DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible

In 1953 Aldous Huxley published his landmark The Doors of Perception. For much of his life Mr.Huxley had been seeking that which was common to all religious faiths, albeit from the perspective of a Brit who'd embraced the Vedanta school of Hinduism. One of his earlier books, The Perennial Philosophy, was a sort of Huxley remix of Bucke's 1901 classic Cosmic Consciousness. Both were forays into what was mostly non-western spirituality. The Doors of Perception was his after-the fact meditation upon his first experience with mescaline and in its pages he made rather explicit the notion that "enlightenment" of the spiritual variety could be had with a good dollop of mescaline. This is an easy mistake for someone who knows about enlightenment but has never really experienced it. Although from this vantage, sixty one years later, I can say that he was illumined, but I rather doubt that he was ever fully illuminated. I have my reasons for writing this and will elaborate further on. At that time, the mid-1950's, there was an Oxford scholar, R. C. Zaehner, Spalding professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics, who took considerable umbrage with Huxley's thesis and wrote an extensive rebuttal, if this is the right word for it, within the covers of a book entitle Mysticism Sacred and Profane. It is an excellent counter-claim against Huxley's psychedelicism. Zaehner reviewed the lives and works of people as widely divergent as William James, Artur Rimbaud, Rosalind Heywood, John Custance and a gaggle of Hindu, Sufi and Christian mystics. He makes the point that Huxley wrote with an apparent naïveté about the 'worlds' he experienced and that he often assumed similarity or identity with the "Divine" states described is (say) the Hindu Upanishads or some of the late-medieval Christians. Aldous Huxley didn't directly state that he experienced union with God but it seems to me that he downplayed the idea of there being a Deity, when he didn't ignore it altogether. Zaehner seemed to me to have concluded that Huxley's homogenization (my word) of mystical states was gross and oversimplified. I should add that Professor Zaehner was man enough to give mescaline a try in 1955. His wasn't a pleasant trip and he came away unimpressed. Huxley wrote Heaven and Hell contra Professor Zaehner, but we are leaving these two writers for the sake of this review. Anyone who thinks that you can discover God with drugs ought to give Dr. Strassman's book a careful read.Some years later the Coptic language scholar Violet MacDermot published a two-volume anthology of texts penned by Syriac, Coptic, Armenian and (as I recall) Greek Christian mystics, all of whom had practiced meditative exercises and who had a variety of experiences. The books were published under the title, The Cult of the Seer in the Ancient Middle East in 1971. I no longer have these books, having given them away a decade or two ago, which is why I say that I 'recall' the contents of these volumes. The point which I wish to make here is that Professor MacDermot found Mr Huxley's ideas, distorted by Dr. Timothy Leary and now well-assimilated in the Western world of the late 1960s wherein these books originated, offensive to her sensitivities as a scholar who lives in the world of early Christianity's literature. She's still writing and has contributed enormously to the elucidation of the Coptic Gnostic texts known since the 1760s such as the Pisits Sophia and the trove of similar material discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. She was at pains to illustrate that the early Christian mystical practitioners had methods and goals, many of them quite clear-cut, about meditation which would hopefully lead the practitioner to an unitive experience with Christ. Like Professor Zaehner she elucidated the fact, often overlooked in over-simplifications such as Huxley's and certainly, Leary's, that such "union" was in fact dependent on God. Such a union was a gift, the grace of God. During the late 1970s when I began a second go-round of ingesting psychedelics with just that aim, to someday experience Nirvana, I found both of these books to be a thorn in my lysergic side and brushed them aside as being just so much ill-informed propaganda by the fuddy-duddy religious protagonists of Western spirituality. I often wrote so called Western Spirituality when friends would ask me to write about my experiences out there. So from roughly 1980 onwards I took occasional and hefty doses of various psychedelics, LSD, psilocybin, MDMA and a singular night under the influence of an overdose of dried Amanita Muscaria mushroom in early 2002.Fast forward to 2009. I'd finally gotten a copy of James Austin's massive Zen and the Brain. Austin is not a litterateur, although he knows the literature of mysticism as well as any scholar of this vast realm. He is by trade a neuroscientist and is more than qualified to compare experiences by Zen practitioners, including himself, to that which may be gleaned from the brain undergoing such extraordinary states via CAT scan, electroencephalograph and other tools of the modern brain researcher. He is very careful to repeatedly note that he himself has never experienced enlightenment or nirvana. One of his conclusions was that psychedelics did not ever cause someone to become enlightened and by this point, some 45 years after setting out on the Yellow Brick Road of acid, I was more than inclined to agree with him and retrospectively - somewhat - with the Professors Zaehner and MacDermot. After