Hi! I had some one off experience that inclined me to theories
posited below:-
However, I am unable to find clinical studies, proof of DMT
being released during birth and death.
Rick Strassman, M.D. is Clinical
Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of British
Columbia. He is currently working on a book describing his
psychedelic drug research with DMT, The Spirit
Molecule.
In January 1991, twenty-three minutes after I injected a large
dose of DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine) into Elena's arm vein. Elena
is a forty-two-year-old married psychotherapist with extensive
personal experience with psychedelic drugs. DMT is a powerful,
short-acting psychedelic that occurs naturally in human body
fluids, and is also found in many plants. Elena has read some
Buddhism, but tractices Taoist meditation
She lies in a bed on the fifth floor of the University of New
Mexico Hospital general Clinical Research Center. The clear plastic
tubing that provides access to her vein dangles onto the bed. he
cuff of a blood pressure machine is loosely attached to her other
arm, and the tubing snakes its way into the back of a blinking
monitor.
Within thirty seconds of injection, she loses awareness of the
room, and us in it. Besides myself, Elena's husband, who has just
undergone a similar drug session, and our research nurse sit
quietly by her side. I know from previous volunteers' reports that
peak effects of intravenous DMT occur between two to three minutes
after the injection, and that she will not be able to communicate
for at least fifteen minutes, by which time most effects will have
faded. Her eyes closed, she begins spurting out laughter, at times
quite uproarious, and her face turns red. "Well, I met a living
buddha! Oh, God! I'm staying here. I don't want to lose this. I
want to keep my eyes closed to allow it to imprint itself. Just
because it's possible!"
Elena felt great the next week. "Life if very different. A
buddha is now always in the upper right-hand corner of my
consciousness," says Elena. "All of what I have been working on
spiritually for the last several years has become a certainty. Left
hooks from the mundane world continue to come up and hit me, but
the solidity of the experience anchors me, allows me to handle it
all. Time stopped at the peak of the experience; now everyday time
has slowed. The third stage, that of coming down from the peak was
the most important; if I had opened my eyes too soon I wouldn't
have been able to do as much integrating of the experience as I
have."
Two years later, Elena rarely takes psychedelics. Her most
positive recollection of the DMT session was the "clarity and
purity of the medicine." The most negative: "The absolute lack of
sacredness and context." Many of the changes in her life,
particularly a deepening shift from "thinking" to "feeling," were
"supported" by the DMT session, but were underway before it, and
continued after it.
Elena's experience, repeated by 10 to 20 percent of the
volunteers in our psychedelic drug trials, represents the most
gratifying and intriguing results of our work in New Mexico. My own
interest in Buddhism and psychedelics meet in the most positive way
in her DMT-induced "enlightenment-experience."
Ours was the first new project in twenty-five years to obtain
U.S. government funding for a human psychedelic drugs study. This
scientific research was the result of eighteen years of medical and
psychiatric training and experience. I also have been practicing
Zen buddhism for over twenty years. And it is in the molecule DMT
where these two interests have finally merged.
There are important medical reasons to study psychedelics drugs
in humans. The use of LSD ("acid") and "magic" mushrooms (which
contain psilocybin) continues to climb. Understanding what
psychedelics do to brain function, and how, will help treat short-
and long-term negative reactions to them. Because there is some
similarity of symptoms between psychedelic drugs states and
schizophrenia, psychedelic drug research also may shed new light on
this devastating mental illness.
There are other reasons to study psychedelic drugs. Although les
"medical," they do relate to health and well-being. Primary among
them is the overlap between psychedelic and religious states. I was
impressed by the "psychedelic" descriptions of intensive meditation
practice within some Buddhist traditions. Because their scriptures
did not mention drugs, and the states sounded similar to those
resulting from psychedelic drug use, I suspected there might be a
naturally occurring psychedelic molecule in the brain that was
triggered by deep meditation.
I was led to the pineal gland as a possible source of
psychedelic compounds produced under certain unusual mental or
physical states. These conditions would include near-death, birth,
high fever, prolonged meditation, starvation, and sensory
deprivation. This tiny organ, the "seat of the soul" or "third-eye"
of the ancients, might produce DMT or similar substances by simple
chemical alterations of the well-known pineal hormone melatonin, or
of the important brain chemical serotonin. Perhaps it is DMT,
released by the pineal, that opens the mind's eye to spiritual or
non physical, realities.
The pineal gland also held a fascination for me because it first
becomes visible in the human fetus at forty-nine days after
conception. This is also when the gender of the fetus if first
clearly discernible. Forty-nine days, according to several Buddhist
texts, is how long it takes the life force of one who has died to
enter into its next incarnation. Perhaps the life-force of a human
enters the fetus at forty-nine days through the pineal. And it may
leave the body, at death, through the pineal. This coming and going
would be marked by the release of DMT by the pineal, mediating
awareness of these awesome events.
