Contemporary Research with Dr Rick Strassman

My unofficial Vital Study Zine #6 with observations from Vital Psychedelic Training and recent happenings in the space

John Giorno ‘We Gave a Party for the Gods’ in the gardens at Chateau de Versailles

Who would inject test subjects with large doses of intravenous DMT four times in a row thereby opening a new paradigm in psychedelic research?

And who, on an otherwise genteel psychedelic training course, would casually riff on orgasms, prophets and brainwashed assassins? Before announcing that it’s probably the placebo effect anyway?

Who turns up at self-declared ‘21st Century Mystery School’ The Tyringham Initiative as sole representative of the USA, and whacks a bible on the overhead projector before calmly explaining that entities are angels? Despite being an ordained Zen buddhist lay priest. And, besides all this drugs stuff, once found a new way to grow embryonic avian dorsal root ganglion neurons, suspended in a semi-solid agar matrix? As one does.

Who, in this psychedelic renaissance of ours, is totally styling it in double denim while sharing police medical reports on the fallout from satanic ayahuasca rituals on Facebook? 

Dr Rick ‘The Strass’ Strassman does all these things and much more.

Like a strong ecstasy pill he sneaks up, and you don’t realise how out there you were till 24 hours later. Displaying affection and disdain for the contemporary space in equal measure, like the sensitive and driven do, this dark horse of psychedelia rattled through a sharp snapshot of the science, peppered with his own astute asides. 

And yes, he spoke about the sex, death and God stuff. And the pineal gland, and the entities. 

“I knew I had to be really well trained to do work like this”

Dr Strassman played with a straight bat in his startling breakthrough book The Spirit Molecule, covering his pioneering DMT tests that catalysed the psychedelic renaissance and become one of the most compelling areas of experimental science. In his opening to this ‘Contemporary Research’ lecture he urged Vital students to also take a scientific approach when rising through the ranks. 

Dr Rick Strassman will put the cat amongst the pigeons at your ceremony

“Stanford in the 70s was pretty cutting-edge. It was a very interesting time, intellectually,” he reminisces, “I was 20 years old in July 1972, and I was watching the sun come down on acid, and decided I wanted to study psychedelics. I wrote a manifesto, got a bit hyper manic, and 19 out of 21 medical schools rejected me straight out. Of the others, one refused talk about it in the interview. The other heard me out, and rejected me anyway. So I knew I had to be really well trained to do this.”

Look normal, and they will suspect nothing. Dr Strassman’s rigour paid off and his research on DMT at the University of New Mexico between 1990 and 1995, which he successfully applied for state funding. Like a tripedal DMT vision shaped as a giant rotating bejewelled milking stool, he stands astride neuroscience, theology – in fact he’s about to reveal his ‘theoneurology’ research – and the imaginative, creative chaos of the trickster archetype. He is currently Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico and on the advisory board of Eduardo de la Luna’s Wasiwaka centre in Brazil. 

“Stanford in the 70s was pretty cutting-edge”

His latest, The Psychedelic Handbook released in 2022 offers up his own thoughts on grassroots healing. DMT: The Spirit Molecule is a core psychonaut text and here’s that Joe Rogan movie. Aficionados recommend DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible and Inner Paths To Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies of which Dr David Luke says "This book raises many fundamental questions about the nature of reality that have barely been asked in the scientific community, let alone answered, and I strongly urge all researchers of consciousness to read it.”

"This book raises many fundamental questions about the nature of reality that have barely been asked in the scientific community, let alone answered, and I strongly urge all researchers of consciousness to read it.”

In the company of fellow travellers he is liberal with his opinions that were always well-informed, and tempered where required. Often these ran contrary to narrative – as the wisdom of the serious players often does.  Listen to him talk about God and DMT along with a bunch more on the New Psychonaut ‘lecture channel’.

Next issue: Dr Bennet Zenner, the mycelial businessman

Holy vape pens, Metatron!

Space

Arguing where DMT entities come from is moot says Dr Strassman. Besides, they’re angels

Magnus Gjoen, ‘I Saw the Sky Come Down to Meet You’ available here.

It’s how and what we learn from DM entities that counts. Not their origin, says Dr Strassman.

“The most important thing is how we use our words. Can we ask the right questions? Can we ask the right answers? And remember them?” says the Spirit Molecule author.

Dr Strassman might be wary of bringing established religions into psychedelic therapy. But he’s certainly not against using them to aid discovery. “The established model is ‘neurotheology’ which states the brain is at the centre of human experience. Things can get it off that: drugs, fasting sleep deprivation, that trigger brain reflex changes. But these are described after the fact as ‘spiritual’ and given terms like ‘openness’, ‘ecstasy’, ‘out of body experience.’ 

Modern science, which is informed by the biological, competitive model put forward by Sigmund Freud and Richard Dawkins, explains this as “We’re evolutionarily configured to be perceptive, compassionate, empathic and sociable to help us survive.”

