Rick Strassman | Is Consciousness Biologically Mystical?

There was a Yale study a couple years ago where they used it in people with treatment-resistant depression. Just gave a big dose of DMT. It didn't provide any formal psychotherapy and people got better. There's a group in the UK, Small Pharma, which is looking at DMT. You know, one of the problems with DMT as a psychotherapeutic aid is usually you have to either smoke it or inject it. And the onset of effects is quite strong, quite powerful, quite intense. And it can be somewhat disorienting, especially if you're not used to those kinds of states.

What if there's a naturally occurring chemical in your brain that could completely change how you experience reality? In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Rick Strassman, the pioneer behind DMT research, to explore consciousness, mystical experiences, and the surprising ways psychedelics and the mind intersect. We get into science, spirituality, and what it really means to understand these states and how they could impact healing and personal growth.

My name is Dr. Fleet Maull, your co-host for this session, and I'm really happy to be here today with Dr. Rick Straussman. Welcome, Dr. Straussman.

Thank you, Dr. Maull.

I'm really happy to have you on our summit today, and I can You can call me Fleet for the rest of our interview here. Your research on DMT has had an impact on our understanding about consciousness. And I wonder if you might explain this idea of how DMT might be involved in naturally occurring mystical experiences, which I assume means DMT has a correlate naturally existing neurochemical in the brain of some sort. So I wonder if you could talk about that.

Yeah, that ties into what led me to this line of work in the first place. In college, I was struck by the similarities between certain meditative states and those brought on by psychedelic drugs. And I thought there must be some common biological denominator that was activated when you meditated and you took psychedelic drugs to the extent that the experiences overlapped. So I began looking for an endogenous or naturally made substance which might be stimulated, let's say, when you meditate and you get psychedelic visions. So I began looking at melatonin, which is a pineal hormone, and there were some, you know, medical data suggesting it was perhaps psychedelic. And there is a long esoteric physiology history of the value of the pineal gland. You know, the Hindus were pinpointing the location on the top of the head which corresponded to some of the highest spiritual experiences. So I began my clinical research career looking at melatonin in the early '80s. We discovered it was only sedating, which everybody knows now. In the meantime, though, I learned about DMT, which is, I guess, a chemical cousin of melatonin., and it was known to be made within the body and had been studied as a very powerful psychedelic drug previously in the '50s, the '60s. So I switched my focus to DMT. My theory was that if giving DMT as an injection or administering it, if it produced effects similar to those that occurred in non-drug altered states of all sorts, not necessarily spiritual ones. Yeah, so psychosis, near-death experiences, mystical experiences, any number of non-drug altered states. Yeah, so if DMT replicated some of those, some of those features, you know, that would support a role for endogenous DMT mediating those effects. Yeah, so for example, if you gave DMT and it caused a syndrome like the near-death state, you could then hypothesize that naturally occurring DMT is released during the near-death state.

So you referenced how your research began. Do you mind my asking, was that personal experience with meditation and psychedelics, or was it just your research clinical interest looking at what studies were being done with meditators and people using psychedelics at the time?

Well, it was a combination. College, I experimented seriously with psychedelic drugs. I also learned a form of meditation, Transcendental Meditation, which the effects were rather subtle. In the meantime, though, I had discovered Buddhism and some of the meditative texts, and the descriptions of some of those states resulting from particular meditation practices were quite psychedelic.

Mm-hmm. Especially I think in the Tibetan tradition and all the Bardo-Thogol cultures and so forth.

Yeah. Right. The visualizations and whatnot.

Mm-hmm. So you're a psychiatrist, and so I know your interest was what can we learn here and how can we apply that to helping human beings with mental health challenges? So what do you see as a role of, and I know there's some current research going on in the UK, probably some other places with DMT. It's probably a long way from being rescheduled. But what do you see about the possible therapeutic applications to treat things like depression, anxiety disorder, PTSD, and so forth? And is there a way to increase endogenous DMT without actually consuming DMT, whether it's, you know, there's synthetic DMT, there's DMT as part of ayahuasca, although it's activated in a very different way. And then there's the 5-MeO-DMT that has got a lot of attention these days.

