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Jeremy's Reviews > DMT: The Spirit Molecule
DMT: The Spirit Molecule
by
by
This is a fascinating book about psychedelic research on dimethyltryptamine, a chemical that naturally occurs in our bodies and is likely produced in the pineal gland. The book takes us through the authors research projects from start to finish, including the painstaking process of getting the research approved by various review boards and actually obtaining DMT by navigating a labyrinth of bureaucracies from the DEA to the FDA. Strassman calls DMT the spirit molecule because in his research he found it induced experiences similar to near-death, alien-abduction, being-contact, and mystical experiences. Subjects were convinced that beings were in contact with them, curious about them, and even experimenting on them. Strassman includes some information from theoretical physics regarding parallel universes and dark matter because he himself had difficulty assimilating the subjects� reports into his own atheistic, materialistic worldview. I include so many quotes because I was interested in the science behind DMT, since it occurs naturally in our bodies, and because the writings of the research subjects were also very interesting. Enjoy.
Quotes:
Philip’s and Nils’s experiences smoking DMT were typical: a startlingly rapid onset of effects, a kaleidoscopic display of visual hallucinations, and a separation of consciousness from the physical body.
Why were Nils’s and Philip’s reports so sparse? One possibility was “state-specific memory.� This refers to the phenomenon in which events experienced in an altered state of consciousness can be recalled clearly only upon reentering that state, and not in the normal one. This happens under the influence of substances such as alcohol, marijuana, or prescription drugs like the sedatives Valium, Xanax, or barbiturates. It also results from non-drug-induced altered states, such as hypnosis or dreams.
In 1948 researchers discovered that serotonin carried in the bloodstream was responsible for contracting the muscles lining veins and arteries. This was vitally important in understanding how to control the bleeding process. The name for serotonin came from the Latin sero, “blood,� and tonin, “tightening.�
Sandoz also recommended giving LSD to psychiatric interns to help them establish a sense of empathy for their psychotic patients. These young doctors were amazed by this temporary encounter with insanity.
Many of today’s most respected North American and European psychiatric researchers, in both academics and industry, now chairmen of major university departments and presidents of national psychiatric organizations, began their professional lives investigating psychedelic drugs.
There are two main chemical families of psychedelic drugs: the phenethylamines and the tryptamines…The best-known phenethylamine is mescaline…Another famous phenethylamine is MDMA, or “Ecstasy.”…Tryptamine is a derivative of tryptophan, an amino acid present in our diet…Serotonin is a tryptamine�5-hydroxy-tryptamine, to be exact—but it is not psychedelic. It contains one more oxygen atom than does tryptamine…DMT is also a tryptamine and is the simplest psychedelic…The “grandfather� of all modern psychedelics, LSD, contains a tryptamine core, as does ibogaine, the African psychedelic with highly publicized anti-addictive properties…One of the best-known tryptamine psychedelics is psilocybin, the active ingredient of “magic mushrooms.�
While chemically simple, this “spirit� molecule provides our consciousness access to the most amazing and unexpected visions, thoughts, and feelings. It throws open the door to worlds beyond our imagination.
DMT exists in all of our bodies and occurs throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. It is a part of the normal makeup of humans and other mammals.
‘It would be so easy not to return. I am faintly aware that I am a doctor, but this is not important; family ties, studies, plans, and memories are very remote from me. Only this world is important; I am free and utterly alone.� Research subject
Endogenous DMT, then, is DMT made within the body. There are other endogenous compounds with which we’ve become familiar over the years. For example, endo-genous morphine-like compounds are endorphins.
If excessive naturally produced DMT was causing the patient’s psychosis,…anti-DMT would have antipsychotic effects.
Twenty-five years ago, Japanese scientists discovered that the brain actively transports DMT across the blood-brain barrier into its tissues. I know of no other psychedelic drug that the brain treats with such eagerness.
We need to hold on tight, and we must be prepared, for spiritual realms include both heaven and hell, both fantasy and nightmare.
The pineal gland is unique in its solitary status within the brain. All other brain sites are paired.
