DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible Paperback – September 18, 2014

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!

This book is a third significant contribution by Dr. Strassman toward understanding the mind-brain dichotomy. The noted mind-brain philosopher John Searle concludes one of his several books on this problem by pointing out that seven billion people have the subjective experience of a mind in addition to obviously having a physical brain. He argues that a common subjective experience of seven billion people is an objective fact of biology, so deal with it! Dr. Strassman has been dealing with it and doing so very well. His third book transports his research from the clinic to the very concrete, pragmatic, and historical world of the Hebrew Bible and its prophets. He demonstrates the similarity of these experiences by comparing the testimony of his DMT (dimethyltriptomine, a mild endogenous hallucinogen created by the pineal gland along with melatonin) research subjects with the testimony of the Hebrew prophets on their communications from a non-material realm and its spirit inhabitants, in particular YHWH. The experiences are remarkably similar with the exception of the message content, which was largely nil from his DMT subjects and remarkably rich and consistent over several centuries from the prophets. Dr. Strassman hypothesizes that the human brain may have been designed or perhaps evolved to receive messages from the spiritual world as prophecy, but without the individual’s call of prophecy and a received message, it is like a radio receiver not precisely tuned to a broadcast station and hence ‘hearing’ only static.So, perhaps Descartes’ Rationalist Dualist conjecture that the pineal gland was the portal between the mind and the brain, between the soul and the body, and hence between the spiritual world and the world of matter may after all be correct, and according to Dr. Strassman, certainly worthy of further scientific study. Most current scientific mind-brain research sees the mind as an epiphenomenon of measureable neural electrical activity in the brain, but the brain is an electro-chemical, biological ‘machine’ and seems to need DMT as part of its input to maintain its self-awareness.My favorite chapter in this book was the one on Kavod, the Glory of God. Dr. Strassman has garnered and classified the entire literary evidence on this topic from the Hebrew Bible; the evidence has been marshaled and is now ready for theory formulation. So, what think ye?

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.