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The Path to DMT

Psychedelic Drugs, Meditation, and the Pineal Gland

The notion of Hebrew Bible prophecy as a model for the DMT experience, and for the Western psychedelic drug experience in general, started forming in my mind several years after completing my drug studies in the mid-1990s. That research project represented the culmination of a decades-long interest in the biology of spiritual experience that began during my undergraduate training in the late 1960s. In these next two chapters, I trace the impetus for my research; its intellectual, biological, personal, and spiritual backdrops; the data that the project generated; and how those data forced me to search outside my preexisting models for more adequate ones. That search ultimately led to the Hebrew Bible and its notion of prophecy.

ALTERED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS: EAST MEETS WEST

During the middle of the twentieth century, two powerful mind-altering technologies burst upon the West. One came from the West itself and the other from Asia. Both provided reliable and widely accessible methods for profoundly altering human consciousness. The Western side of this coin brought forth the psychedelic drugs, especially LSD. The other produced Eastern meditation practices, particularly those of Hinduism and Buddhism.*14

Psychedelic Drugs

The term psychedelic means “mind-manifesting” or “mind-disclosing.” When it qualifies the word drug, it refers to a family of chemical compounds that regularly occasion a unique constellation of psychological effects. These effects include seeing visions; hearing voices and other information-bearing sounds; feeling intense emotions, both positive and negative; experiencing unusual thought processes and novel insights; and undergoing changes in the sense of self.

Several other names exist for these substances, examples of which are LSD, mescaline from peyote cactus, psilocybin from “magic” mushrooms, and DMT. The traditional medical-legal term is hallucinogen, although this is overly restrictive because these drugs do not routinely cause hallucinations. Psychotomimetic (mimicking psychosis) inordinately emphasizes serious psychopathology and ignores these drugs’ reinforcing and sought-after qualities. We rarely encounter the term today. The more recent entheogen, meaning “generating divinity from within,” also is too exclusive for general use because it implies a belief in spirituality that not everyone shares, and it refers to a particular type of experience that not everyone undergoes.

I prefer the term psychedelic because it casts the widest possible net for the range of effects these substances elicit. They nearly invariably reveal to the mind previously invisible processes and contents. At the same time, the term subsumes the highly complex and variable responses they bring about, beatific or horrific, insightful or confusing. While psychedelic has accumulated a significant amount of cultural baggage from the divisive and chaotic 1960s, it also is the most flexible and inclusive term. For that reason, I have decided to use it, rather than pejorative or overly restrictive ones.*15

LSD originated in the modern European pharmaceutical laboratory in the 1940s2 and was one of the three legs of the scientific tripod upon which scientists erected the edifice of modern biological psychiatry, or human psychopharmacology, the preeminent model for understanding mental function and the treatment of psychiatric disorders. Another leg of this tripod was the nearly simultaneous synthesis of the antipsychotic medication Thorazine (chlorpromazine). The third was the discovery of the presence and LSD-like properties of the neurotransmitter serotonin.†16

Eastern Meditation

Ancient East Asian religious traditions were the source of the multitude of meditation techniques that flooded the West at nearly the same time as did the psychedelic drugs. Hinduism and Buddhism had received some Western attention during the early 1900s; however, it was not until the psychedelic drugs had unleashed a massive level of public interest in altered consciousness that Eastern religious meditation practices began assuming their current level of popularity. The Beatles initiated an interest in Transcendental Meditation, a Hindu spiritual practice originating in India, after their “psychedelic” phase, and American West and East Coast academics and counter-cultural figures also popularized Buddhism, especially Japanese Zen Buddhism.

It did not take long for similarities between descriptions of psychedelic drug effects and those resulting from the practice of meditation to become apparent. For example, here are representative verses of an ancient Buddhist text:

There were banners of precious stones, constantly emitting shining light and producing beautiful sounds. . . . The finest jewels appeared spontaneously, raining inexhaustible quantities of gems and beautiful flowers all over the earth. There were rows of jewel trees, their branches and foliage lustrous and luxuriant. 3

I found the psychedelic qualities of accounts of meditation such as these intriguing and puzzled over their implications. I began considering how resemblances between the effects of psychedelic drugs and meditation might reflect the action of common underlying biological mechanisms in both states. When the phenomenology of the two sets of subjective experiences resembled each other, one could propose similar alterations in brain activity. This idea contained practical applications as well. Did psychedelic drugs provide a shortcut to success in Buddhist meditation? Did Buddhist meditation represent a non-drug method for entering into psychedelic states?

PERSONAL FACTORS

While I was considering how to bridge psychedelic psychopharmacology and the effects of Buddhist meditation, I decided to learn more about meditation firsthand and explored various options before settling on Zen Buddhism. Up until then, my religious background consisted of a relatively ordinary Jewish upbringing within a Conservative Jewish*17 household. During the six supplemental hours per week of Jewish education I received from the age of five to thirteen, we studied the Hebrew language; learned about Jewish history, culture, and festivals; and read from the Hebrew Bible. However, we learned little about God other than His historical involvement with the Jewish people over the millennia. Direct spiritual experience and the methods to attain it were not part of our curriculum. While Hebrew prayers were a large part of the Saturday Sabbath synagogue service, their recitation seemed rote and passionless. After my bar mitzvah at age thirteen, lacking any intellectual, emotional, or spiritual connection with Judaism, I drifted away from it.