Noradrenaline and adrenaline (or norepinephrine and epinephrine) are the two neurotransmitters that turn on melatonin synthesis in the pineal…The unique enzymes that convert serotonin, melatonin, or tryptamine into psychedelic compounds also are present in extraordinarily high concentrations in the pineal. These enzymes, the methyltransferases, attach a methyl group—that is, one carbon and three hydrogens—onto other molecules, thus methylating them. Simply methylate tryptamine twice, and we have di-methyl-tryptamine, or DMT.
Stress worsens hallucinations and delusions in psychotic patients. DMT levels in those patients are related to the degree of psychosis—the more intense the symptoms, the higher the levels of DMT…Individuals with schizophrenia received pineal gland extracts as an experimental treatment in the 1960s. Their symptoms improved markedly.
I already knew that the Tibetan Buddhist Book of the Dead teaches that it takes forty-nine days for the soul of the recently dead to “reincarnate.”…It takes forty-nine days from conception for the first signs of the human pineal to appear. Forty-nine days is also when the fetus differentiates into male or female gender. Thus the soul’s rebirth, the pineal, and the sexual organs all require forty-nine days before they manifest…The pineal could act as an antenna or lightning rod for the soul. And sexual differentiation into male or female, occurring at exactly the same moment, provides the biological framework through which the life-force now may assert itself…Until this forty-nine-day watershed, the fetus may be only a physical, rather than a physical-spiritual, being.
Lung, liver, blood, eye, and brain all possess the appropriate raw materials for DMT production. In fact, for some years researchers jokingly referred to schizophrenia as a lung disease because of the high concentrations of DMT-forming enzymes within the lung!
Psychedelics don’t cause craving or withdrawal.
I said, “Sometimes people think they’ve died, or are dying, or that we’ve overdosed them. So far, no one’s been injured. This is a physically safe dose, although your blood pressure and heart rate will probably take a nice jump. We can respond if there are problems. “If you think you’ve died, there’s two ways I tell people they can deal with it. One is ‘Man, I’m dying, and I’m going to kick and scream and try and stop it.� The other is ‘Okay, I’m dying, now let’s see what this is like. Very interesting.� Easier said than done, of course.�
DMT’s lack of tolerance development also was one of the factors making it a likely naturally occurring schizotoxin…If tolerance to endogenous DMT did develop, psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia, for example, would last only as long as it took for tolerance to build up. Since psychotic symptoms are usually chronic and constant, demonstrating that DMT could not elicit tolerance would be powerful evidence that it could play a role in these disorders.
Cyproheptadine prevents drugs from attaching to the serotonin �2� site, the receptor researchers believe is the most important in controlling how psychedelics work.
Describing what it’s like in the DMT realms is about as easy as giving words to scaling a mountain peak, sexual orgasm, undersea diving, and other nonverbal but breathtakingly profound experiences.
Even more impressive was the apprehension of human and “alien� figures that seemed to be aware of and interacting with the volunteers…Beyond their own loss of control, some volunteers felt another “intelligence� or “force� directing their minds in an interactive manner. This was especially common in cases of contact with “beings.�
The basic processes of psychotherapy seemed to be at work: thinking, recollecting, feeling, connecting emotions with ideas. For most of us, facing painful feelings is difficult, and DMT can make those feelings easier to confront.
‘Yes, it’s very refreshing. It feels like there are thousands and thousands of separate parts of me and this drug brings them all together. It feels very complete.� Research subject
‘DMT is far better than any therapy ever was for me. All therapy reminds me of is how bad things were and are. On DMT I saw and felt myself as a good person, as loved by the DMT elves.� Research subject
I’m hopeful that these reports will accelerate interest in the nonmaterial realms, using whatever intellectual, intuitive, and technological tools we possess…Once there is enough interest in, and even demand for, information about them, such phenomena might become an acceptable topic for rational inquiry…DMT has shown me the reality that there is infinite variation on reality. There is the real possibility of adjacent dimensions.
‘You can choose to attend to this or not. It will continue to progress without you paying attention. You return not to where you left off, but to where things have gone since you left. It’s not a hallucination, but an observation. When I’m there, I’m not intoxicated. I’m lucid and sober.
