the volunteers had an [unitive] experience like that and he was someone with a long-standing interest in the mystical unitive state

He belonged to a church that emphasized it, taught about it instead my [subjects/ students/ crowd]

Everybody else had experiences that were full of content.

There were beings

there was intelligence

there was an interaction, give and take

lots of verbal information communicated

4:13

When I went back to the drawing board to look for models of how to explain the DMT experience, I continued looking at the Buddhist model as a good spiritual system, but it fell short or it wasn’t consistent with the data, which was: the spiritual experience was quite different [than the unity model].

[The non-drug meditation and weak mystical experience per the false Stace model is “unity”; ie nondual unity oneness boundary-suspension of mentally constructing the self/other boundary.]

4:45

It was around that time that I parted ways with my Zen community specifically over the issue of the relationship between spiritual experiences or the enlightenment experience and psychedelic drugs.

4:55

So that gave me an opportunity to return to my own roots, which are Jewish.

Jewish Mysticism

5:00

I started reading the Hebrew Bible or what Christians call the Old Testament but it’s the Hebrew Bible and  the Tanakh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_Bible

5:13

I was struck by the description of a prophetic state, which was quite typical, especially in its extreme forms.

5:27

Quite phenomenologically similar to the DMT experience

[summary:

The pushed narrative in meditation is “unitive”.

On psychedelics, people have relational (prophet-like), not unitive experiences.]

5:34

There’s visions and there’s voices and there’s out of body experiences

5:40

There’s beings with which or with whom you communicate your time and space

5:54

you continue; There’s a beginning and a middle and an end of the experience is incredibly profound, more meaningful than anything else which has ever happened to the person receiving prophecy.

6:17

Prophecy isn’t only foretelling the future or predicting; it’s any spiritual experience on a whole ladder full of rungs.

Inspiration is one form of prophecy.

6:23

Courage might be another form , you seeing an angel; you’re hearing an angel; so there’s all kinds of stages of the prophetic state but in the full-blown

prophetic state it’s quite like DMT.

[Sounds like it’s time to backtrack, countersignal yourself, and diminish/disparate psychedelics. -mh]

6:42

If you read the first chapter of Ezekiel it’s completely wild: he’s standing by a river, the heavens open, he falls down, an angel grabs him by the hair, pulls him through space.

6:55

There’s what has come to be referred to as Ezekiel’s chariot.

7:00

There’s angels, there’s spinning wheels, there’s globes, there’s lightning, there’s ice, there’s a roaring sound.

There’s beings with wings and eyes on their wings, they spin without moving.

It’s completely DMT-like phenomenologically.

[Sounds like it’s time to backtrack, countersignal yourself, and diminish/disparate psychedelics. -mh]

7:21

If you’re looking for a religious experience that resembles a DMT one, it would be the Hebrew Bible’s extreme examples of the prophetic experience

[He accidentally says the correct thing: religious myth is like psychedelics – rather than saying, as usual: “psychedelics are somewhat like authentic, normal, non-drug mystical experiences or meditation”.]

[TIME TO COUNTERSIGNAL:]

7:38

The differences [FALSE] though are clear which is that the information which was gleaned in the prophetic state and as laid down in in the Hebrew Bible have they they’ve endured, they’ve influenced western civilization for 3,000 years.  [or subtract 700 years, per chronology revisionism — and date the Old Testament back to 300 BC, not 1000 BC -mh]

7:59

Our kids are named after biblical figures our economy our philosophy theology art, aesthetics, poetry, it all can be traced back to the Hebrew Bible, which is a prophetic text; it was written in a prophetic state describing prophetic experiences, speaking with angels, speaking with God, and written down and then interpreted and explicated and transmitted

[B.S. PRESUPPOSITIONS:]

8:33

As opposed to the DMT state which, there’s no DMT Bible out there quite yet which contains any new information of anywhere near the significance of what’s been transmitted in the prophetic state [B.S.; THIS GENRE COMES FROM PSYCHEDELICS -mh]

8:51

From what I’ve read from the Old Testament or the Tanakh it’s very deeply layered in symbology [better: analogy].

9:02

You can read the same text over a hundred times and always get something new like it’s so intimately deep.

