Dr. Rick Strassman on DMT, Dose-Response, and the Zen State
My background was in psychopharmacology and neuroendocrinology, so I set the study up the way those fields taught me to: as a dose-response project. You give a small dose of a drug, then larger ones, and you gather every piece of biological and objective data you can at each level. Then you line the dose up against the effects. When the two track together, you can be reasonably confident that what you are observing really does come from the drug and not from something else.
So we tracked a long list of biological measures. Hormones like endorphins, cortisol, and prolactin. Cardiovascular readings too, blood pressure and heart rate among them. But the part of the work that mattered most was describing the subjective side of the experience as precisely as I could manage.
My hunch going in was this. If the DMT state turned out to share features with states people reach through meditation or in near-death episodes, states arrived at with no drug involved, then you could at least float the idea that the body's own DMT plays some part in producing them. The body makes its own DMT. If that endogenous DMT were switched on during deep meditation or a brush with death, the overlap between those experiences and the ones we triggered by injecting DMT would be the thing you could point to.
The spiritual angle I brought to the research grew out of a relationship with Zen Buddhism that went back many years. For close to two decades I had been practicing and studying under an American Zen order. So I came in expecting that a large dose of DMT might land people somewhere close to the Zen enlightenment state: content-free, without form, beyond words. The personal self dissolves. Time falls away. Space falls away. There is nothing you would really call interaction happening at all.
The Buddhist idea of emptiness gives you some sense of what that state is like. It is not empty the way an empty bottle sits empty. It is empty of any self, of any form, of feeling, of thought, of all of that.
The volunteers tended to expect similar things, partly because most of them already had an interest in eastern religious practice and philosophy. We were anticipating something enlightenment-like, that encounter with the white light people describe as the ground of creation and existence itself.