four and a half decades on said Yellow Brick Road, I was as far away from Oz as I was when I was but a tadpole of 14. I'll say it in slightly different words and I'm putting my 50+ years of tripping behind them: I do not know of any instance, public or private, where psychedelic drugs have caused a permanent and total transformation of a human being wherein traditional masters East and West would agree that either “Nirvana” or “Union with God” quote unquote had happened. I am not talking about the demonstrated therapeutic uses of cannabis, psilocybin, ibogaine, MDMA, LSD and mescaline; these things have been shown in clinical settings to be good in reducing post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). People with addictions have responded to ibogaine and LSD positively, so much so that some of them might be legitimately be pronounced cured. Nor am I talking about the fantastic “bliss-outs” which can occur under the influence of them. I can cite two instances in my own life. In the summer of 1980 I had taken a formidable amount of acid on splendid August night. The “setting” was near ideal and totally stress-free. Physically, or somatically, I felt marvelous and the music I was listening to seemed to carry me into another universe where all was praeternatural colored energy which bathed me in an overwhelming sense of peace. I'd not had anything like it before and it stayed with me......for maybe five days, then I was back to being my old goddam grump of a self. In 1996 I went with three friends to an isolated hilltop in southern New York and we all took a very pure MDMA. It was strong enough to render us wordless for the most part and as the sun started coming up we simultaneously began going on about how wonderful we each thought that the other three were and quickly declared our love for each other. Within 48 hours we all of us back-pedaled from our passionate declarations.Thus I am introducing my take on Dr. Rick Strassman's new book DMT and the Soul of Prophecy, subtitled a New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible, Park Street Press, Rochester 2014. I had read his earlier DMT: The Spirit Molecule (Park Street 2001) and his contribution to Inner Paths to Outer Space by him, Slawek Wojtowicz MD, Luis Eduardo Luna PhD and Ede Freckska MD (Park Street 2008) and had gotten in touch with him shortly after the Community went on line in April 2005. To our delight he responded to my initial e-mails affably. He is among our "Professional Associates," that is, someone with professional status as a writer or scientist with whom we've had occasional contact; and here I must point out that we have from the outset kept our promise to this small cadre that we will not ride on the professional coat-tails of their varied specialties and it is specifically here that I should add our disclaimer:Doctor Rick Strassman does not endorse the Outlands Community or its ideas as we posit them on the Internet and elsewhere.The book is easily described; in its pages he compares the data from his test subjects to whom he gave DMT in his research project from 1991 to 1995 with selected passages from the Old Testament of the Bible. This is an oversimplification of course, rather like saying that a Testarossa is an automobile. He first mentioned to me that he was working on it in 2012 and I was like a little kid who couldn't wait for their birthday. I ordered it from Amazon the day that it was published and actually got it a couple of days later. Silly old hippie that I am I tore right into it, thinking I'd have a firm handle on it and plow through it. About ninety pages out I had to stop ad take a break. My brain was hurting because I could plainly see the infinite care which wen into the making of it. What do you know about DMT or DMT research? What do you know about the Hebrew Old Testament of the Bible? What do you know about Dr. Rick Strassman? I know enough about the first two, in descending order, enough to be dangerous, as the saying goes. My knowledge of Rick Strassman as a person is whatever he has revealed of himself on the Internet and in our few e-mails over the years.I took DMT once in 1967, a friend of a friend gave me a shot in the comforts of his office in Greenwich Village; the fellow was a psychiatrist who'd been having a torrid relationship with one of my friends from high school and I had asked to give it a whirl. No sooner had he pulled the tourniquet lose from my left arm and the whole world exploded and disappeared into a shower of intense light and roaring, buzzing sounds. I was gone for about 30 minutes, they said. I remember thinking to myself, “Where's the mushroom cloud?” as lucidity returned. It was powerful; already illegal, that was the only time I'd ever gotten a chance to experience the stuff. I was okay, was able to go about being myself and doing what I did; but like all of the acid and other psychedelics which I'd done up until then, it became one more memory and left no marked change upon my personality. Like many of my peers I kept right on tripping until March of 1971. That year was a turning point for those of us in the psychedelic subculture. That's when the bubble irrevocably burst: bands became very rich, the Black Panthers were being destroyed by the US government, drugs were getting harder and harder to find, Richard Nixon was still his grinning evil self in the Oval Office, the war in Viet Nam showed no signs of stopping. One more thing happened: the grass-roots “Jesus Freaks” movement showed its face in my area and I succumbed to their sly terrorism. For most of March in that