9:09

You know one of the stories that I really enjoy is the just Exodus I really like that one especially with Moses and the burning bush.

9:22

What do you think about those theories that say that the burning bush was an acacia tree and that he [Moses] was actually in a DMT state?

Do you think there is any sort of a psychedelic substance involved or do you think that’s a bit of a stretch and these are just like natural meditative experiences?

[GTFO! baloney, scholarly / evil priestly constructions and theft of credit, and dishonoring the holy spirit -mh]

[{burning bush} means any psychedelic, revealing non-branching – per msh tree artists – the bush is not the psychoactive; it’s the br vs non-br revealed by the psychedelic -mh]

9:35

The bush is a is a bush, it’s not a tree.

9:43

In the Hebrew Bible, the acacia tree or the acacia wood is called shitim and the bush isn’t called that in the story of Moses and the burning bush.

Moses and the burning bush

9:54

It is possible that there is a DMT-containing plant in the desert which when it’s burnt gives off fumes of DMT but that is you pretty much the only evidence.

10:10

Well it isn’t even evidence.

[it is sh!tty theorizing -mh]

10:17

But if you were pointing toward it you could say oh okay that’s one example of a burning bush or anything burning which allows communication with an angel.

10:30

That was Moses’s original theophany; it was his first prophetic experience, and it also involved an angel.

10:42

And all the rest of Moses’s interactions with divinity involved communication directly with God.

And there are no visions [you have no idea what you’re talking about -mh], it was just verbal; it was just mouth-to-mouth, or as a friend speaks to his fellow.

10:59

It was his [Moses’] first experience and it was crude, relatively speaking

11:11

If there were a role for exogenous psychedelics, like the manna has been suggested as an ergot kind of fungus

11:16

and the incense some speculate contain cannabis but

11:27

There was no mana in the times of Ezekiel

[how do you know where Cubensis was – in the “wilderness” translated as “livestock grazing pastures” -mh]

11:35

There was no yoli incense for Daniel when he was living in Babylon

and

11:42

the presence of naturally occurring DMT in the mamalian brain dispenses with a need to identify an outside agent

[“any activity at all is the same effect as ingesting DMT”]

11:54

you can instead suggest that elevated levels of DMT in the human brain were mediating the visions and the voices that people encounter in the prophetic state

Jewish view on psychedelics

12:12

What you said earlier with your a bit of a falling out with the Zen Buddhist community because from what I understand the eastern religions are quite against psychedelics, as is Christianity and even and Islam as well

12:40

What about Judaism or just rabbis that maybe you spoken to

what are they what are their view on psychedelics in general

12:45

All Zen Monks Started Because of LSD

Returning to the Eastern issue:

12:52

When I first spent any time at the Zen Temple, I spoke with as many of the young monks, all in their early 20s like myself, and I asked them

13:00

how many of them took LSD before they became monks

13:07

and almost everybody said “Yeah I took LSD as a teenager or young adult.”

13:12

And my followup question was:

How important were those LSD experiences in you becoming a monk?

And they all said I wouldn’t be a monk if it weren’t for LSD.

13:25

That supported my belief at the time that there were similar biological concommitants or determinants of the meditative state and the brain state which occurs after taking a psychedelic.

[confirms for me there is a lot that’s entirely baloney; meditation comes from psil historically -mh]

13:52

The same part of the brain might be turned on with LSD as is turned on with certain [WEAK, ineffectual] meditation practices.

14:01

Be that as it may with respect to my theory of a relationship in private interviews with monks over the decades actually over 20 years we spoke about psychedelics and their relationship to Zen training.

14:29

My studies were encouraged and we brainstormed about how to design them and how to interpret them and what kind of application might flow out of them.

14:40

But publicly once I started doing my studies and writing about them and making the comparison between the first flash of enlightenment which is what spurs people to become Buddhist and the psychedelic state which share many features in common, they just really couldn’t countenance it; it was just a little too controversial.

15:18

With most Buddhist communities, most of the teachers and most of the monks had their first flash of enlightenment on a psychedelic drug.

15:24

The apprehension or the comprehension that things were not quite what they seemed and that there was an underlying strata of reality which felt more real than this everyday reality.