It felt like going backward from life in a physical body to life as simply an energy form with no body. The essence of who I am was alone in the void, back in the staging area for life where souls wait to incarnate. I was in a place where there are no physical life-forms, only colors and sounds.� Research subject
Clearly, many of our research subjects experienced a radical and complete separation of consciousness from their bodies. For most of us, this would make us feel as if we had died. However, many of our recruits had already undergone this type of dissociation in their previous psychedelic experiences.
‘It was so much more real than life.� Research subject
‘It’s like a cosmic joke. If we all knew what was waiting for us, we’d all kill ourselves.� Research subject
‘Everyone should try a high dose of DMT once. I don’t know if the beings today were saying “Try death once� or “Try life once.”� Research subject
Those who have had a near death experience do not rush off to suicide. Rather, they reside in the knowledge that there is “life after death,� and that transition loses its sting…Thus, they are able to live life more fully, because the fear of death that drives so many to distraction is now so much less.
DMT reproduces many of the features of an enlightenment experience, including timelessness; ineffability; coexistence of opposites; contact and merging with a supremely powerful, wise, and loving presence, sometimes experienced as a white light; the certainty that consciousness continues after death of the body; and a first-hand knowledge of the basic “facts� of creation and consciousness.
MDMA is what I like to call a “love and light� drug, one that accentuates the positive and minimizes the negative. If only life were so simple.
‘I have had many psychedelic experiences in my life, but nothing could compare with or prepare me for what happened today. I feel I have come back a changed person. I realized that there are many more realms than the one we exist in.� Research subject
As opposed to Elena, when Don met face-to-face the vast and impenetrable nature of the source of all existence, he despaired. Elena was steeped in Eastern mysticism, while Don was raised in, and continued believing in, the Catholic faith. Elena saw the love behind the “impersonal� void. Don, on the other hand, felt shocked, stunned, and betrayed by the absence of a personal God or Savior behind it all.
Psychedelics, if anything, provide a view. And a view, to one so inclined, can inspire the long hard work required to make that view a living reality.
It’s been shown that membership in the peyote-using Native American Church reduces the incidence of alcoholism. Similar effects on alcohol and cocaine dependence seem to occur in members of ayahuasca-using churches in Brazil.
These new, easy-to-take chemical agents are forcing us to reevaluate the risks and benefits involved in making us better than average. Why not use psychedelics, too, for indications other than treating the sick?
Quotes:
Philip’s and Nils’s experiences smoking DMT were typical: a startlingly rapid onset of effects, a kaleidoscopic display of visual hallucinations, and a separation of consciousness from the physical body.
Why were Nils’s and Philip’s reports so sparse? One possibility was “state-specific memory.� This refers to the phenomenon in which events experienced in an altered state of consciousness can be recalled clearly only upon reentering that state, and not in the normal one. This happens under the influence of substances such as alcohol, marijuana, or prescription drugs like the sedatives Valium, Xanax, or barbiturates. It also results from non-drug-induced altered states, such as hypnosis or dreams.
In 1948 researchers discovered that serotonin carried in the bloodstream was responsible for contracting the muscles lining veins and arteries. This was vitally important in understanding how to control the bleeding process. The name for serotonin came from the Latin sero, “blood,� and tonin, “tightening.�
Sandoz also recommended giving LSD to psychiatric interns to help them establish a sense of empathy for their psychotic patients. These young doctors were amazed by this temporary encounter with insanity.
Many of today’s most respected North American and European psychiatric researchers, in both academics and industry, now chairmen of major university departments and presidents of national psychiatric organizations, began their professional lives investigating psychedelic drugs.
