Rick Strassman, MD, is an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico. He is author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule — A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research Into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences, Inner Paths to Outer Space: Journeys to Alien Worlds Through Psychedelics and Other Spiritual Technologies, and DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: a New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible. He has also authored a novel titled Joseph Levy Escapes Death.

Here he describes the process of setting up a program to research the psychedelic drug, DMT, at the University of New Mexico. It took two years to obtain the required permissions, as there had been a twenty year hiatus in psychedelic research on human subjects. He describes the many precautions required for such research. He also discusses, in great detail, the stages of a DMT experience. Half of his research participants described communication with intelligent, autonomous entities while in an ostensible out-of-body state.

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is a past vice-president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology; and is the recipient of the Pathfinder Award from that Association for his contributions to the field of human consciousness exploration.

(Recorded on September 27, 2019)

Published on September 30, 2019