So there are meditation retreats which occur with enhancement by psilocybin or iawaska.

16:07

There was actually a Swiss study came out a number of years ago and it was above-board with a certified zen teacher, where they did a week-long retreat and used psilocybin at least once or twice over the course of that week, and scores on meditation intensity increased, as you might expect.

16:19

Within the Jewish tradition* it’s really — like Hasidism, which is a mystical ecstatic form of Judaism which developed in Eastern Europe was

started by a rabbi called the Besht: he had a pipe and he would smoke things in this pipe and be transported to heaven

[I debate whether to attach the word “tradition” every time I assert psychedelics in religious history – it’s as bad as fabricating “secret” every time.  “secret” is made-up rhetoric invented by the modern scholar; same w/ the word “tradition”. -mh]

16:50

Wow that’s fairly suggestive although I haven’t seen an analysis of his smoking mixture.

The more current iteration, Zalman Schecter, who lived in Boulder Colorado for quite a long time grew up in the 1950s, was a student of Kabad the Lubovicher rabbi in Brooklyn, and he learned about LSD from Tim Leary and his friends and he took acid that he said I want to explore this further within a Hasidic Jewish context.”

LSD the source of inspiration for Renewal Judaism

17:35

Out of his experiences, the Renewal movement was formed, Renewal Judaism and quite a few of the rabbis you got their first flash of “I want to be a rabbi” on LSD.

17:49

I sought out Rabbi Schecter and it’s a big movement now.

17:55

There’s a book that just came out Madison Margolan a young woman journalist.  It’s called Exile and Ecstasy and it’s all about Jewish psychedelic sensibilities.

Exile & Ecstasy: Growing Up with Ram Dass and Coming of Age in the Jewish Psychedelic Underground (Margoland, 2023)

Exile and Ecstasy

Madison Margolan

Exile & Ecstasy: Growing Up with Ram Dass and Coming of Age in the Jewish Psychedelic Underground

Nov. 7, 2023

Madison Margolin

Blurb:

“Through the perspective of having grown up among “HinJews” in the Ram Dass community and cannabis legalization movement, journalist Madison Margolin takes the reader on

“a journey inside New York’s Jewish counterculture and the Hasidic underground, reconciling her roots, tackling ancestral Jewish trauma, and finding intersectionality between the Jewish and psychedelic experience.

“Exile and Ecstasy sets out to explore the psychedelic path that occupies the crossroads between the Ram Dass movement and Hasidism.

“It’s a path of seeking and escape, rebellion and return, medicine and magic.

“Bridging the polar ends of the Jewish and psychedelic worlds, while buttressing the experience with expert reportage, Madison Margolin prods at Be Here Now to find its relevance and utility in a new generation, facing different issues than those Ram Dass faced as a generally well-to-do boomer.

“In doing so, she looks at solutions to our lack of presence and offers practices that help us integrate our psychedelic experiences in mundane life, as well as in the context of our roots and religious identities.

“This book is for anyone looking to feel spiritually kindled, to make peace with where they come from, and to reconcile seemingly disparate experiences of spirituality and psychedelics, with traditional* religion.”

[* might as well write “secret, suppressed, underground religion” – empty rhetoric narrative, completely arbitrary and debatable.  In fact, Jewish history includes some psychedelics use, and some literalism and lack of psychedelics use.

Is a mushroom tree a mushroom, or is it a tree?

Given that Jewish history includes some psychedelics use, and some literalism and lack of psychedelics use, which storytime tale should we learned, learned scholars ritually tell?

* Jewish history has a psychedelics tradition.

* Jewish history has secret, suppressed, heretical, underground use of psychedelics.

-mh]

18:12

The young Hasidic Jews in Israel and in Brooklyn are taking a lot of psychedelics, and who knows what’s going to emerge from that practice.

Exile & Ecstasy — so I was just writing that down.

18:33

It’s a take-off on “agony and ecstasy”.

wow yeah crazy huh

18:40

yeah absolutely i didn’t I wouldn’t have expected that

18:46

 in a way it makes sense in a strange way I suppose but because I know from like at least let’s say

18:51

Like Orthodox Christianity or fundamental Christianity, they’re very against psychedelics, to the point where they’ll say that they’re basically demonic tools that open you up for your body to become a vessel for these evil entities to use you as a as a puppet, and in Islam would be the same thing, they have a word for it jinn,

Exploring the spiritual world

19:17

If you believe in good spirits, you have to take into account bad spirits.

