Rick Strassman

So there were some personal issues as well that led to something that was different than the Buddhist model.

So I'm Jewish.

I was wandering around a New Age bookstore and found a very cool book called The Kabbalah of Envy by Milton Bonder.

And it's a very short book, and he starts describing the difference between a grudge and revenge and envy and jealousy.

very subtle ideas about how to relate to the world.

And it came from the Jewish model, from Jewish philosophy, Jewish psychology.

So I thought, oh, interesting.

Maybe there's something in my own tradition that was more consistent with the DMT effect and also was more personally relevant.

So I started to read the Hebrew Bible and then just went down this huge rabbit hole

So when you're reading it in Hebrew, you're reading words that are derived from three-letter roots.

And those roots may have a huge range of meaning.

Something, for example, could cause a sin, and something could remove a sin just by an extra dot in the middle of a letter.

So it can really kind of bring you closer to the kind of large-scale way of looking at the text.

It isn't just A follows B follows C, but there's a diffuse dispersion of A, then there's B, and then there's C. There are these clouds of interaction, which are a lot more fluid than what would be a straightforward English rendition.

Well, I mean, there's a lot of ways to interact with the text.

So the first thing that came to mind when you were asking that is, back in the day, I used to spin fleece into yarn and then weave the yarn into rugs.

Like, after I stopped the DMT work.

That's all I did for a year.

Just make rugs?

Yep.