In addition to the scientific puzzle presented by these
similarities between psychedelic and mystical consciousness, there
were issues of healing that also drew me to both. The sense of
there being "something greater" resulting from major psychedelic
episodes led me to think that psychedelics might be helpful to
people with psychological, physical, or spiritual problems. It
seemed crucial to avoid the narrowness that often spoiled claims
for the drugs' usefulness or dangers, and to hold a broad view. My
emerging worldview resembled a tripod supported by biological
(brain), psycholanalytic (individual psychology), and Eastern
religious (consciousness and spirituality) legs. The first two legs
were important in my decision to attend medical school. The third
pushed me deeper into Buddhism.
Disheartened by the lack of spirit in medical training, I took
year's leave of absence from medical school and explored Zen in a
series of retreats. Zen's emphasis on direct experience, its
evenhanded approach to all mental phenomena encountered during
meditation, and the importance of enlightenment all fit with my
image of an ideal religious tradition. During my four-year
psychiatric training, I helped found and run a meditation group
affiliated with my long-standing Zen community. I was ordained as a
lay Buddhist in the mid-1980s. This was the same year I was trained
in clinical psychopharmacology, learning to administer psychoactive
drugs to human volunteers in controlled scientific studies.
The form our research in New Mexico took was a traditional
biomedical one, monitoring effects of several DMT doses on blood
pressure, temperature, pupil size, and blood levels of several
chemicals indicating brain function. We recruited experienced
halluncinogen users who were psychologically and medically fit.
This was because they would be better able to report on their
experiences, and less likely to panic or suffer longer-lasting side
effects, than drug-inexperienced volunteers. Volunteers believed in
the ability of psychedelics to help "inner work," and volunteered,
at least in part, to use DMT for their personal growth.
Was there a spiritual aspect to the DMT experience? And, if so,
was this helpful in and of itself? This was one of my deeper
reasons for developing our DMT research program.
Supervising sessions is called "sitting," usually believed to
come from "baby-sitting" people in a highly dependent and, at
times, confused and vulnerable states. But, in our minds, Buddhist
practice is as relevant a source for the term. Our research nurse
and I did our best to practice meditation while with our
volunteers: watching the breath, being alert, eyes open, ready to
respond, keeping a bright attitude, and getting our of the way of
the volunteer's experience. This method is very similar to what
Freud called "evenly suspended attention," performed by a trained
psychoanalyst who provided support by a mostly silent but present
sitting by one's side. I experienced this type of listening and
watching as similar to Zen meditation.
Another example of how psychedelic and Buddhist meditation
converged was in the development of a new questionnaire to measure
states of consciousness. Previous questionnaires measureing
psychedelic drug effects were not ideal for many reasons. Some
assumed that psychedelics caused nothing but psychosis, and
emphasized unpleasant experiences. Other scales were developed
useing volunteers who were not told what drugs they were given or
what the effects might be. I had always liked the Buddhist view of
the mind being divided into the
five skandas ("heaps," "piles," or "aggregates")
which, taken as a whole, give the impression of a personal self who
experiences. These are the familiar "form," "feeling,"
"perception," "consciousness," and "volition." I looked into
several guides to the Abhidharma literature, the Buddhist
"psychological canon" with over a thousand years of use monitoring
progress in meditation. It seemed that a skanda-based
rating scale could provide an excellent basis for a neutral,
descriptive understanding of psychedelic states.
I let it be known I was interested in talking with people who
had taken DMT. Soon, the phone was ringing with people wanting to
describe their experiences. Most of the nineteen people were from
New Mexico and the West Coast, and nearly all were involved in some
therapeutic or religious discipline. They were well-educated,
articulate, and impressed with DMT's ability to open the door to
highly unusual, nonmaterial states, which was greater than that of
longer-lasting psychedeilcs like psilocybin or LSD. After
completing these interviews, I decided to add a sixth
"skanda" to the questionnaire, called "intensity," which
helped quantify the nature of the experience.
We gave and analyzed this new questionnaire, the Hallucinogenic
Rating Scale (HRS), almost 400 times to more than fifty people over
four years. It is interesting to note that the grouping of
questions using the skanda method gave more sensitive results in or
DMT work than did a large number of biological meaurements, such as
blood pressure, temperature, or levels of certain chemicals in
blood.
Besides informing our style of sitting for and measuring
responses to drug sessions, Buddhism helped make sense of the
experiences people had in our relatively sparse but supportive
environment. For many volunteers, even those with prior DMT use,
the first high dose of intravenous DMT was like a near-death state,
which in turn has been strongly linked to beneficial mystical
experiences. Several were convinced they were dead or dying. Many
had encounters with deities, spirits, angels, unimaginable
creatures, and the source of all existence. Nearly all lost contact
with their bodies at some point. Elena's case is a good example of
an enlightenment experience--sounding identical to reports in the
Buddhist meditative tradition--brought on by a high dose of
DMT.
On one hand, a Buddhist perspective might hold all of these
experiences to be equal. The matter-of-fact approach to nonmaterial
realms in Buddhism provides firm footing for accepting and working
with those experiences. It also does away with judging nonmaterial
realms as better (or worse) than material ones--a tendency in some
New Age religions. The experience of seeing and speaking
to deva-like creatures in the DMT trance was just
that: seeing and speaking with other beings. Not wiser, not less
wise, and not more or less trustworthy than anyone or anything
else.