19:38

That it makes sense that they would be doing that.

19:44

They’ve been studying Talmud especially the legal tracks of Judaism  like laws of kosher food, ritual purity, those kinds of things; legal stuff: property and damages and whatnot

20:13

For a lot of them, there isn’t a feeling which is associated with their study, like intensive concentrating or concentrated study you can induce an altered state [fkking WEAK!], but if it’s not looked for or you’re not aware of it, it just can just pass you by.

20:40

They’re looking for some more emotional connection to the tradition.

20:47

I just was corresponding with a fellow who is Jewish, and he hasn’t read the Bible, but he’s tripping a lot and he’s experiencing certain things during his states which at least bear some resemblance to things within the Hebrew Bible, like:

The high priest in Exodus is described as wearing a breastplate, and this fellow became the breastplate, and God downloaded the Torah into his chest and he says to God “But I’ve not read the Torah”, and God says “It doesn’t matter”.

21:44

Who is speaking to this fellow?  Is it his own unconscious, or is it a lying spirit?

21:50

One of the hallmarks of true prophecy versus false prophecy is the source: is it angelic, or is it demonic?

[Both angel messages and demon messages come from psychedelics.  -mh]

You need to be alert to distinguishing between the two.

22:19

I just finished reading a book called The Antichrist

22:27

yeah it’s a scholarly tour through the history of the antichrist from the beginning to nowadays.

The hallmark of the antichrist is the lie.

22:40

The antichrist is a liar, but it’s couched in partial truths, or you’re led to it through partial truths; it’s a sophisticated system, or it can be.

22:53

The ultimate essence of the antichrist or the message or his tool is of the lie.

23:06

You don’t want a spirit telling you falsehoods or giving you bad advice — that wouldn’t help.

23:12

At the same time, you’re convinced of the truth of these revelations, because of the meaning-enhancing effect of psychedelics.

23:18

I’ve never been more convinced of the truth of anything that I’ve thought or heard in my life well that’s the function of the drug

23:25

but what’s the content which is being transmitted in that state as a result of the drug

opening you up to things which were at least previously invisible they might not be spiritual or psychological or any number of things

but they were not visible before and with a drug they become visible and

23:45

where do they come from and what’s their content

23:50

That’s why discernment is very important

23:56

I’m sure you’ve met people who have fallen in love with just the wrong woman or vice versa because they’re so enamored emotionally but objectively it’s like “Man you got to you got to leave this chick man she’s like horrible for you.”

24:07

But they’re like “No but she’s my soulmate.”

And then obviously sometimes it can end disastrously

24:16

you do think that one “chasing” the psychedelic experience can chase the psychedelic experience especially with these formless kinds of states that are more common with ketamine or fivethoxy DMT where you’re completely detached from everything, from any conscious content

24:41

if you’re living in this world which is rather stressful

24:46

there’s a a temptation to escape that’s

24:52

one of the things that I was picking up from learning about

24:58

these young ultra-orththodox kids that are tripping so much is they just live from trip to trip

they want to to storm heaven or they’re chasing

25:11

a certain experience over and over so the integration question obviously is one that

25:18

always comes

25:24

so how do you integrate those big experiences with the rest of your life and if you can’t you might just return to that state over and over and ask yourself how do I integrate this

25:37

in the meantime you’re not integrating it because you’re not giving yourself any time to do so

25:43

you need to allow the paint to dry without just going back in to marinate

25:51

and because it can be difficult to ground these abstract experiences into everyday

reality but that’s why you got to just put in the work

26:01

They’re abstract and they can be very exotic as well like let’s say you go down to Latin America and you spend a

26:08

week or two with a Peruvian shaman and your mind is totally blown

26:14

in that setting in the jungle in a palapa with songs

26:21

and other likeminded folks and a whole different worldview

26:26

system of how healing works or how illness comes about yeah and you then you go home to New

26:32

York yeah I think yeah integration’s key like the ideas or the feelings need to be integrated but also in the setting the context in which those