So, yeah. Well, you know, compared to other psychedelics like psilocybin and like LSD, you know, so far there's not been correspondingly strong interest in studying DMT for mental health problems. Although that is slowly changing. There was a Yale study a couple of years ago where they used it in people with treatment-resistant depression. Just gave a big dose of DMT. It didn't provide any formal psychotherapy and people got better. There's a group in the UK, Small Pharma, which is looking at DMT. You know, one of the problems with DMT as a psychotherapy therapeutic aid is usually you have to either smoke it or inject it. And the onset of effects is quite strong, quite powerful, quite intense. And it can be somewhat disorienting, especially if you're not used to those kinds of states. So one of the focuses of interest is to formulate a preparation of DMT which is slower onset, the duration is longer,, you know, so you can work with it psychotherapeutically. You know, there's a couple of approaches which are being taken. One is the development of a continuous infusion of DMT, you know, keeping people in the DMT state for 30, 60, or 90 minutes. What's very cool about that model is you can titrate the state in real time, just about. You can increase the infusion rate and increase the level of intoxication. You could decrease the infusion rate, even people completely out of the state. You know, if you're doing, psychotherapy with a person and they want to go deeper or they want to go lighter, you know, talk or not talk. I think they're also working on buccal formulations of DMT. You put it in your cheek, it absorbs more slowly. You know, you could, you can place, you know, DMT as a psychotherapeutic agent within the class of compounds which are being studied as psychotherapeutic agents. You know, well, so MDMA is like a quasi-psychedelic and that's been used for PTSD treatment. It's been kind of slowed down by the FDA, you know, but we'll see how that goes. Psilocybin has been used for depression, anxiety, end-of-life despair, substance abuse. They're using more LSD now in studies, anxiety disorder, existential distress from a terminal illness. You know, so I think one of the things we'd need to do before these drugs are ready for prime time is number one, you know, figure out how they work. We're just kind of throwing them at everything. And, you know, they seem to be helpful in, you know, the proper situations for a vast number of conditions. And, you know, they're almost, they're almost like panaceas. And I think, you know, that's a very interesting finding. You know, like, how is a drug or a category of drugs a panacea? You know, so I think once we understand, you know, how psychedelics work, we'll be able to determine which conditions are the most amenable. Another thing we need to figure out is the role of psychotherapy. And if psychotherapy is necessary, then what kind? There's a couple of reasons I think that psychotherapy is a crucial component. You know, one is that you'll increase the benefit. Or the potential benefit. Because if you're completely in an altered state and you're aberrating and crying and/or joyful and ecstatic or confused or all kinds of things, you want somebody to talk about that with. And if somebody's just sitting there, you're reading the newspaper, that's not going to quite be the same. And I think also it will reduce the frequency of adverse effects. Because there's support. You're working with a person, you know them, they know you, there's respect, there's trust, and they help you through the state and you have them to discuss things with, you know, once the session is over. So you can integrate it a lot more carefully, successfully, as opposed to just this big experience and you're left with a bunch of loose ends.

You raised two really important areas there and maybe And we'll start with what you just talked about and move backwards a little bit. But certainly, in general, for me anyway, I mean, combining psychotherapy with psychedelic medicine seems like a no-brainer for the reasons you described, certainly for quality preparation. Even if there was no psychotherapy happening during the session, certainly for preparation and integration seems really important. I guess the only reason it would come up at some point is issues of scale and economy and so forth. There is some ketamine infusion clinics where they don't offer psychotherapy and people are benefiting to some degree on that with depression. And I think that's still an open question, but it seems like if one is able to integrate the two, that seems to be ideal. And you mentioned we don't really understand that these psychedelic medicines seem to be a panacea in many ways, and we don't really understand how it's working yet. I wonder if you could elaborate a little more on that. I mean, there is some notion of, and this harkens back to some of the similarities with meditative experiences, There may be some suppression of the activity of the default mode network. There's some speculation around that and a commonality there. There's the idea that there's increased neuroplasticity. There's Robin Carhart-Harris's notion of the entropic brain and that somehow these psychedelics get us into a sort of a sweet spot or a Goldilocks zone between rigidity and chaos and the function of the brain where change is more possible, which I guess is another way of talking about neuroplasticity. But I wonder if I've asked a number of researchers these questions. I had a conversation with Bessel van der Kolk for a summer last year, and he said, "Well, you know, we used to talk psychobabble, now there's neurobabble. The truth is we don't really know what's going on yet." And I'm curious about your thoughts about that and what directions of research we need to do so we can figure out what the therapeutic mechanisms are of these medicines.

