Aug 27 2008
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Online Interview With Richard Strassman
Reality Sandwich’s Martin Ball visited Dr. Richard Strassman at his New Mexico home for what turned out to be a great interview. Maybe I won’t have to do one now! He reiterates his opinion that the “alien entites” experienced by his DMT study subjects were most likely not due to things that the subjects were exposed to beforehand:
Now, I was doing my studies in the early 1990’s and there may have been a fair amount out there on UFO’s and alien abductions, but the volunteers who were in my study weren’t that interested in that kind of material and I didn’t know much about it and wasn’t interested in it either, so I certainly don’t think, though one could always argue that it was the case, but I don’t think, that it was an example of people expecting to have alien contact sorts of experiences. And Terence McKenna’s descriptions of the machines elves and the dwarfs and the pixies hadn’t really come out to any extent yet - I don’t know if his first book had really come out yet - and not that many people were really familiar with Terence in the early 90’s in the first place. So, in that case as well, I don’t think it was an example of people’s expectations being fueled by their anticipated effects of the drug.
So I think both in terms of more contemporary memes that are passing through our culture, as far as the abduction experience in our culture and Terence’s raps, I don’t think that either of those had really filtered into the consciousness of our volunteers or my consciousness at the time. So, saying that as an introduction, people were certainly not going into our research studies with hopes of seeing entities or beings. Nevertheless, a huge number of volunteers did.
Strassman also discusses the internal vs. external reality conundrum of psychedelics. I find it interesting that another interview subject and friend of mine, Dr. Mario Pazzaglini, came to some of the same conclusions about this subject. He said “Was the brain downloading stuff that wasn’t in there?” Like Strassman, he also concluded that this was a distinct possibility, based on his work with psychotic patients and personal interest in ritual magic.
The rest of this extensive and excellent interview with Strassman is here.
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August 27th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
Vewy intwisting…
August 27th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Greg — nows the time to share YOUR drug experiences! haha. OK so today I was thinking about an old friend who died from a brain tumor when he was only 24 years old. He had done tons of LSD in high school. My co-worker recovered from a brain tumor and he had done a lot of LSD. Then Terrence McKenna gets a brain tumor — so I do a science citation index study and sure enough — there’s research claiming LSD causes cancer. Anyway Dr. Daniel Levitin in his brand-new book on music and evolution notes that in his neuroscience research on the West Coast he discovered that LSD has widely differing reactions on people. Some can take tons of it and some will be completely fried after one or two doses.
Not that it’s DMT but it is a visionary drug — kind of like Salvia. I took Daniel Pinchbeck up on this subject and he fled his own website (now he hides on Reality Sandwich!) haha. For example there’s this drug expert online and he saw machine elves while taking salvia — so then he tried combining salvia and DMT. Salvia is known as the most powerful psychedelic and sure enough he reports that the Salvia machine elves morphed with and took-over the DMT machine elves. So the DMT machine elves now had the Salvia clothes on and their body parts changed around, etc.
Well so I had to try the full-lotus electromagnetic pineal gland out on Salvia (although I’ve never done DMT or LSD). I discovered that drugs work with electrochemical energy but do not have much electromagnetic power. So the chakras opened up and I had all these internal climaxes but I had no visions because I can already flex my pineal gland it will (and therefore synchronize the electromagnetic energy). I took stronger dosages and just kept blacking out but I would stay in full-lotus. Finally after I blacked out I woke up while keeping self-awareness (instead of thinking my life and the whole world was just an illusion). I then, while completely cogent, had this amazing third eye rainbow vision where I could see rainbows around my hands held in front of my eyes — even in a pitch dark room, with a wool hat over my eyes, with my eyes closed. Then that night I dreamt about Kuna mola art work from Panama (something I had just seen as a kid without knowing what it was) — the same rainbow psychedelics. Turns out that salvia uses the same neural circuits as pot and pot is the sacred drug for the Kuna people.
Anyway the aliens I think are really just a projection of the cerebellum as the reptilian brain archetype, caused by these momentary electromagnetic visions - while the machine elves are basically just homunculus of the cortex. As modern medicine states — psychedelics just causes the cerebellum to directly download images to the cortex without any kind of normal inhibition processing. This, of course, doesn’t mean the whole world and I are not an illusion.
August 27th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
thomas,
Yes. Quite.
August 27th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Drew,
I tend to think that we will find that these “illusions” are all part of a continuum of “reality” that we shouldn’t subject to artificial barriers, but that’s far from original.
August 28th, 2008 at 7:20 am
Greg,
An interesting book about Ayahuasca (which contains DMT) is “The Antipodes of the Mind,” by Benny Shanon.