year I was tripping during the day and smoking hashish at night. One of my friends had come over, having been absent for most of the month and when we offered her the water pipe she declined. Asked why, she explained that she'd “found Jesus.” I snorted in disgust and she told me I was being narrow-minded, giving me two Bible tracts (small pamphlets designed to convert you to this perverse form of fundamentalist Christianity). I read them and was terror-stricken. Like many people of my generation I was raised to believe that the Bible was something than God had created long ago and of you were serious about wanting to go to heaven when you died, this was the place to turn. As it was I'd been reading it every day since I was ten, having gone through it numerous times before that eventful night. The tract explained, in a disingenuous and faulty manner, that the Bible taught that people who used drugs were going to burn in Hell. Later that night I went home and in the privacy of my room succumbed to the most violent evil hallucinations I'd ever had. Demons were peeking out of the mirrors in my room. In short, I flipped out. No acid that morning or afternoon, no marijuana once the sun went down. I lived with this terror for two months and finally confided to my best male friend that I was afraid that I was going to be struck by lightning. It turned out that he, too, had gone over to Jesus, and he literally spent a whole morning explaining and comforting me. Within a month I was attending a fundamentalist Baptist church and a few months later was baptized. Another few months and the three feet of hair that I wore was gone. I became a Sunday School teacher. The pastor of this church was very unusual. He recognized that I was a reader and he recommended that I not only learn the Bible, but about the Bible: “You know, it didn't pop out of the air, it grew out of a number of ancient cultures, Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syrian and the like.” With this as my goad I proceeded to do just that for the next 30 years. I became a competent amateur scholar of ancient literature, ranging from ancient Britain to Japan, as far back as the first cities which appeared in the archaeological record and forward into the Enlightenment.Among the books which I treasured were the works of those ancient Jewish writers who lived some 400 years before Christianity to well into the 18th century. Although subdivided into various strata and eras, this is all under the umbrella that you may have heard called, “Tradition.” You know, like the song Tevye sings in Fiddler on the Roof. The earliest strata originated in ancient Palestine and Egypt, literary works of pious Jewish writers who wrote with the aim of inculcating proper piety. Some of these works originated in an unusual community which had lived at the edge of the Dead Sea at a place now called Khirbet Qumran from roughly 300 BCE until the end of the first century CE. They were very austere and lived according to the laws of the Old Testament with a severity which has never been seen since. They had a goal. Palestine, rather their portion of it, had been occupied by foreign invaders, first the Greeks who followed on the heels of the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, then the Romans. The pious ascetics at the Dead Sea looked to the day when the would, with God's aid, kick the hated forces of Caesar out of the country. Then would be established the Kingdom of God on earth, a theme which had been around since the sixth century BCE. Revolutionary leaders kept appearing during this era and Jesus was one of them. Like Jesus they were all of them executed by the Romans. In the year 66 CE a complete revolution broke out and the Romans had to throw everything that they could at the Jewish insurrectionists. It wasn't until seven years later, with the taking of the hilltop fortress of Masada, that the fighting ended. Those Rabbis who survived no longer spoke of establishing a kingdom of God, rather, they went about explaining everything within the Hebrew canon of the Bible. From these first sages there appeared a body of literature, the Mishnah, in which was written the oral traditions of these sages; after the Mishnah came writings of later Rabbis who discussed the meaning of the Bible and the Mishnah; this was eventually put in written form some time during the 6th century CE and became known as the Talmud. This became a pattern, writers commenting on writers commenting on writers, until there was a vast corpus of literature consisting of hundreds of books and thousands of writers. The Mishnah and the Talmud were only loosely organized, being more like a series of discussions which one might imagine were written down as opportunity afforded. There were also two Greek-speaking writers whose works appeared at the cusp of the change of the eras from BCE to CE. Josephus was a general in the revolutionary army which had opposed the Romans in the war which began in 66. He was caught by the troops of the Roman general Vespasian and Josephus, brought before him, told Vespasian that he would be the next Caesar. Vespasian let him live and sure enough, when Nero was killed in 68, Vespasian was made the next Caesar. Whether out of gratitude or what, he gave Josephus a home in Rome. Josephus started to write and it is largely through his works that we know a good deal of what happened in Palestine from roughly 300 BCE until after the end of the wars. The other writer was named Philo and he was a native of Alexandria in Egypt, Philo was as at home with Greek philosophy and poetry as he