Well, I think you can dispense with both your neurobabble and psychobabble if you think about your set and setting. You know, that's been a theme that's run through any discussion of psychedelic drug effects since the '60s. You know, the set is, you know, who you are at the time you take the drug. It's your physical health, your mental health, your spiritual health. And it involves what you think about and how you occupy yourself. What are your goals, your priorities? What's important to you? What questions do you have? What's your intention of taking a psychedelic drug? And the setting is the environment in which the experience takes place. Friends, family, by yourself, outside, inside, all those extra personal factors, so to speak. You know, so if you are a spiritually oriented person and you study spiritual texts and you pray and you meditate and you belong to a religious community and you take a psychedelic drug because you want to enhance your practice or increase your commitment to the path, I could guarantee just about that that will be the kind of experience that you have. It might be pleasant, might be unpleasant, but those are the things which are going to provide the content of the experience itself, the visions, the voices, the ideas, and the feelings. If on the other hand, you're Charles Manson and you want to recruit vulnerable people and feed them these weird ideas and make them like almost imprint upon you in a attachment kind of manner, and you find people who want that kind of experience, they're lost and they feel hard done by and they feel society's out to get them, you can solidify, make more true and meaningful those kinds of ideas, those kinds of feelings. So that's like in a non-pathological set of circumstances. If though, for example, you have depression, and you're depressed, you wanna feel better, you haven't responded to normal treatments or, you know, typical treatments. You know, the placebo response in antidepressant trials is enormous. Like, you know, 40% of your people get better on placebo as opposed to, you know, 60 or 70%, you know, on an antidepressant. You know, the placebo response is powerful. It's a biological response. There's, you know, functional brain imaging changes in endocrine and immune function, inflammatory effects of placebo. You know, so if you're steering your experience towards the relief of depression and you're told, you know, this is a drug which provides a certain experience, which then leads to a less depressed state, chances are that'll occur more often than not anyway. So when you're talking about placebo, response with the psychedelics, there's a couple of factors which come into play. One is the neurological or neurobiological factors that you were alluding to, the default mode network and increased functional connectivity, entropic brain. So those just may be the pharmacological effects of the drug. On the other hand, there's the subjective experience, which at the very least is intense.— you know, convincing, meaningful. It might be mystical, it might be psychodomimetic, it might be ego-dissolving, or what have you. It's intense and it's convincing and you're there, you know, more in a way, more present than one's everyday consciousness. You know, so what's the correspondence then between the acute subjective effects and the neurobiological effects? Is there like a threshold of intensity of the subjective experience which is necessary to activate the neuroplasticity or the default mode network. So I think it's a really interesting interplay between the subjective experience and the biological effects. You know, they're developing these non-psychedelic psychedelics now that just stimulate neuroplasticity, at least in lower animals. You know, there aren't any data for humans yet. And, you know, the thinking goes that you can stimulate, you know, neuroplasticity and change the functional connectivity in the brain without like imposing a psychedelic experience on the person. You know, most people only want to be less depressed. They don't necessarily want to have a huge psychedelic experience. I think those drugs will probably turn out to be like super antidepressants and they'll be helpful for a lot of people and they won't be burdened with a lot of side effects, most likely. On the other hand, for those individuals who don't respond to non-psychedelic psychedelics, you You may want to turn to a psychedelic and you have a big subjective effect, which may prove more beneficial, but at the same time would be more liable to adverse effects.

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So from what I hear you saying, it sounds like even if we get greater clarity about the actual neurobiological mechanisms at play with these various psychedelic medicines, and they're not all the same, but if we get more greater clarity in it, that won't necessarily tell the whole story. For the more transformational experiences people have when it is a subjective psychological experience with ideal set and setting and so forth. So the neurobiological effects may only tell part of the story. And if we focus too much on that, that could be the same kind of reductionistic science that kind of led to our focus on, so the antidepressants and so forth.

That's fascinating.

So I'm curious, your book, The Spirit Molecule, I haven't, I really want to read that. I feel bad I haven't read it because it's become kind of a classic in the field. And I'm very looking forward to reading it. But just the title seems to point in the direction of the notion within various plant medicine traditions of these substances having their own spirits or allies, but also even in Western science points to consciousness. And of course, in reductionistic Western, highly materialistic, you know, consciousness is still like, you know, the difficult question, how does it arise? But in more kind of open-minded Western science as well as Eastern science, I think consciousness is certainly looked at. So I'm wondering what has your research around DMT and what is this all telling us about consciousness, the relation between consciousness between the mind, the brain, and these different factors, and maybe how that might be of interest to you as a healer and a psychiatrist.

