Rick Strassman and the Hebrew Bible
Dr. Rick Strassman began his work by drawing a line between the psychedelic states brought on by DMT and the enlightenment experiences described in Buddhism. That comparison eventually caused friction. Once he started talking about the DMT state as something that might involve a Divine Personality and distinct spirits, his Buddhist community pushed back.
Strassman's early leanings sat closer to Buddhism than to any theistic view. In the Buddhist framing he had absorbed, every vision, every being, every encounter was a projection of the mind, treated as illusion or distraction. What counted as real was Emptiness and Luminosity, nothing else. Theism said the opposite: the images in a spiritual vision, the beings that appear, the telepathic exchanges, all of it carries weight and bears on spiritual understanding. Many of his DMT research volunteers came back describing telepathic contact with God and with other advanced beings they experienced as separate from themselves, agents with their own autonomy. To the Buddhists around him, those reports were imagination and little more. Strassman has described the reaction plainly. Under the traditional model, enlightenment and spirituality were byproducts of mental activity, and no genuine outside force was thought capable of reaching in and interacting with a person.
Looking for a way to make sense of these layered, multi-dimensional reports, Strassman went to the Hebrew Bible. Those Hebrew scriptures gave him a context for the DMT experience of multiple realities, and that reading pushed him toward fresh conclusions about what his earlier psychiatric experiments had shown regarding DMT in the brain. He admits the text did not click at first. The notion of real external forces that modern thinking would call illusory made no sense to him until he considered it from a psychedelic frame of mind, a frame willing to entertain realities past the narrow focus our culture places on the physical body.
What he found running through the scripture was a prophetic mode of awareness that looked a great deal like the visions reported on DMT. From there he argued that much of Western religious belief traces back to ideas generated in prophetic visions, the same kind of material that now shows up in DMT sessions. The prophetic state, as he describes it, carries auditory contact with spirits, telepathic exchange with God, and visions that disclose the structure of reality along with the route to mystical ability.
His experiments left Strassman open to a possibility he had not started with: that an external spiritual world exists and is objectively real. Such a world might operate on its own terms while still interacting with the human mind, not spun out of the mind as a side effect. He floated the idea that DMT could act as a bridge between the physical reality we know and other mystical realities far larger than it.
He also pointed outward for corroboration. Latin American shamanic practice, by his account, describes ritual participants leaving the physical world to enter spiritual realms populated by other sentient beings. Those beings speak to people as guides, carrying knowledge of life and of what follows it.
Strassman separates two kinds of religious practice. One is a direct encounter with reality, which he would call the genuine article. The other is unquestioning deference to clerics and their rituals. He traces the split to two sources: contemplative meditation on one side, and on the other a kind of spiritual starvation that works on human hope and fear. He has called it a problem that some people adopt Eastern traditions while writing off the Western prophetic account of spiritual realms and the guidance those realms can offer. God, he noted, may be among the most subtle and abstract concepts anyone has tried to hold, and across the whole of human history we have reached for larger forces beyond the body. Why the mind keeps straining toward contact with them is the question he says we have to work out.
- Brandon Petty