Dr. Rick Strassman (Interview Archive)

When we put all the weight on the unitive mystical state and skip past the interactive, relational kind of experience, two things happen. First, we overlook a category of experience that shows up far more often than the unitive one. Second, we brush aside the core religious experience of an enormous number of people, most of it having nothing to do with drugs. Take the text of the Hebrew Bible. Its influence on the shaping of western civilization runs across economy, law, theology, psychology, science, the full range, and that influence grew out of the verbal content of the religious experience as the text records it. The verbal information arrives inside a relationship within the spiritual encounter.

In many ways it is simpler to dwell on the wordless qualities of the mystical unitive state, because then you never have to sit with the verbal messages carried in the Hebrew Bible. I'd argue the opposite approach is warranted: look harder at what that message actually says and test whether it matters beyond the sensation of being filled with everything or the raw impact of the moment. Something more specific could help with integration, which is exactly where a lot of people who take psychedelics run into trouble once they return from the state.

Erik: And this message you keep pointing to, what is it, specifically, that you think the text transmits?

Dr. Strassman: There are two main messages, and both are worth sitting with. I was turning this over just last night. You have the Eightfold Path in Buddhism, and the Ten Commandments in Judaism. Though strictly, they aren't the Ten Commandments at all. They're the Ten Statements. The first of those ten is God announcing His name, His relationship to humanity, and the reason that relationship exists. Set that against Buddhism, where if you set aside the Eightfold Path and look instead for a theme stated in a few words, something close to a mantra, you land on the first of the Four Noble Truths: life is unsatisfactory, life is suffering. One is pointed entirely inward, toward the self. The other, the first of the Ten Statements in the biblical text, declares that there is a God, that this is God's name, the one God who created and holds together the whole universe, both the visible part and the invisible.