Well, I think one of the most interesting things about DMT in particular, obviously it's a topic near and dear to my, to my heart. There was a study in 2019, which was looking at brain production of DMT in the rodent. And they determined, there was a group at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. John Dean was the first author. He's now at UC San Diego. They discovered that concentrations of DMT in the rodent brain are comparable to those of serotonin and of dopamine. So we're kind of closing in on the notion of a DMT DMT neurotransmitter system, which, you know, and if there were a DMT neurotransmitter system, you'd really wonder what was it mediating? You know, what's it responsible for? You know, so you can deduce the role of a neurotransmitter by giving medications or drugs that modify that neurotransmitter and you're seeing what happens. Yeah. So for example, you give SSRIs and people are less depressed and usually less anxious. So you could say to yourself, well, serotonin then is involved with the functions of mood and anxiety. The amphetamines, they are stimulating, they help you focus, they keep you from falling asleep. And those are medications that interact with the dopamine system. So you can then assume that dopamine is involved in alertness and focus. So what's the hallmark of giving DMT? Well, it's the conviction that what you're experiencing is more real than real. It's a state of consciousness that completely replaces ongoing mental experience. So if giving a drug that, simplistically thinking, stimulates DMT receptors and one feels themselves completely transported to a different reality which feels more real than this one, one might then speculate that perhaps perhaps the role of a DMT neurotransmitter system is to mediate our sense of reality. So if there's higher levels, things are hyper-real and meaningful and important and convincing and they stick with you. If lower levels might be accompanied by feelings of flatness or lack of energy or lack of excitement or interest, less meaningful. You know, so I think, you know, that's one way in which DMT in particular, you know, ties into the idea of consciousness. I was joking around at some point, you know, thinking of DMT as the endomatrix. It's the naturally occurring compound in the brain that, you know, regulates our sense of reality. You know, so one can venture down some pretty interesting rabbit holes along those lines.

Yeah, that's a particularly interesting one. So certainly we know that the consensual reality that we all experience, and of course that can be influenced by mood and all kinds of things, but still that basic consensual reality is a curated experience delivered to us by the brain. And in fact, it may be a two-way street, the way the brain's influencing that and the way that influences the brain. So we think of if DMT and other psychedelics give us access to a completely different experience, we generally think of that as altered or not, you know, different than real or departure from the real, but it may just be a different curated experience of a greater field of consciousness. So that's a fascinating area to explore.

Yeah, it might be a greater sphere. Well, you know, by a greater sphere of consciousness, do you mean within the person or to the external to the person?

I was thinking external to the person that it may open us up to a larger field of consciousness than one that our brain currently curates for us.

Yeah, well, yeah, you know, one of the interesting things about DMT as well is, you know, why is there so much DMT in the natural world? It's in every mammal that's been studied. It's in hundreds, if not thousands of plants. You know, so it is tempting to think of DMT as some kind of spiritual Esperanto, as a shared language which might cross different species, as it were.

You mentioned before the placebo effect, and I think often in the general public, the lay audience, they may, they've been kind of educated to think the placebo effect means something doesn't work, it's not real, it's just, and in fact, the placebo effect is a really important phenomenon to understand the human brain, the innate healing possibilities within the human, whole human body. And so you mentioned that, and my understanding is that in some of the clinical trials, You know, the, one of the criticisms from the advisory committee to the FDA that has put off rescheduling of MDMA for now was, you know, the difficulty in doing truly double-blind or truly blind clinical trials. And, you know, generally once someone knows pretty quickly whether they've received the placebo pill or the real psychedelic medicine, but at the same time during some of the clinical trials, because the person is receiving some preparation, they're put in a place in a nice setting, they have the eye mask on, they have nice music, there's some nice people sitting with them in a really reassuring way, they end up having some very positive experiences. And in some cases actually didn't realize they'd received the placebo and in fact had some positive results from the session. So again, the power of set and setting. And it seems like even, you know, understanding the really deep mysteries of our biology and the deep mysteries even of our immune system and really the profound intelligence within it and the way it works. And while we know so little about it, on some level, it seems like the placebo effect is one of the things we should be most researching. I'm curious about your thoughts on that.