26:46

experiences happened ah for sure and sometimes you can come back a little bit scathed because I had a few terrifying experiences in in the Amazon with

26:57

Rick’s nightmare Acid trip

Ayahuasca which I wanted to talk because on in your upcoming book you talk about

27:02

having this very harrowing LSD trip and you kind of stopped tripping for six years if I remember correctly let’s see when did that happen

27:15

1973 and the next time I tripped was 1985 so oh no no that’s not true

27:22

I used to say 12 years but then I thought about it

i think it was more

27:30

like six years but up until

27:35

then I was taking acid every weekend or two

27:44

and I just stopped because I had a similar trip where I stopped

I didn’t touch a psychedelic for like three years so it took a long time so I kind of kind of

27:50

understand that like that fear I guess of jumping back in from going a little bit too overboard

27:58

but yeah how was it

do you mind elaborating on your experience

28:07

I was 21 and was graduating from college and I wasn’t sure about becoming a doctor and going to medical school i really didn’t want to and I wasn’t quite in any medical school quite yet because nobody really wanted me as a student because I was just so fixated on a messianic view of psychedelic

28:36

Buddhist you Freudian healing

28:41

i developed this manifesto in my last summer at school which combined all of those disciplines

and I decided that’s why I want to be a doctor

28:55

this was 1972 and I’m interviewing at all these medical schools and they just weren’t interested in hearing that

and I couldn’t help myself

29:00

they say why do you want to be a doctor and just launch right into this like crazy stuff yeah your manifesto was it if I

29:08

It is my manifesto

29:15

I was spending the last few months with my old girlfriend or my college girlfriend back then and we had started dating when she was living with a guy and we ended up at a Bach concert by ourselves one night on acid and we fell in love and I moved in with her in her dormitory a few days later

29:48

and she ended the relationship with the other fellow so I was with these friends and we decided to take acid one day and go hiking and the old boyfriend was there in our group and he enjoyed ribbing me about living at a girl’s dorm and stealing his girlfriend from him

30:19

I felt guilty you for having done that but still it was what it was

30:29

and there was another fellow in the group who was new very tacetern like a real poker face you really you couldn’t read him

30:42

so I was in an unstable state or an unstable set back then like I didn’t know what my future was holding i was with a guy whose

30:48

girlfriend I had ripped off there was some other guy who I couldn’t you read at all

30:54

and one friend who was also like a good friend

31:05

so we took the acid walked up a canyon stopped every every so often and I started to feel very disconnected like people didn’t want to look at me or talk to me or that they think I was strange or what was going on

And it just built and built and built until I just snapped

31:24

and decided that the reason that I was being treated that way was because I was crazy and had always been crazy and the

jig was up

31:43

this was the true nature of my relationship to reality which was I was crazy and it was just a matter of time before I discovered it

31:55

in the meantime everybody else knew it but they were just waiting for me to discover it

So it just went on and on I imagined you myself just completely

32:02

giving up i had a vision actually of you being in a seclusion room in a mental

32:07

hospital with nurses kind of vaguely dimly outlined in this room and I was lying on a

32:15

pile of

and I was floating like just over it and I I felt like I I could finally give up

32:23

this is where my life has led I’m just going to give up it’s just way too hard and it was

32:31

kind of scary but the nuns seemed pretty nice and they had my interest at heart

32:37

This was going on for a few hours

at least the nurse was nice

32:43

I couldn’t make out any of them But they you seemed like nuns

32:48

like sisters in a like I’m in a hospital and friendly or well I

32:54

I wouldn’t say friendly but you benign so my

33:00

best friend you from my childhood years was at

33:06

the same college back then he transferred as a sophomore and was living in a compound

33:12

with a number of the fellows that was

33:18

part of our group or were part of our group so instead of being dropped off at my girlfriend’s dorm I asked them to drop me off at my friend’s place

and thankfully he was there and he just

33:34

talked me down like I explained you the situation and he you thought well we first you

33:40

smoked a joint you because one look at

33:46

me and he you realized that something was off so we sat down smoked a joint and I described the

33:52

state I was in like I had you finally discovered I was crazy and explained a lot of things you like oh now I get it

