Constant reflection and tireless self-work are essential to handle the rigours of psychedelic therapy

“Doubt is core to the psychedelic movement,” says Dr Strassman, “We question authority, we question belief.”

The top-flight ego dissolver leaves no current controversy unexamined in his Vital lecture on contemporary research, evoking the hard truths of psychedelic experience.

The fearless researcher starts by probing the supposed mental health revolution. “I don’t think these miraculous cures are going stick,” he warns, “The figures are good, but there’s an open question abut regularity. With ketamine it looks like you’re having to come in every week. Psilocybin looks like every month or so. People ‘come down’ and revert to the old patterns.”

He’s most keen to impart the value of self-examination and ‘shadow work’; on behalf of the therapists themselves. “Consider your own prejudices. Take what you believe to be ‘right’ and and be very careful not to project it,” he warns.

“There’s been a suicide in testing. One subject was so disappointed he didn’t have one of these ‘life-changing mystical experiences’.”

Dr Strassman is an ordained key buddhist priest and a student of Hebrew mysticism who’s developing a way to communicate with entities using conversational models inspired by the prophets of the Old Testament. But he’s not sold on the ‘mystical experience’ allegedly key to healing.

“I think if we left it secular we’d be better off,” he says, “the scientific plane can coexist. There’s been a suicide in testing because one subject was so disappointed he didn’t have one of these ‘life-changing mystical experiences’. Part of the setting should be not to have it as a goal.”

This actually echoes Stan Grof, who in LSD Psychotherapy refers to Einstein’s ‘cosmic consciousness’ that can be considered universal, practical and even scientific. Therapists should allow ‘a symbolic framework that is emerging spontaneously from the subject’s collective unconscious, and is the most appropriate form for their spiritual experience.’

“If this is a simulation, there’s still cause and effect. You do things, think things, they have repercussions”

Dr Strassman’s standpoint extends to arguments from the religious use movement. “There’s a movement to you relabel these compounds divine, or specifically ‘generating God from within’. That assumes a lot: first of all, that there is a spiritual level of existence, specifically God, and that’s within us, you know, which is questionable. That a drug can generate divinity, or a real religious experience, I don't think is an established fact."

Humans are capable of transcendence without a particular faith, says Strassman: “My colleague Daniel Freidman used to talk about the ‘portentous’ moments – the feeling that what you're seeing is the most significant thing you've ever undergone. That can be truly meaningful even without religious belief.”

Even once the more fantastical effects of the treatment have worn off, “it will still strengthen aspects like ‘vocational efficacy’, one’s sense of self.”

Strassman prefers ‘unitive experience’ to the ‘spiritual’ term, and reminds “there are plenty of ways to achieve a mystical experience without drugs, in particular traditions for example.” [EG tantra, or alchemy].

“Doubt is core to the psychedelic movement. We question authority, we question belief”

Plus he advises sensitivity with any spiritual props in the treatment room. A multi-faith approach might work for the irreligious but some communities can be actively triggered by some psychedelic tropes: “a lot of the official music is Wagner, which the Nazis played to jews arriving at the concentration camps. Imagine you’re a jew presenting with generational trauma and hearing that as you’re coming up. Or lots of christians believe Buddhism is idolatry and paganism. If a christian opens their eyes and the first thing they see is a buddha… it may be cool, it may not be.”

Challenging experiences is a term he’s equally wary of: “Challenging ‘reactions’ is possibly less onerous.”

With Strassman it all comes down to results. Asked where he stands on Anil Seth’s simulation theory, he replies “If this is a simulation, there’s still cause and effect. You do things, think things, they have repercussions.  I don’t think we need to spend a lot of time figuring that one out.”

Tremendously more important, he says is that “We make ourselves better people and the world a better place. If psychedelics can contribute to that, more power to them.”

The Strass is so promethean that he debunks his own landmark hypotheses. Like the one about DMT originating from the pineal gland AKA ‘third eye’ in mystic circles.

“I don’t think it’s as important as it was when I put it out,” he harrumphs, “I write a wild-eyed but scientific article about the pineal gland in 1991. The group in Ann Arbor picked up on that 12 years later, and produced the study in the living rodent pineal gland. Now a 2019 report thinks the 2013 data was the result of the probe going through the brain into the pineal snagged brain tissue, not pineal tissue… What’s much more interesting is the brain makes DMT – in very high quantities.”

How will the stark nature of psychedelic science play out within our comically dysfunctional human condition?

Turning to tragedy, ‘Kill the physician and the fee bestow upon thy foul disease’ says the Earl of Kent to King Lear in act one of Shakespeare’s masterwork. Lear has disowned his loving but frankly-spoken daughter, after her honest efforts to protect him from hubris; the complacent monarch is suffering from a ‘disease of the ego’ according to Shakespeare buffs.