Dr. Rick Strassman on the Prophetic State of Consciousness
The Latin American shamanic tradition has drawn more interest lately, largely because of ayahuasca, a DMT-containing brew used both in religious ceremony and in psychotherapeutic settings. One thing this model has going for it is that it treats the altered state seriously. Those other worlds are real within its framework, and so are the spirits that inhabit them. They carry weight; they act on our physical lives. Set against a Buddhist reading of the same experiences, that willingness to grant the visions genuine reality is a point in its favor.
Still, shamanism isn't theistic in any strict sense. Its attention sits with the spirits themselves rather than with a single God who creates, sustains, and governs them. And the particular strain of Latin American shamanism that has been spreading into the West strikes me as ethically compromised. You find a great deal of spiritual warfare in it: black magic, rivalry, revenge, greed, sexual predation. Every old religious institution carries baggage of that kind, of course, so this is hardly unique. But you would at least hope a borrowed tradition might come in as some improvement on the troubles already present in Western religious life, not a repeat of them.
So I set both the Buddhist and the Latin American shamanic frameworks aside as ways of making sense of the psychedelic state, the DMT state in particular. I went back to where I came from and began reading the Hebrew Bible, the Jewish scriptures. There were several reasons for that choice. Over time what held me was the idea of a prophetic state of consciousness, the kind of experience the prophets in those texts describe having.
The parallels were hard to ignore. The visions and voices recorded in the text lined up closely with what my DMT volunteers reported: the same colors, shapes, movement, and patterning. The voices in particular matched, described as overwhelming in their force. So did the emotional register, with fear and reverence and anxiety and bliss all showing up on both sides. Even the bodily reports overlapped, things like shaking, lightness, heat, a sense of weight, a sense of being moved. I began to think the prophetic experience might work as a serious alternative to the Eastern and shamanic models for understanding and integrating what the psychedelic state actually contains.
I should be careful about how I'm using the word prophecy. The modern sense leans heavily on prediction, on foretelling what is to come, but that emphasis is mostly a residue of translation. When the Hebrew Bible was first rendered into Greek, the translators took the Hebrew word for prophet, nabi, and gave it as prophetes, which carries the meaning of one who foretells or predicts. The forecasting connotation came in with the Greek. It isn't really what the original word was pointing at.