There are two main chemical families of psychedelic drugs: the phenethylamines and the tryptamines…The best-known phenethylamine is mescaline…Another famous phenethylamine is MDMA, or “Ecstasy.”…Tryptamine is a derivative of tryptophan, an amino acid present in our diet…Serotonin is a tryptamine�5-hydroxy-tryptamine, to be exact—but it is not psychedelic. It contains one more oxygen atom than does tryptamine…DMT is also a tryptamine and is the simplest psychedelic…The “grandfather� of all modern psychedelics, LSD, contains a tryptamine core, as does ibogaine, the African psychedelic with highly publicized anti-addictive properties…One of the best-known tryptamine psychedelics is psilocybin, the active ingredient of “magic mushrooms.�
While chemically simple, this “spirit� molecule provides our consciousness access to the most amazing and unexpected visions, thoughts, and feelings. It throws open the door to worlds beyond our imagination.
DMT exists in all of our bodies and occurs throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. It is a part of the normal makeup of humans and other mammals.
‘It would be so easy not to return. I am faintly aware that I am a doctor, but this is not important; family ties, studies, plans, and memories are very remote from me. Only this world is important; I am free and utterly alone.� Research subject
Endogenous DMT, then, is DMT made within the body. There are other endogenous compounds with which we’ve become familiar over the years. For example, endo-genous morphine-like compounds are endorphins.
If excessive naturally produced DMT was causing the patient’s psychosis,…anti-DMT would have antipsychotic effects.
Twenty-five years ago, Japanese scientists discovered that the brain actively transports DMT across the blood-brain barrier into its tissues. I know of no other psychedelic drug that the brain treats with such eagerness.
We need to hold on tight, and we must be prepared, for spiritual realms include both heaven and hell, both fantasy and nightmare.
The pineal gland is unique in its solitary status within the brain. All other brain sites are paired.
Noradrenaline and adrenaline (or norepinephrine and epinephrine) are the two neurotransmitters that turn on melatonin synthesis in the pineal…The unique enzymes that convert serotonin, melatonin, or tryptamine into psychedelic compounds also are present in extraordinarily high concentrations in the pineal. These enzymes, the methyltransferases, attach a methyl group—that is, one carbon and three hydrogens—onto other molecules, thus methylating them. Simply methylate tryptamine twice, and we have di-methyl-tryptamine, or DMT.
Stress worsens hallucinations and delusions in psychotic patients. DMT levels in those patients are related to the degree of psychosis—the more intense the symptoms, the higher the levels of DMT…Individuals with schizophrenia received pineal gland extracts as an experimental treatment in the 1960s. Their symptoms improved markedly.
I already knew that the Tibetan Buddhist Book of the Dead teaches that it takes forty-nine days for the soul of the recently dead to “reincarnate.”…It takes forty-nine days from conception for the first signs of the human pineal to appear. Forty-nine days is also when the fetus differentiates into male or female gender. Thus the soul’s rebirth, the pineal, and the sexual organs all require forty-nine days before they manifest…The pineal could act as an antenna or lightning rod for the soul. And sexual differentiation into male or female, occurring at exactly the same moment, provides the biological framework through which the life-force now may assert itself…Until this forty-nine-day watershed, the fetus may be only a physical, rather than a physical-spiritual, being.
Lung, liver, blood, eye, and brain all possess the appropriate raw materials for DMT production. In fact, for some years researchers jokingly referred to schizophrenia as a lung disease because of the high concentrations of DMT-forming enzymes within the lung!
Psychedelics don’t cause craving or withdrawal.
I said, “Sometimes people think they’ve died, or are dying, or that we’ve overdosed them. So far, no one’s been injured. This is a physically safe dose, although your blood pressure and heart rate will probably take a nice jump. We can respond if there are problems. “If you think you’ve died, there’s two ways I tell people they can deal with it. One is ‘Man, I’m dying, and I’m going to kick and scream and try and stop it.� The other is ‘Okay, I’m dying, now let’s see what this is like. Very interesting.� Easier said than done, of course.�
DMT’s lack of tolerance development also was one of the factors making it a likely naturally occurring schizotoxin…If tolerance to endogenous DMT did develop, psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia, for example, would last only as long as it took for tolerance to build up. Since psychotic symptoms are usually chronic and constant, demonstrating that DMT could not elicit tolerance would be powerful evidence that it could play a role in these disorders.
Cyproheptadine prevents drugs from attaching to the serotonin �2� site, the receptor researchers believe is the most important in controlling how psychedelics work.
