Dr. Rick Strassman on DMT, Invisible Worlds, and Why Religion Still Matters
Maybe someday we'll build cameras capable of recording what sits inside the dark worlds. If that happened, we could line those images up against the ones people describe while under the influence of DMT and see how closely they match. But suppose the pictures agreed. That still wouldn't tell us why the mind and the brain are wired to work this way in the first place. Swallow a compound and within moments you're somewhere else entirely. Why? What accounts for that near-instant relocation into other realms, and why would a biological system be arranged to allow it at all? I wanted a larger explanation, something that spoke to the reason behind the phenomena rather than only the phenomena themselves.
There was a second thing I kept returning to, which was whether these states are good for anything. Do people come back smarter, or more considerate, more willing to pay attention to one another, more careful with the world around them? You could, in principle, give a full mechanistic account using ideas drawn from dark matter or parallel universes and explain exactly what the brain is doing. But a description like that leaves the ethical and moral content untouched. It doesn't tell you how to pull any guidance for living out of the experience.
So I asked myself which fields have always busied themselves with invisible worlds, and the answer was the religious traditions. They've spent centuries mapping those worlds and inventing methods for reaching them. More than that, they've worked to draw information out of what they found there: how to treat the world outside yourself, how to treat yourself, how to relate to the spiritual dimension. They ask about the nature of the divine, the nature of spirituality itself.
That led me to look at the frameworks people currently borrow from religion when they try to make sense of the spiritual side of the psychedelic effect. Two sources have done most of the heavy lifting. One is the eastern religious outlook, Buddhism above all. The other is the shamanic tradition of Latin America.
The eastern approach carries a problem, though. It tends to treat the visions and the voices as unreal, something to notice and then set aside rather than take seriously. And for the most part these traditions are non-theistic. That matters if you want a model that reaches the widest possible audience. For any framework to catch on broadly, it has to fit the worldview that most people in a society already hold. Given how many people operate from a theistic starting point, the non-theistic character of these eastern systems strikes me as an obstacle it won't easily get past.