was with the Hebrew Bible (although he often used a Greek translation of it called the Septuagint, which had been started some time after 300 BCE). He lived from some decades before the turnover from BCA to roughly 40 CE. To summarize them briefly, Josephus was a historian and Philo was a philosopher.Dr. Strassman chose some passages from the Hebrew Old Testament of the Bible which are written in a charged emotional language, all of them describing as best is possible visions of extraordinary power and vastness of scope. For example, Ezekiel, a prophet who lived, in the traditional reckoning, 622 – 570 BCE, was living in Babylon along with other Jewish captives who had been brought there by order of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II in 597 BCE. He writes:1 Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month, as I was among the captives by the river Chebar that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God. 2 In the fifth day of the month, which was the fifth year of king Jehoiachin's captivity, 3 the word of the LORD came expressly unto Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, in the land of the Chaldeans by the river Chebar; and the hand of the LORD was there upon him. 4 And I looked, and, behold, a stormy wind came out of the north, a great cloud, with a fire flashing up, so that a brightness was round about it; and out of the midst thereof as the color of electrum, out of the midst of the fire. 5 And out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: they had the likeness of a man. 6 And every one had four faces, and every one of them had four wings. 7 And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf's foot; and they sparkled like the color of burnished brass. 8 And they had the hands of a man under their wings on their four sides; and as for the faces and wings of them four, 9 their wings were joined one to another; they turned not when they went; they went every one straight forward. 10 As for the likeness of their faces, they had the face of a man; and they four had the face of a lion on the right side; and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four had also the face of an eagle. 11 Thus were their faces; and their wings were stretched upward; two wings of every one were joined one to another, and two covered their bodies. 12 And they went every one straight forward; whither the spirit was to go, they went; they turned not when they went. 13 As for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance was like coals of fire, burning like the appearance of torches; it flashed up and down among the living creatures; and there was brightness to the fire, and out of the fire went forth lightning. 14 And the living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning. 15 Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel at the bottom hard by the living creatures, at the four faces thereof. 16 The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the color of a beryl; and they four had one likeness; and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel within a wheel. 17 When they went, they went toward their four sides; they turned not when they went. 18 As for their rings, they were high and they were dreadful; and they four had their rings full of eyes round about. 19 And when the living creatures went, the wheels went hard by them; and when the living creatures were lifted up from the bottom, the wheels were lifted up. 20 Whithersoever the spirit was to go, as the spirit was to go thither, so they went; and the wheels were lifted up beside them; for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels. 21 When those went, these went, and when those stood, these stood; and when those were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up beside them; for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels. 22 And over the heads of the living creatures there was the likeness of a firmament, like the color of the terrible ice, stretched forth over their heads above. 23 And under the firmament were their wings conformable the one to the other; this one of them had two which covered, and that one of them had two which covered, their bodies. 24 And when they went, I heard the noise of their wings like the noise of great waters, like the voice of the Almighty, a noise of tumult like the noise of a host; when they stood, they let down their wings. 25 For, when there was a voice above the firmament that was over their heads, as they stood, they let down their wings. 26 And above the firmament that was over their heads was the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone; and upon the likeness of the throne was a likeness as the appearance of a man upon it above. 27 And I saw as the color of electrum, as the appearance of fire round about enclosing it, from the appearance of his loins and upward; and from the appearance of his loins and downward I saw as it were the appearance of fire, and there was brightness round about him. 28 As the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud in the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness round about. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that spoke. (Jewish Publication Society translation of 1917)Everything about this passage fairly screams, DMT! And there are some modern scholars who've dipped into the scented vat who postulate that Ezekiel and some of his compatriots did something with the local flora, perhaps making a brew similar to the South American shaman's drink ayahuasca. After all, the ingredient were to hand. However a major difficulty with this theory is that there is nowhere in the Old Testament where the making and taking of mind-blowing brews is even hinted. It may be that the citizens of Palestine and Babylon in those days knew of the transports available with cannabis and the opium poppy; but there is nothing in the Biblical text which directly confirms that either. As a veteran of cannabis use, I can tell you, nothing like Ezekiel's vision is likely to happen; and it is common knowledge that opium rarely yields anything of visionary status. Strassman has been proposing for decades now that the body will sometimes produce DMT in the pineal gland. The occasion for such an unusual phenomenon may include stress brought about by prolonged fasting, prolonged lack of sleep, sitting immobile for long stretches. In addition, “near-death-experiences” may involve the release of DMT into the bloodstream of a person dying. Although confirmation of these ideas has yet to happen, I would remind the reader that Rick Strassman has been working with DMT and people who have taken DMT for more than twenty years now; he is psychiatrist and a clinician. With the advent of better and better body-scanning technologies, proof for his thesis will not be long coming and will certainly arrive before evidence of Jewish prophets drinking the local version of ayahuasca.So, what is this fellow, this – prophet? In Hebrew he is one who “does Nabi,” that is, he utters things. As long ago as Thomas Paine it was noted that nabi as a verb and as a noun was tied to the spontaneous utterance of poetry or song. There were “bands of nabi” who moved throughout the ancient Israeli kingdom; Saul, the first king of Israel, fell in with one such group and he, too, “made nabi.” There are many nuances to the word but of primary import is the idea that the nabi is speaking for God. In Ezekiel's case, it's a dead cert that God got his attention that day.On a point-by-point, experience-by-experience basis Dr. Strassman compares the visions of Ezekiel and a number of the Hebrew prophets with those reported by his DMT subjects in his 1991 – 1995 study. His sensitivity as a therapist emerges early on in this comparison. During the years of the study, his subjects repeatedly told of meeting other beings in other dimensions, other galaxies. At first Strassman's reaction was a guarded “Uh-huh,” but the subtle doubts this introduced to the study and those taking the stuff began to produce guardedness on the part of the trippers. He had to suspend this doubting aspect as best he could so that the voyagers would report as fully as possible without having to work past his preconceived notions about what was real and what was “just hallucinations.” As a scientist he is committed to a monist view of the world and there is simply no room for other dimensions and insectoid creatures within it confines. This left him a predicament of sorts: his DMT subjects insisted that their experiences were real. How to reconcile this with his training as a scientist? In the years since 1995 he has consulted numerous physicists about this and it has been suggested that if there is a reality to these experiences the key to them may lie in dark matter, string theory and other niceties of quantum physics. There was a similar but different problem with the writings of the Hebrew prophets: all of them claimed to be speaking for God. Try telling an Ezekiel that his brain is producing DMT; and he or she will declare the more loudly, Thus saith the Lord. So......is there in fact, a God? Did He speak to Ezekiel and the others? Simply put, Strassman feels there may well be. However, we all of us, Jews, Muslims, Christians in the West, have piled a lot of baggage on that name, that entity God. Perhaps it is time to let God speak for Itself through the ancient nabi. In this Dr. Strassman has succeeded admirably. In psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud recommended that an analyst listen with a neutral, evenly-hovering attention to what the patient – the analysand – was saying. Strassman listened to his DMT subjects in this manner back in the 1990s and now he's done it again – with Ezekiel and with Ezekiel's interpreters from 570 BEC on. Ezekiel's vision here of a heavenly throne was taken up early by those who came after him. Whoever the Jewish sectaries who lived by the Dead Sea from at least 250 BCE to well after the rebellion in 66 CE had a commentary on this which was recovered as a part of the Dead Sea Scrolls. In Hebrew Ezekiel's experience is referred to as “the vision of the Throne,” or ha Merkavah. As detailed by the 20th century scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem (1897 – 1982), the visions of the Merkavah and how to experience them occupied many rabbis and sages for the entire period from Ezekiel's day down to the present.In this way – by suspension of judgment as befits a a therapist and a scientist – Strassman makes his case that while Ezekiel certainly qualifies as having an experience similar to those of his subjects, there are differences enough between the two sets of data, differences which may indicate some kind of presence in the universe of what for now we shall give the name given long ago to another fellow having a rather intense experience. His name was Moses and one day he saw a bush blazing with fire – but it was not consumed. Upon his coming closer, a voice spoke to him and declared that It was God. He told Moses a number of things which he, Moses, was going to do in the days ahead. Moses asked what God's name was and was answered, I shall be as I shall be.