33:59

this is why that and this is why that and you so on you

so he you pondered it a bit and he said that makes no sense

34:15

so I thought what do you mean and he said if you have been you know crazy your whole life you wouldn’t just figure that out now so like that may be

34:23

true it might you not be true you but it just popped a bubble like there’s you there was an

34:30

absess in my brain or in my mind and it just popped it and out came all

34:35

the poison and I looked around and yeah I I came down like I felt way

34:40

better and who knows what might have happened if he weren’t around i

34:46

would you probably have ended up in an emergency room and a stigma of mental

34:51

illness would have followed me the rest of my life

34:57

So that was a scary experience and I was not keen on repeating it

35:03

i knew that it resulted from some certain instability in my sense of self and even though I didn’t articulate it in this way I knew I needed to have my feet firmer on the ground the next time I tried any kind of psychedelic drug

35:23

Those are the most terrifying experiences is when you think you’re going crazy because then there’s like this a point of no return like oh man really this is going to be my life

i’ve had those kind of similar visions it’s it’s the point of no return yeah it’s it’s going to be

35:42

like this forever Yeah yeah like my poor family like what are my friends going to think like I’m just I’m just

35:48

going to be here forever like Yeah i had that on still on a one of those heroic psilocybin doses so yeah

35:57

yeah well it’s an interesting phenomenon clearly and you

36:03

know like it’s one of those things which occur in a lot of people when they trip and it’s just not written

36:09

about it’s common knowledge that those bad trips happened but there’s much less

36:16

written about them or studied about them than the mystical experience yeah but

36:22

I think those kinds of effects are very important because they can

36:27

lead to a lot of harm

36:35

that’s why even on YouTube there’s more reported like trip reports of people explaining their experiences like I’ve shared my difficult

experiences and how to kind of heal from that psychedelic PTSD or

Using psychedelics for Spiritual and psychological bypassing

36:46

Sometimes we just make mistakes and we go into it unprepared or in a poor set & setting

36:57

and so it can be helpful to help integrate these experiences or do the work especially doing the work in everyday reality instead of using these psychedelics as a spiritual bypassing

A lot of people do they think of it as like a magic pill to enlightenment

37:11

spiritual bypassing but also psychotherapeutic bypassing

37:19

lots of the issues that you people contend with on a bad psychedelic experience are not spiritual problems

37:25

but psychological problems like they’re depressed or they’re anxious that

they don’t really know who

37:30

they are

In the mid 80s I was part of psychedelic research group

37:37

we were taking new drugs that chemists would send us and

37:42

we would write up the reports and send the reports it was pretty nuts

37:50

we were trying all kinds of things and after a couple years it was the same, it was the same trip

it could be some phenthylamine some tryptoamine some urgine and

38:02

it was the same trip

38:08

why was I attracted to a certain kind of woman and it was the same trip like I would empathize with them and I wouldn’t feel for myself and like one day I woke up after one of those weekends and I said I need therapy

38:26

so I just dropped out of the group and found myself a psychoanalyst actually

38:31

and worked with him for four years straight

38:37

so sometimes psychedelics can convince you that it’s time to stop taking psychedelics and to do something else

DMT DEJA VU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAheho6pu08 —

39:07

The DMT or I guess just in psychedelics in general but that strange memory phenomenon that I think from the study that I read is:

39:20

About 25% of people who have that overwhelming sense of familiarity like I’ve been here before

What are your theories on this

39:25

maybe neurologically spiritually like what what parallel universe neurological misfire like what’s going on

39:33

It has to do with the meaningfulness the reality sense that psychedelics seem to produce

39:46

there’s obviously brain centers which are mediating that and circuitry in the brain which changes

39:56

I just can’t keep up with all the brain imaging data coming out but if you just introspect and besides all those brain imaging studies do is explain how the experiences occur

40:15

and you can tell that the experiences occur by paying attention if the experiences were different then we would look at the brain imaging data and say that’s the biology behind that kind of experience

40:37

it’s the subjective state which matters and that subjective feeling is the reality feeling the meaningfulness the truthfulness

40:50

41:09

The reference point for that on your kind of your truthfulness is your home it’s your home it’s where you grew up