On the other hand, how to meet head-on the volunteer who had a
drug-induced enlightenment? Certify him or her as enlightened?
Explain away by pharmacology the earth-shattering impact of the
experience?
It was confusing. At first, it seemed as if a big dose of DMT
was indeed transformative. As time elapsed, though, and we followed
our volunteers for months and years, my perspective radically
changed. While some, like Elena, had profoundly beneficial results
from her participation, a small number of volunteers had frighening
, negative responses that required some care afterward. Other, more
subtle adverse effects also crept in (as may happen with Buddhist
practice) in the form of increased self-pride--that is, a division
into those with and without "understanding." In addition, "solving"
problems while in an altered state--particularly common with
high-dose psychedelic use--but then not putting the solution into
practice, seemed to me worse than not even trying to work on the
specific problem.
I have concluded that there is nothing inherent about
psychedelics that has a beneficial effect, nor are they
pharmacologically dangerous in and of themselves. The nature and
results of the experience are determined by a complex combination
of the drug's pharmacology, the state of volunteer at the time of
drug administration, and the relationship between the individual
and the physical and psychological environment: drug, set, and
setting.
The volunteers who benefited most from their DMT sessions were
those who probably would have gotten the most out of any
"trip"--drug or otherwise. Those who benefited least were those who
were the most novelty-saturated. The most difficult sessions took
place in combinations of two factors, the first being an
unwillingness to give up the internal dialogue and body-awareness;
and the second being uncertain or confusing relationships between
the volunteer and those in the room at the time. Therefore, the
"religious," "adverse," or "banal" effects resulting from drug
administration depended more upon the person and what he or she and
those in the room brought to the session, than on any inherent
characteristic of the drug itself.
Thus, the problem with depending on one or several transormative
psychedelic experiences as a practice is that there is no framework
that suitably deals with everyday life between drug sessions. The
introduction of certain Amazonian hallucinogenic plant-using
churches into the West, with their sets of ritual and moral codes,
may provide a new model combining religious and psychedelic
practices.
In the last year of our work, a more difficult personal
interplay of Buddhism and psychedelics appeared. This involved what
might be described as a turf-battle developing between my Zen
community and me. For years, I had been given at least implicit
support to pursue my research by several members of the Zen
community. These were senior students with their own prior
psychedelic experiences. In the last year, I described our work to
psychedelic-naive members of the community, who strongly condemned
it. Formerly sympatheric students appeared pressured to withdraw
any support for my studies. This concern was specifically directed
at two aspects of our research. One aspect was a planned
psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy project with the terminally ill,
research that demonstrated impressive potential in the 1960s. That
is, in patients who were having difficulty with the dying process,
a "dry run" with a high-dose psychedelic session might ease the
anguish and despair associated with their terminal illness. the
other area of concern was the potential for adverse effects, both
the obvious and more subtle ones previously described.
Scriptural and perceptual bases for this disapproval were given,
in addition to community members' own and others' experiences.
However, it appeared to me that the major concern was that it would
be highly detrimental for them, as a Buddhist community, to
associate Buddhism with drug use in any way. It appeared that those
students who had their own psychedelic experiences (and had found
them to stimulate their interest in a meditative life) had to close
ranks with those who did not.
What I have experienced as the friction between disciplines is
not uncommon in the world at large, and perhaps within the Buddhist
community in particular. That is, is it "Buddhist" to give, take or
otherwise occupy oneself with psychedelics as spiritual tools?
Several research projects are being planned across the U.S.,
using psychedelics to treat intractable drug abuse--a condition
with a high mortality rate if untreated. I understand Buddhist
precepts to condone the use of "intoxicants" for medical purposes
(e.g., cocaine for local anesthesia, narcotics for pain control).
Whether or not a Buddhist who gives or takes a psychedelic
"intoxicant" for the treatment of a medical condition faces similar
criticism will be important to note. Complicating this case is the
point that the psychological/spiritual effects of a properly
prepared and supervised psychedelic session might be seen as
curative.
In a final area of possible overlap, I believe there are ways in
which Buddhism and the psychedelic community might benefit from an
open, frank exchange of ideas, practices, and ethics. For the
psychedelic community, the ethical, disciplined structuring of
life, experience, and relationship provided by thousands of years
of Buddhist communal traditon has much to offer. This
well-developed tradition could infuse meaning and consistency into
isolated, disjointed, and poorly integrated psychedelic experience,
without the accompanying and necessary love and compassion
cultivated in a daily practice, amy otherwise be frittered away in
an excess of narcissism and self-indulgence. Although this is also
possible with a Buddhist meditative tradition, it is less likely
with the checks and balances in place within a dynamic community of
practicioners.
However, dedicated Buddhist practitioners with little success in
their meditation, but well along in moral and intellectual
development, might benefit from a carefully timed, prepared,
supervised, and followed-up psychedelic session to accelerate their
practice. Psychedelics, if anything, provide a view that--to one so
inclined--can inspire the long hard work required to make that view
a living reality.