Yeah. Well, you know, there's a couple of relevant points with regard to placebo in, you know, current studies. You know, one is, you know, the FDA's assistance on placebo, you know, double-blind, you know, placebo-controlled studies. And as you mentioned, you know, if you get a substance that has no psychological effects, the chances are that you won't have as great a response, although you may have some. There's been a lot of hand-wringing and hair-pulling about what's the proper placebo, you know, condition if you're going to do a double-blind placebo-controlled study. Is it a low dose of drug? Well, not really, because that stimulates neuroplasticity, and some people are quite sensitive, you know, subjective response as well. You give Benadryl, well, you know, Benadryl, it gives you an altered state. You're sedated. You've got anticholinergic, antihistaminergic things going on in the brain. THC, well, that's another trip for another— you're comparing two trips with each other. You know, there's a notion out there, the open-label placebo trial. It was— I'm not sure if it began at the Harvard Placebo Research Center. There's a fellow there named Kapchuk who's been working on the open-label placebo idea. He has found out that if you tell people that they're getting placebo and that placebo has a high rate of response, there you have it. There's your placebo condition. So I think that would cut through the Gordian knot of what's the proper placebo. Proper placebo is a placebo and you tell them that. So it is no longer double-blind, but you have a good comparator group. Because, you know, people do know that they get the psychedelic. They're never double-blind because it's obvious. You know, the other issue with placebo and the medical use of psychedelics is what conditions would they be most useful for? And I think that would be in conditions with a high placebo response in the first place, which are your mental health conditions for sure, maybe autoimmune diseases, allergic responses or allergic illnesses. Pain, those conditions all respond to placebo fairly robustly. So if psychedelics enhance the placebo response, you would want to direct that enhancement towards the placebo response in the person, which might be quite helpful in and of itself. On the flip side of that would be that psychedelic-assisted therapy would not be useful for placebo non-responsive conditions, like for example, cancer. Yeah.

Fascinating. I just wanna follow up on something you said in your previous response that because BMT is, this stuff seems to be so omnipresent in nature, you know, brings up some curiosity about its role, right? And even as you said, in some way modulating the notion of matrix and consciousness and being throughout nature. It just reminded me, I've had, we've had Paul Stamets on our summit a couple times and And his whole world is out of fungi and psilocybin and so forth. And he talks about how that fungi and humans have kind of co-evolved together and the role of the mycelium in our whole world, in our whole ecosystem. And that I had similar ideas that psilocybin and fungi have this some kind of natural evolutionary symbiotic role with human consciousness. For what purpose though? Yeah. That's a deep question about why we're here all together, right? You know, back to the research a little bit and, you know, the challenge with doing double-blind studies, that open placebo idea is certainly an interesting idea, you know, and this idea that psychedelics do seem to be a bit of a panacea and, you know, so many reports both from the clinical trials and from people who are, you know, going outside the country to do various retreats with various plant medicines. That, you know, there are so many people who are relieving profound suffering and PTSD, a lot of veterans and so forth. And in fact, Australia recently, you know, approved the use of psilocybin and MDA more based on that, you know, first-person account and appeal by the people saying, we need this, we want this, it's healing us. And there also is— so, and there's a lot of enthusiasm around this field. There could be a bit of hype. So I wonder about doing research in that environment where, you know, there's a citizenry saying, this is healing, we need this. There's a certain hype, there's a certain, you know, commercialization, you know, the psychedelic pharma arising, wanting to, you know, so there's all this going on. So I wonder how do we assure that we're on a good research track without keeping it so suppressed that we're actually going to, you know, prevent people from accessing these things that could really be healing them.

Well, you know, one part of your question has to do with public policy, and I'm not much of an expert on that, you know. So I can speak to the research, you know, needs, which would be, you know, keep a level head, you know, don't succumb to funding or, you know, sponsored studies or— yeah, yeah, you have to keep your integrity when you're studying such controversial drugs. You don't want to become a zealot or a missionary or snake oil salesman. These are very powerful drugs, and, you know, they can go to the researchers' heads in some respects. They start being convinced that, you know, some kind of salvific tool which will cause utopia, you know, to descend upon us all. You can contaminate, you know, the research agenda if you believe that. You know, one of the things which I learned from my DMT study, you know, was that DMT was not going to bring on a messianic era. I was kind of hoping it would, you know, like in the back of my mind I was thinking, you know, these are great drugs and everybody should have an experience like this and get in touch with their deeper and more meaningful selves. And if just everybody had that experience, then there would be peace on earth. I kind of flashed on that when I was like 20 years old in college. But in a way, I never let go of that that fantasy, as it were. And I was interested, like, if you give enough DMT to people, is the drug inherently spiritual, or is it going to invariably induce a particular kind of beatific mystical experience? And instead, it was kind of a no-brainer. It was set and setting. People had absolutely individual experiences. Rather than some uniform realization. It was very much dependent on the person rather than the drug. The drug amplified things, but the things that amplified were in that person, in their more or less conscious minds.