Describing what it’s like in the DMT realms is about as easy as giving words to scaling a mountain peak, sexual orgasm, undersea diving, and other nonverbal but breathtakingly profound experiences.
Even more impressive was the apprehension of human and “alien� figures that seemed to be aware of and interacting with the volunteers…Beyond their own loss of control, some volunteers felt another “intelligence� or “force� directing their minds in an interactive manner. This was especially common in cases of contact with “beings.�
The basic processes of psychotherapy seemed to be at work: thinking, recollecting, feeling, connecting emotions with ideas. For most of us, facing painful feelings is difficult, and DMT can make those feelings easier to confront.
‘Yes, it’s very refreshing. It feels like there are thousands and thousands of separate parts of me and this drug brings them all together. It feels very complete.� Research subject
‘DMT is far better than any therapy ever was for me. All therapy reminds me of is how bad things were and are. On DMT I saw and felt myself as a good person, as loved by the DMT elves.� Research subject
I’m hopeful that these reports will accelerate interest in the nonmaterial realms, using whatever intellectual, intuitive, and technological tools we possess…Once there is enough interest in, and even demand for, information about them, such phenomena might become an acceptable topic for rational inquiry…DMT has shown me the reality that there is infinite variation on reality. There is the real possibility of adjacent dimensions.
‘You can choose to attend to this or not. It will continue to progress without you paying attention. You return not to where you left off, but to where things have gone since you left. It’s not a hallucination, but an observation. When I’m there, I’m not intoxicated. I’m lucid and sober.
It felt like going backward from life in a physical body to life as simply an energy form with no body. The essence of who I am was alone in the void, back in the staging area for life where souls wait to incarnate. I was in a place where there are no physical life-forms, only colors and sounds.� Research subject
Clearly, many of our research subjects experienced a radical and complete separation of consciousness from their bodies. For most of us, this would make us feel as if we had died. However, many of our recruits had already undergone this type of dissociation in their previous psychedelic experiences.
‘It was so much more real than life.� Research subject
‘It’s like a cosmic joke. If we all knew what was waiting for us, we’d all kill ourselves.� Research subject
‘Everyone should try a high dose of DMT once. I don’t know if the beings today were saying “Try death once� or “Try life once.”� Research subject
Those who have had a near death experience do not rush off to suicide. Rather, they reside in the knowledge that there is “life after death,� and that transition loses its sting…Thus, they are able to live life more fully, because the fear of death that drives so many to distraction is now so much less.
DMT reproduces many of the features of an enlightenment experience, including timelessness; ineffability; coexistence of opposites; contact and merging with a supremely powerful, wise, and loving presence, sometimes experienced as a white light; the certainty that consciousness continues after death of the body; and a first-hand knowledge of the basic “facts� of creation and consciousness.
MDMA is what I like to call a “love and light� drug, one that accentuates the positive and minimizes the negative. If only life were so simple.
‘I have had many psychedelic experiences in my life, but nothing could compare with or prepare me for what happened today. I feel I have come back a changed person. I realized that there are many more realms than the one we exist in.� Research subject
As opposed to Elena, when Don met face-to-face the vast and impenetrable nature of the source of all existence, he despaired. Elena was steeped in Eastern mysticism, while Don was raised in, and continued believing in, the Catholic faith. Elena saw the love behind the “impersonal� void. Don, on the other hand, felt shocked, stunned, and betrayed by the absence of a personal God or Savior behind it all.
Psychedelics, if anything, provide a view. And a view, to one so inclined, can inspire the long hard work required to make that view a living reality.
It’s been shown that membership in the peyote-using Native American Church reduces the incidence of alcoholism. Similar effects on alcohol and cocaine dependence seem to occur in members of ayahuasca-using churches in Brazil.
These new, easy-to-take chemical agents are forcing us to reevaluate the risks and benefits involved in making us better than average. Why not use psychedelics, too, for indications other than treating the sick?
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Reading Progress
August 19, 2010
– Shelved
March 2, 2011
–
Started Reading
March 27, 2011
–
Finished Reading
