The Mystery

This book is a highly readable, intriguing, provocative description of Rick Strassman’s theories and research concerning the effects of N, N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT)—a short-acting and powerful plant-derived psychedelic chemical that is endogenously produced in the human brain—and what its evolutionary and psychological function might be. In this intellectually courageous book, which reads more like a novel than a scientific text, Strassman, Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, recounts the history of psychedelic research; the bureaucratic labyrinth he had to navigate to begin the first clinical research with psychedelic substances approved by the Drug Enforcement Administration in more than 20 years; his methods and results (including case descriptions of what his volunteers encountered while taking the drug); the dangers of experimentation with psychedelics as well as possible beneficial effects; and speculations regarding the...

About 2300 years ago, the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tau dreamt of a butterfly. He got up in the morning and asked himself a question: “How would I know if I was Chuang Tzu dreaming of a butterfly — or if right now I’m a butterfly dreaming I’m a man named Chuang Tzu?”. French philosopher Rene Descartes, in his vision of understanding what’s real and what’s not, asked an interesting question through a Thought Experiment: “Is someone stimulating my brain in such a manner as to make me believe that I’m here and I’m touching the ground and seeing those people and hiring those sounds?”. Is that too much to ask from approximately 2,500 square centimeters of our brain? Scientists have been working on getting a better understanding of the functioning of our brain. We, as humans, have just managed to scrape though the surface. We work with finite number of neurons, which need to multitask all the time. This multitasking of neurons have their own issues, as we fail to register the reality as it ...

You talk about, again in your first book, about how cells automatically move away from toxicity, and towards nutrition. And it seems that, as human beings that’s something that we’re trying to do, but we get it wrong a lot of the time. We’re trying to move away from unhappiness, or what we think makes us unhappy and towards what we think makes us happy. But we get it muddled up don’t we? Well, yah.  But do you see… the key word you said there was “what we think makes us happy". I mean, I was caught in that whole daze too before I became aware I thought at one point, wow I’m going to buy that little… you know that car. I bought a car that looked like a Ferrari called a Pantera back in the 70s. And I thought, “Okay I’m going to be happy, I got this great car.” So I got the car and about three days later it’s like, “Now I got this car, and I’m not any happier and as a matter of fact I got three speeding tickets every day I took the car out, because of course I couldn’t go 30 miles an...

Something else you talk about in the book, which I found quite fascinating, was the placebo effect and the nocebo affect. It’s funny because a lot of people understand what the placebo effect is. And what is it? It’s interesting because medical science has revealed that from one-third to two-thirds, which is significant, of all healing, whether it’s drug related, or surgery, or whatever healing process, the healing didn’t come about form the process. The healing came about because the person believed the process was going to heal them. So if I gave you this brand new drug, and it’s purple colored, because that makes it really special you know. And it’s funny because there is a drug, a purple drug, and they said “It’s purple” and everybody’s like, “That’s got to be real special!” But people believe that the drug holds this effect. And you give a person this drug, all the sudden they themselves say, “Yah the drug did it.” And then you tell them later, it was just a sugar pill and that he...

One of the things that I really found fascinating in your book, is the fact that we all have approximately 50 trillion cells in our body and these cells are all self-sufficient. They have their own memory, they have their own immune system. In fact, you also go on to say that for 2.75 billion years, there was only one-celled organisms alive on the planet. Yah, and the nature is, as the single cell evolved to be the most intelligent it could be, it ran into a physical limitation, because intelligence is physically tied up with the membrane, or skin of the cell.  You can only have so much membrane. So evolution apparently stopped. It was like two and a half billion years, just these single-celled organisms, then someone asked “How can you have more evolution?"  And the answer is: cells started to come together into community, because when cells come into community they share awareness. So there’s more awareness with ten cells than there is with one cell. And there’s more awarene...

Well, the first thing is this; the work shows that your mind’s perception of the world changes your biology, the chemistry of your body, which changes your cells. And I said OK, if you can control how your mind operates, then you can control your chemistry, but then here’s where the problem comes from: there’s two parts to the mind. The conscious mind, which has your personal identity, your spirit, your source attached with it – is a creative mind. The conscious mind can see into the future, it can review the past; solve problems. The subconscious mind, the other mind, is more of a habit mind. That’s when you learn how to do something; and when you learn how to do it, you don’t have to think about it, it’s automatic. Well, most of us walk around in the world thinking that we’re running our lives with our creative mind. I might say, “Emmett, what do you want out of your life?” And you would say, “Oh I want to be healthy and have great relationships” and then you would try to say that ‘I...

So you eventually became a biologist. What did you actually learn then?  Well it was interesting because I became a biologist, a developmental cellular biologist, I was working on cells of course then, and in my graduate work I was cloning stem cells. And it’s interesting because a lot of people think stem cells are something brand new that just came into this world recently; and the fact was I was cloning stem cells back in 1967. Forty years ago.  And the significance was - while I was doing this research - I was also teaching medical students.  So I was teaching medical students the foundations of how cells work, the conventional story out of the text book. Genes control life, what we call the ‘genetic determinism’, the belief that genes control your traits, behavior(s), physical characteristics, et cetera.  And what my research revealed when I was studying the stem cells was this, very profound: I put one stem cell in a petri dish all by itself and it would divide...