So we're probably contemporaries, or at least near so, and I went through the whole countercultural experience in the '60s. And so we had that enthusiasm back then. If we could just, you know, if everybody would just have such an experience, the world would change. Didn't quite work out that way. At the same time though, and I'd like to explore the whole question now for a bit about the whole intersection between science and spirituality and psychedelics' role in that. And your research kind of began with that. You're noticing that there's commonality between some of the meditative traditions and psychedelic experiences. So from what you're saying, I mean, there's no guarantee that any of these psychedelic medicines are going to create that. The importance of setting, you brought up the Charles Manson example before who was using LSD. And influencing the people to do some incredibly horrific things. But however, if you did combine good set and setting and psychedelic medicines, it seemed like that could be a program to change the world if that was scalable.

Well, it would have to be voluntary.

It's hard to do involuntary good set and setting.

Right. You'd have to allow for people to say, I'm not interested in that.

So, you know, in terms of our human spiritual journey of, you know, evolving psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, and, you know, all the different religious traditions have notions of liberation and of some form or another. I'm just curious about your thoughts of the role of psychedelics in that and the role of psychedelic-assisted therapy in that, you know, this interface between whatever people might pursue independently as part of their path, but also, you know, there already is quite an overlap between people's spiritual paths and meditation practitioners and the whole world of psychotherapy. There's a lot of people involved in all those. Some of your more prominent Western Buddhist teachers of mindfulness, for example, are also psychotherapists. So there's already been a lot of overlap between the world of healing and psychotherapy and the world of spiritual practice and spiritual growth and evolution. So I'm curious about your thoughts on the role of psychedelics and psychedelic medicine and all that.

Yeah, well, speaking of psychedelics and Buddhism, when I was in my early 20s, I went to a Zen monastery and most of, you know, the postulants and junior priests were around my age as well. And every chance that I got, I asked them if they had taken LSD and almost everyone said yes. And my follow-up question was, how important was your LSD experience in your becoming a monk? And almost everyone replied, if it weren't for LSD, I wouldn't be a monk. So there is a very interesting correspondence there. I think what occurs with psychedelics from the point of view of Buddhist belief is this notion of the flash of enlightenment, bodhichitta. It's the first intimation that enlightenment is possible, that there's another way of looking at and interacting with the world. And I think LSD, other psychedelics are quite good at that. Providing a glimpse into an enlightened way of being. So my thinking about spiritual experiences and psychedelics has to do with, concerns itself with Aristotle's division of the mind into the imagination and the intellect. And I think what occurs with psychedelics is they stimulate the imagination. The intellect is the location of ideas, concepts, notions, abstractions, those kinds of things. That is the purview of the intellect, ideas. The role of the imagination is to contain everything else, sensation, perception, feeling, the body, even the feeling of reality, which I think is an intuition as opposed to something that you deduce. You know, so if you divide the mind into, you know, the intellect and the imagination, you can conceive of your psychedelics as stimulating the imagination much more than they stimulate the intellect. You know, most people are able to describe, you know, the features of the psychedelic experience, but it's much more difficult for them to describe the meaning and the message of the experience. And if they do, it isn't anywhere near as detailed manner as the description of the imaginative contents. So that's the way I kind of start off thinking about spirituality and the metaphysics of the psychedelic state or the prophetic state or the enlightened state on any highly altered state of consciousness. So you can have the visions and the voices, those are kind of invariant. You will have a certain phenomenology. There's beings and there's feelings and there's a sense of importance and meaningfulness. But the meaning and the message is filtered through the intellect, which is, you know, what you think about, what you read, what you study, what you talk about. It's what you feed your mind with, you know, more or less. You know, so if you're a Buddhist and you have certain visions and voices on a psychedelic experience, you interpret them through that lens. You know, plus the meaning-enhancing effects of, you know, the drugs will kind of increase one's dedication to the practice. When it comes to naturally occurring spiritual experiences, you would naturally occurring psychedelics, and, you know, the only one which has been articulated or studied that carefully is DMT. So you can think of elevated endogenous DMT occurring in non-drug spiritual experiences, which is then mediating the, you know, the visions and the voices, the content of the imagination. And, you know, then you would use your intellect to extract the information which is condensed or represented in the imaginative contents. That study I mentioned from, you know, from 2019 where they found quite high levels of DMT in brain, you know, concentrations increased at least, you know, 5 times in the dying brain. So it is possible that— oh, and especially in the visual cortex. So if naturally occurring DMT increases in the dying brain, especially in the visual cortex, that's some pretty strong evidence that naturally occurring DMT is playing a role in certain aspects of the near-death state. The visual phenomenology as As far as what the meaning is, you know, what you would get out of that state, you know, that would depend on one's intellectual function.