This explanation might be tight, but fails to include the grander narrative that DMT is especially at pains to impress upon us is ‘real’, or ‘noetic’ to the scientific language. “During the 1990s tests, I learned that I wouldn’t get the same debriefs out of subjects unless I took their DMT experiences to be real,” says Strassman on his YouTube. And can we just explain away art, love, friendship, purpose and so many other wonderful things, as stuff we do to get laid?

“I expected Zen shunyata without form, feeling, consciousness, perception or volition… empty. It turned out DMT was everything but”

Theoneurology, outlined in Strassman’s book DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible flips the script, proposing the ‘divine’ whatever it might be, informs neurology. This could be said to suit the psychology of Carl Jung.

At this point it’s worth noting that the two Vital lecturers who’ve cautioned the most against ‘transcendence porn’ and the quest for a ‘mystical experience’, Bill Richards and Strassman, are both deeply religious individuals. 

“Buddhism saved my life after I dropped out of medical school,” Strassman says, “I became a serious practitioner for two decades. I’m in its debt. It was the closest thing I had come across that strengthened the psychedelic experience, and also strengthened my belief there was some intimate relationship between psychedelic states and buddhist practice.”

When he began his famous early 1990s DMT tests he expected the experiences to mirror buddhist teaching: “Both myself and the subjects expected something similar to Tensho, the Zen state of shinyata, “without form, feeling, consciousness, perception or volition… empty."

However, “It turned out that DMT was everything but that.”

He continues: “The beings, the visions, the information… The personality was maintained, even strengthened. There was space and time, it was distorted but it still existed. This was not consistent with my data.” Strassman was subjected to an ego death of sorts: “I had to go back to the drawing board.” (Dr Strassman’s N, N-Dimethyltryptamine DMT is not to be confused with 5-MEO DMT of Sandoran desert toad fame, which is said to produce a ‘white out’ experience.)

Other influences were at play in this ontological snafu. “I was being discouraged by the American buddhist organisation, for being too truth-orientated. I ended up studying judaism and being impressed by prophecy.” Ever the scientist, he uses ‘impressed’ to mean ‘could be useful’.

“Armed with an expanded definition of prophecy from Maimonides, I began to compare the visions from the Old Testament and DMT”

At the 2015 Tyringham Initiative gathering, Strassman stunned even the world-class psychedelic thinkers in attendance by delivering a bravura presentation on how Old Testament dialogue can be employed when chatting to DMT ‘entities’. (Read about it in the superlative DMT Dialogues book covering the whole conference, edited by Dr David Luke). Correspondence in hyperspace is notoriously difficult, and can include important elements like divulging the intentions of the entity in question, or decoding the information they relay.

To clarify, “Prophecy doesn’t always mean foretelling like the canonical prophets do. It includes any spiritual experience: from the nameless soldier who has a dream predicting victory for Israel to Moses on mount Sinai.” The key text to study apparently is The Guide of the Perplexed, written by the Ottoman Emperor Saladin’s physician and astronomer Maimonides’ in 1190. 

“Maimonides borrowed Aristotle’s concept of ‘active intellect’ conflating information from the past, present and possible future,” says Strassman in this interview with a Hebrew mystic channel.

According to Maimonides’ own introduction, “The Guide of the Perplexed has a second object: it seeks to explain certain obscure figures which occur in the Prophets. Even well-informed persons are bewildered if they understand these passages in their literal signification. But they are entirely relieved of their perplexity when we explain, or merely suggest that the terms are figurative.”

In recent podcast interviews Dr Strassman’s been keen to insist he’s presenting the notion as “an interested theologian” rather than a profile scientist. It doesn’t stop him bringing in medical anecdotes, like left-brain stroke victims seeing in ‘pixelated’ vision. Anyway, back to the Bible. 

“Armed with an expanded definition of prophecy from Maimonides, I began to compare the visions from the Old Testament and DMT. And, descriptively phenomenologically, the visions, the voices, the emotions, the effects on the body… were quite similar.”

You may’ve figured that we’re getting into the ‘advanced class’ of psychedelic use here. So I’ll end with this passage from the book of Ezekiel, a favourite with contemporary churches, abridged by Strassman in his 2015 Tyringham Initiative presentation.

“Ezekiel’s messages came from God and were intended to be given to the wider community. In chapter one, the heavens open, there’s a stormy wind, brilliant light, beings emerge from the fire. There are spheres, wheels. Ezekiel sees faces of beings: a man, a lion, an ox, an eagle. The beings run rapidly to-and-fro despite the immobility of their legs. Their backs and wings are full of eyes. Some beings fly through space. Thee is an expanse of blue, or a rainbow, above their heads. Ezekiel loses all strength, falls on his face. An angel stands him up, speaks to him, pulls him by the hair, and carries him through space.”