If you aren't familiar with Dr. Strassman's work, don't start with this book. But, by all means start! This whole area is fascinating and important work. Even though Rick does devote a chapter to the work fully documented in his first book (DMT - The Spirit Molecule), I believe it is really important to view this work as volume III in an arc encompassing all three of his books. One grasps, in this way, that what we have here is a serious scientist/ seeker with a serious commitment to data, development of models / frameworks, and iteration... trial and error in a sometimes groping search for, if not the ultimate truth, something much better than the claim/counter-claim usually in this space. As has been well established, this sort of work requires real commitment and real courage.In part because of his courage, I believe that this stage of Rick's work will have very few fully sympathetic readers... as he is well aware (and as evidenced by some of the other reviews here). This book is unlikely to bolster any particular existing set of biases and thus is unlikely to get a 'must read' recommendation from either High Times or The Jewish Quarterly. Or anyone else grinding an old axe.A few points. First, we have the 'A data set' as represented by the DMT study. Second, we have the 'B data set' of the prophetic verses of the Hebrew Scripture. This is enough to generate many very interesting observations correlating these datasets without further need (in my mind) to answer 'if so, so what'... but this is ever on Rick's mind, so he goes on to discuss the revival of the Hebrew Scripture prophetic state by suggesting that the framing (theology, morality, logical method in parallel with medieval scholars), presumably to create the right set/setting for success. Further, Rick seems to suggest that broad acceptance of the 'prophetic results' would require language, morality, values that are derived from the Hebrew Scripture rather than some other source (he mentions Santo do Diame and the Native American Church as not sufficiently old or broadly accepted). I am not so sure of this myself. My own bias is that progress in broad acceptance is more likely to be generational (made in a Thomas Kuhnian style "one funeral at a time") with simultaneous evolutionary creation of something new, built on venerable foundations and lots of new experience/work rather than through a pharmo-technological revival of the age of prophecy, 600 BCE style. But by all means, let's conduct the experiment!Readers should be aware that a substantial trove of video interviews (with study participants) is available on Youtube. My favorite is:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Rhln28YJcg(or search youtube for: Patricio Dominguez high dose)Somehow this case highlights the fact that Rick explicitly high graded both the Hebrew Bible testimonies and his DMT cases to create the maximum sense of overlap... without mentioning the number or percentage or other cases of mismatch (other than acknowledging that they exist). I would consider this information very useful to have as well as the match cases. A breadth/depth thing, I guess.Another point to bear in mind is that Rick works with the text as-it-is in the case of Hebrew Bible, sidestepping the issue of the provenance of the particular words in the Prophetic texts. While I sympathize with the need to stay focused, I also would have liked at least a summary version of the issues that arise and the potential impact on the conclusions of this book/study. This is a minor grumble if one has any familiarity with this topic, but is pretty darn important to the serious seeker.There is a reported mismatch between the presence of a Divine aspect in the Hebrew Bible prophetic state vs. the DMT state... something that is material and subject to a range of testable (and non-testable) causes. Readers will need to work out a list of reasons for this mismatch for themselves. Meanwhile Rick homes in (I believe) on set / setting as the source of this gap and makes his proposal to get orthodox-oriented Jewish folk to take DMT to re-establish a prophetic situation here on earth... ambitious! It might work. But let's back up and cast the net a bit wider.I think there is a real possibility that a large population of new DMT experiment cases (involving 'suitably spiritually advanced' participants) will contain a sufficient number of cases with a Divine aspect so that