Well, that is a really interesting new window to look at the whole literature on near-death experiences, and that as well as in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of all the bardo intermediate state and all the teachings around the whole progression of death and all the different levels we go through in terms of consciousness and the dying process. That's quite fascinating. So you mentioned early on the pineal gland and Vedic traditions and other mystical traditions, the pineal gland has often been associated with elevated consciousness experiences, liberation, enlightenment, and different things. Do we know that, is there a relationship between DMT and the pineal gland? Do we know that yet scientifically?

Well, yes and no. You have two sets of data. You know, one is the circumstantial evidence for a role of the pineal in making DMT. All the precursors are there in high quantities. The enzymes responsible for conversion into DMT are there in high levels as well. So another part of the yes is a 2013 study that came out of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor as well, demonstrating that the fluid around the pineal gland contained DMT. The dialysate of the pineal gland in a living animal contained immeasurable levels of DMT. So that was supportive evidence. But the same research group went back in their 2019 paper, which demonstrated high concentrations in cortex, and they weren't able to demonstrate pineal DMT. And in retrospect, they concluded that earlier data was the result of the probe snagging on your brain tissue into and out of the pineal gland. You know, so the pineal may not make DMT all the time, if it does at all. Yeah. So it still is kind of an open question. You know, the whole pineal gland thing isn't as important to me as it once was because, you know, the brain makes DMT and that's an amazing thing. And, you know, most people without pineal glands, you know, live normal lives. If you've had a pineal stroke or a cyst or tumor, Most people live fairly normal lives. They still dream. They still have an imagination. I think the brain makes levels of DMT comparable to a neurotransmitter. I think it elevates the discussion much above just solely the DMT issue.

Fascinating. So back to the relationship again between spirituality and science, but also So whether we have profound mystical experiences, ones that would qualify on the mystical experience scale, for example, whether we have them through a form of meditation, whether they happen spontaneously in the natural world somehow, or whether we have them as a result of consuming a psychedelic medicine of some kind, they can be incredibly profound and meaningful, as you've discussed, and can really shift our worldview in many ways. And yet it seems, certainly in my experience, but I think in general, that we still have our work to do. I mean, people can have profound so-called enlightenment or awakening experiences as a result of intensive meditation and so forth, still find themselves, even though maybe they thought they were done, find themselves getting in trouble with the challenges of the human life around sexuality and money and relationship and the rest of it. And so for myself, early psychedelic experiences in the 1960s and early '70s, some of them really did reorder my worldview. And I never experienced the world the same again. And yet, you know, I certainly still had a lot of work to do and still do in terms of human maturation and psychological development, emotional development and maturity and all of this. And even now that I've been, you know, involved in deep, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and other meditative traditions for over 50 years, even still, if there's a real, there may be these sudden experiences, but there's this real gradual work of the development and to really to be able to live your life from, even if you've seen If you've been up to the mountaintop and you've seen this greater view of human consciousness or reality, to be able to live your life from there is a different question. And so I'm wondering what that brings up for you in terms of, again, the role of psychedelics, the role of psychedelic-assisted therapy, the relationship between healing and then higher levels of self-actualization, human evolution, and so forth. You know, I guess it's the role of mystical experiences, whether they're they happen through psychedelics, through some kind of meditative work or spontaneously, and overall personal development and a human being towards higher levels of what we're capable of in terms of human sanity, human positive evolution and so forth.