41:16

if it was you more or less satisfactory your parents are there your siblings are there your stuff is there your friends are around, it’s your world

41:30

That can act as a frame of reference or a touchstone for the feeling which then emerges on psychedelics which is like the feeling of what it was like as a small being in a safe secure happy place the only place; that is your entire universe

41:53

That ties in with the sense of familiarity which is interesting as well

42:06

if there are brain centers responsible for meaningfulness and truthfulness what regulates those brain centers on an every day moment-to- moment basis

42:19

They’re obviously pegged among psychedelics but what maintains them on a daily basis

That is one of the possible roles of indogenous DMT: is it is a psychedelic substance

42:41

it really makes you feel like what you’re experiencing is the most truthful honest intense meaningful thing you’ve ever encountered

42:50

it could be keeping the meaningfulness part of the brain at a certain or within a certain window,

if it increases whatever it is you’re undergoing in your everyday life becomes more meaningful and vice versa

43:14

It feels for some people like deja vu on steroids and even deja vu like we don’t like science doesn’t have like a direct explanation for exactly what it is they’re only hypothesis but even deja vu is very strange

43:30

The temporal lobe’s been implicated in deja vu.

43:36

it’s a micro seizure of some sort

43:41

43:49

psychedelics depending on your model can activate temporal lobe function

The DMT Endomatrix

43:55

A number of years ago I thought about the naturally occurring DMT as being the endomatrix

44:12

It’s what regulates our everyday consensus reality

44:17

and we just don’t know really what is going on with endogenous DMT the concentrations are quite high comparable to neurotransmitters like

serotonin

so there may be a DMT neurotransmitter system and it

44:29

will be very interesting to see what what that regulates and what

44:36

regulates it so you stay tuned to the ever unfolding naturally

44:44

occurring DMT story yeah absolutely on the next episode

44:49

we’ll see well thank you Dr strasma for joining me today i really appreciate it

44:56

Is there anything you wanted to share about what’s going on, like your new book for example

45:03

my new book is called My Altered States

45:11

it’s an illustrated memoir from the age of of 0 to 22 and it’s got psychedelics and cannabis and alcohol and meditation and the manifestos in there

45:22

my depressed mood that occurred after I went to medical schools there yeah so it’s potirie is narratives and after each of the narratives is like clinical discussion

45:36

how did this occur and why and and what does it mean

45:43

what can you learn from these kinds of experiences

so it’s a bit like Hunter Thompson meets sigmund freud

45:50

That’s a good explanation

45:57

actually some very entertaining stories coupled with a clinical and objective assessment of those narratives that’s coming out in mid December [2024]

46:17

other than that I’ve got a number of other books that are rattling around out there

46:23

nice awesome looking forward to it well thanks again and I’ll yeah keep in touch

okay I’ll you see you next time

/ end of video Strassman transcript cleaned up by Michael Hoffman

Motivation for this Page

His headset mic sounds horrible: no bass at all; only the upper half of spectrum – upper midrange and treble. Unlistenable. Text is better.

Tons of filler junk words too:

so you know like um i think you that [x].

The Bible is analogies describing peak psychedelic experience.

Using the traditional methods of the mystics, an angel firing arrows down and poking me with a spear taught me better to interpret the Bible as analogies describing peak psychedelic experience (loose cognitive association binding).

I partly cleaned up the transcript. It’s full transcript so full dedicated page. Pretty substantive.

I was trying to re-find a video in which people said “Need more coverage of the threat of Psilocybin experience.” Similar is in this video.

Heavy Cleanup of Strassman Stuttering (Self-Prompting) “You” Between Each Word

When Rick Strassman joined our church book club, he mentioned psychedelics helping with his stuttering.

Yesterday’s video with him, transcript shows that he very frequently inserts:

  • um
  • uh
  • you know (deleted over 500! in just a 46-minute discussion)
  • you [short for “you know” — inserts “you” every few words] – this is most distinctive of Strassman’s verbal junk compared to typical junk utterances.

Example of raw transcript of Rick Strassman (exaggerated):

“you- DMT you- is you- same you- as you- Bible, you- except you- quite you-different.”

See Also

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Author: egodeaththeory

http://egodeath.com

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