a 'similar to what happened in Hebrew scripture' process can be applied (basically disregarding that which does not portray matters according to criteria 'evolved' into a narrative message) and generate similarly impressive self-consistency. This would be a great test... is the Hebrew Scripture (as a body of moral teaching and wisdom) reproducible? If so, well that's something really interesting.All in all, I am delighted at the progress that this book represents, and I am hopeful that Rick's researches will expand, including other mappings / correlations (his + Benny Shanon's + Robert Monroe's + William Buhlmann + Others) phenomenological data sets to (Hebrew Bible + New Testament (there are only a few examples here) + Sufi + Hindu + Buddhist + Others (Meister Ekhardt? Desert Fathers? Eastern Orthodox writings?)... the field is enormous and only just started, by this excellent work!

I thought that because the title has Hebrew Bible in it, that it would be more parallel to the Bible. I thought that it would shed some light on the mystery’s of the Bible. Or something like that. But I’m reading the first chapter, and it talks about some random guy named Leo who takes psychedelics and describes some weird trip, then the author compares Leo’s weird mind “trip” that makes NO sense, to the supernatural vision of Ezekiel from the Bible!And then the author takes his time trying to draw comparisons that aren’t there.I only just started the book. I hope that it gets better than this.

Entertaining and an amazing review of the Hebrew Bible as it relates to prophesy. Valuable comparisons are made between Hebrew prophetic experiences and DMT experiences.The major short-coming of the book is that Strassman attempts to compare a relatively small sampling of laboratory-based DMT experiences where the participants did not know each other, were not part of a larger, cultural community, were studied during a short time period, who had experiences that are not culturally embraced, to the Hebrew tradition of prophesy that spanned millennia and was culturally reinforcing in both set and setting. As such, Strassman's conclusion that the information gained from DMT experiences lack the more highly articulated, profound, and meaningful messages of the Hebrew prophets seems unfair and perhaps made in haste without giving our civilization a couple millennia of working with DMT the chance to catch-up. Having said that, Strassman offers interesting insights on how to potentially create more meaningful DMT experiences.

Calm down brothers and sisters it's all a matter of perspective the observer and The observed are both one and the same Rick and Terrence life within each other in real creatures living the dream of the imagination and that's an individual viewpoint

This is a very thought-provoking and interesting read. It does concentrate on the prophecy of the Hebrew Scriptures, so it you want to extrapolate - as I did - into other prophetic works from other scriptures, i.e. New Testament and other Sacred or Alternative Texts, that's up to you. I got the impression that it was largely aimed at Jewish readers, or Christians with a firm knowledge of the 'Old Testament' - stories and prophecies. There's also a 'given' which Rick Strassman assumes: that the prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures really happened as recorded (which I have often wondered about). Nevertheless, he had to start with that premise as it was the nature of HOW the reported prophecies arose through those who prophesied, rather than the explicit content of those prophecies which he compared with DMT experimental usage and the observed results. Can DMT be used as a means to elicit present-day prophecy? That's open to future experimentation. And if yes, for what purpose? Does 'prophecy' (not foretelling the future, just 'God' speaking to people for the good of humankind) have a place in today's world? Does prophecy have to be restricted to 'religious' or 'spiritually-minded' people, or can anyone hear that 'still small voice', as I believe is possible? Will DMT be usable as a conduit to enable the human mind to access, and/or commune more readily with, what I call the Higher Mind of the Creating/Sustaining Spiritual Force of the Universe (God)?

Great work by Rick, the book is well researched and very well presented. I am always looking forward to anything Rick does.

Very hard going too slow to get into.