Well, I think the emphasis, well, first of all, it would be helpful for me to describe what I think of as the two I guess, categories of fully psychedelic states and to the extent that they resemble spiritual ones. You know, one category is the mystical unitive, which is what's measured on the MEQ. It's unitive. You're one with everything. There's no time or space, no personality, no sense of self, no content. That's what I call the mystical unitive state. It's universal. At least it's proposed as a universal state that one can attain if you take into account whatever mechanisms or whatever causes. The other is what I call the interactive relational state, which is, you know, the typical one would be DMT. You maintain your personality, your sense of self, your volition is full of content with which you interact. Time and space are, you know, they're obviously altered, but they— you continue. You're in a non-corporeal space, but it is space. Time passes. You interact with the material. There might be beings that you ask questions of or they do things to you, those sorts of things. So there's the mystical unitive state and there's the interactive relational one. I think that people have prioritized the mystical experience because of its presumed universality and your ability to just call it whatever you want after you come down. You could say it means that I should start a retreat center, or it means I ought to go to medical school, as opposed to the interactive relational state, which is full of content with which you interact. You get ideas, you get conviction, you think about things differently. Like, for example, you know, the beings may speak to you specific words. You know, so it isn't like you can say, oh, it's all one. You can say, well, there's this thing that was saying certain stuff to me. And, you know, that gets particularistic. One person may have a being tell him to vote for Trump, and another being may tell somebody else to vote for Harris. So you've got content, you've got particularism, and there can be some conflict. I think that the mystical unitive school has gained such traction is because of an implicit theology that's being diffused through the research and the larger public sectors to seek a universal religion, the basis of which is the mystical unit of state, which has no content. It's a feeling. I think it's mostly just a feeling of awe and of reverence and a conviction, but towards what is an open question. You know, so I feel like I am more interested in the DMT-like state, which led me to the Hebrew Bible and the prophetic experience, which is all interactive relational. There's not one mystical unitive state in the whole text, all 22 books, 24 books, I can never remember. You know, so it's an articulation of an interactive relational spiritual state with a long history and a lot of information, lots of content. But, you know, the content is verbal, you know, particularistic, which is going to ruffle a lot of feathers. What is, you know, the message contained in an interactive relational spiritual tradition or spiritual text? You know, so, you know, there is a tendency to want to just make all one, and this universal religion, which is based on this putative universal mystical experience, is one way of that taking place. You know, also when you read about the prophetic experiences in the Hebrew Bible, in most cases it's very difficult. You know, people don't just seek out to be prophets. They're chosen to be prophets. And their experiences are anything but beatific and ecstatic. They're quite difficult. They're being called to chastise the public and the royalty, and they're just harangued and abused and put in jail. You know, so the spiritual experience of that text, that has got a completely different series of goals than enlightenment, world peace, self-contentment.

It's really fascinating. One thing that brought up for me, my Zen teacher in creating kind of a formulation of the traditional Buddhist refuge, but the notion of both oneness and diversity and the need for have the balance of that, that if you go completely to diversity, you end up with chaos. And if you go completely to oneness, you can end up with some kind of totalitarianism. Ism. And so we always need this balance of the oneness and the diversity. So it seems like those two are pointing at those.

Yeah. Well, yeah, my teacher put it that all is one and all is different.

Yeah. Well, this has been really illuminating and fascinating. I have one final question for you. You know, as we know, I think a lot of us are somewhat sad and a little, maybe sometimes a little confused about this, but maybe it's all good in the end, the recent decision by the FDA not to to currently reschedule MDMA, and especially the influence of that advisory committee that didn't seem, when you look at who the members were, to be the best body to be giving that advice in the first place. And some of their criticisms seemed a little nonsensical, but nonetheless, you know, it's going to cause those involved to do more work to get it right. So, but if you are, you know, working with MAPS or working with Lycos or working with the FDA, what do you think the important next steps are to get over that hurdle of rescheduling the first psychedelic medicine effectively and sanely so that we can begin the slow march towards the potential these psychedelic medicines have for transforming the field of psychiatry and for really reducing human suffering?

Well, I think that Elikos may want to ask the FDA to, you know, monitor everything they do. And if they are, you know, swerving to, you know, to the left or to the right, you know, that FDA would be there, you know, this time around, you know, to correct them or, you know, to get things along that, you know, the FDA desired trajectory. You know, I just don't think they did great science. Their quality control could have been better, you know, so they could do good science in the future, you know, but it needs to be vetted every step of the way., you know, by the FDA.

Well, it's interesting. Evidently, the FDA was involved in developing some of the protocols in partnership with Lycos and Masque. But yeah, nonetheless, there's an issue. You brought up that open placebo idea. I mean, some— it seems like that's one of the real questions is, I mean, there was, you know, some issues of they weren't keeping track of the negative experiences robustly enough. And there's some controversy around that, but different versions of what happened there. But this whole issue of the double-blind standard in, you know, in Western science for, especially for approving new drugs, it seems like that Gordian knot does have to be solved somehow. And what you were pointing to may be part of the answer.

Yeah. Just cut through it. You say, you forget about an inert placebo. You're giving a placebo that might produce a lot of beneficial effects.

Yeah. Well, thank you very much, Dr. Straussman. This has been illuminating and fascinating. I'm sure a wonderful contribution to our overall conversation. So thank Thank you so much, and thank you for the work you're doing. Well, thank you. Be well.

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Take care. Mm-hmm.