Rick Strassman

Well, in thinking about psychedelic states back then and in the prophetic literature, you can think of the visions as being generated from the bottom up when you take something.

In the model of the Hebrew Bible anyway, it all comes down from God.

So it's a top-down vision.

causal relationship between the source of the visions and the visions as opposed to them being generated by taking something.

It's exogenous DMT versus endogenous DMT.

Well, I mean, it might be helpful to even go back to why I started reading the Hebrew Bible, of all things.

Yeah.

Well, when I was doing my DMT work, I was really involved with the Zen Buddhist community that I started affiliating myself with, learning from.

when I was 22.

And that was the spiritual approach I took to the DMT work.

I was expecting it to be consistent with a Buddhist enlightenment goal, with no form, no thoughts, no sense of self, anything like that.

So that was the expectation that I took in with me when I was doing those studies.

Would people have those kinds of experiences just being given DMT without any other trappings?

No expectation, just go in there, tell us what it's like.

So instead of that, DMT was full of content.

People were interacting with it.

Their sense of self was maintained, which was not at all consistent with the Buddhist model that I brought to bear.

So that was going on, like, okay, Buddhism's not quite holding up to the data.

And then my Buddhist community and I parted ways over the psychedelic work.

They thought it was promoting a deluded idea that psychedelics can be spiritual.