In addition to Buddhism’s entrance into popular culture, academic courses in Buddhist studies were just beginning to form when I was an undergraduate student. I was fortunate to be attending Stanford University at a time of unprecedented growth in the scholarly study of Buddhism. The stimulus for this growth was government funding for research attempting to explicate the role of Buddhism in the Vietnam conflict. Highly publicized politically disruptive acts, such as self-immolation by protesting Buddhist monks, baffled the U.S. Department of State and the Department of Defense. As a result, money soon began flowing to American universities to establish a Department of Buddhist Studies to help the American government understand this mysterious religion. Nancy Lethcoe, a newly minted Doctor of Philosophy in Buddhist Studies, joined the faculty at Stanford, and I took her class on Indian Buddhism in 1972.

Buddhism intellectually and emotionally stirred me as very few things had before. In addition, it represented a time-tested tradition that integrated and applied highly altered states of consciousness into one’s life. To the extent that meditational and psychedelic drug states resembled each other, one could consider Buddhism as a model for how to live a more consistently “psychedelic” everyday life.

I was not alone in this belief. Countless Western men and women have begun Buddhist practice after first using psychedelic drugs.4 Both psychedelic drugs and meditation elicit states of consciousness that point toward an enlightened state of mind: one in which time, space, and personal identity do not exist; opposites reconcile seamlessly; and death no longer holds any sting.*18 The memory of and longing for that glimpse of enlightenment pushes and draws them along the Buddhist path, a path seemingly unavailable in their own culture.

After learning Transcendental Meditation and visiting a number of Hindu and Buddhist centers in the United States, I began Buddhist practice within a Zen†19 order in my early twenties. I quickly found confirmation within that religious community of my ideas about the relationship between Buddhism and psychedelics. Among the dozens of its young members, nearly everyone had his or her first intimation of enlightenment‡20 during a psychedelic drug experience, usually with LSD. These monks and laypeople then found in Zen a model for living a spiritual life that was consistent with the insights they had obtained from their psychedelic drug experiences.

The Japanese term for the Zen meditation practice I learned is shikan taza, which roughly means “just sitting.” It involves directing attention to what is taking place both within one’s mind and body as well as in the external world in as continuous and focused a manner as possible. Deceptively simple, but difficult in practice, the sustained and energetic application of this technique is capable of leading to a direct apprehension of the bases of experience, and ultimately, of the nature of phenomenal existence itself. From this basic meditation technique and resulting states of consciousness emerges all of Buddhism.

THE PINEAL GLAND AND CONSCIOUSNESS

After establishing a meditation practice and finding a spiritual community with whom I could study and train, I began accumulating information and formulating ideas within an academic context regarding the relationship between biology and spirituality. In doing so, I took a slightly different approach than scientists at that time.

Academic research into the biology of meditation in the 1960s and 1970s never considered a possible role for endogenous psychedelic substances. Rather, researchers chose to examine less controversial topics, such as changes in brain waves and indicators of stress, including adrenaline metabolism and blood pressure.6

Scientists who were examining the relationship between endogenous psychedelic substances and non-drug altered states similarly overlooked those resulting from meditation. Instead, they focused on psychoses, in particular schizophrenia. In both the psychotic and psychedelic drug state, one hears and sees things that others do not, self- and body-image change radically, and thoughts lead to highly unconventional and unshakeable conclusions. Researchers hypothesized that drugs blocking the effects of LSD might similarly block psychotic symptoms, based on the idea that the two syndromes reflected the workings of the same biological processes. In other words, if there were an endogenous LSD-like substance causing psychosis, blocking LSD might block that endogenous substance’s psychotomimetic effects. Naturally, DMT dominated researchers’ interest because it was the only known endogenous psychedelic whose biological and psychological effects had been characterized at the time.

My approach instead was to consider the possibility that the body synthesized a compound with psychedelic properties that produced highly prized spiritual experiences, rather than highly maladaptive psychotic experiences. And rather than proposing that meditation influenced brain waves or stress hormones that were relatively remote from the immediate subjective state, I wondered whether a hypothetical “spirit molecule” directly occasioned the meditational experiences themselves. In the same vein, it seemed possible that this compound mediated the subjective elements of other nonpsychotic, non-drug-induced altered states such as dream sleep and the effects of fasting and prayer.

Where in the body might this spirit molecule arise? In my search for its origin I was led to the pineal gland by another Stanford mentor, Jim Fadiman. The pineal gland, a tiny organ sitting deep within the recesses of the human brain, has been for millennia an object of great interest to several systems of “esoteric physiology,” including Hinduism and Judaism. Even the rationalist Descartes referred to the pineal gland as the “seat of the soul,” the conduit between the human and spiritual worlds. Consistent with a role for the pineal gland in consciousness, its location in the brain is ideal for affecting visual and auditory pathways, as well as for releasing secretions into the cerebrospinal fluid that continually bathes the entire brain.*21 Most intriguing, I learned that the pineal gland contains the precursors and enzymes necessary for the synthesis of endogenous psychedelics such as 5-methoxy-DMT†22 and DMT.‡23

Right after I completed my clinical and research training early in the 1980s, I was not in a position to embark directly on a human psychedelic drug study. Fortunately, at that time we understood very little about melatonin, the most well-known product of the pineal gland. Some research even alluded to it possessing significant psychoactivity. Therefore, I decided to initiate my search for a biological basis of spiritual experience with the pineal gland and launched the most thorough investigation of melatonin’s effects in humans to date.

At the end of this two-year project, we discovered relatively modest physiological functions for melatonin, but no psychedelic effects, even at rather high doses. I needed to look elsewhere than melatonin in my search for an endogenous psychedelic substance. By this time I had established myself as a successful clinical research scientist and also had learned a great deal about previous investigators’ findings regarding DMT. It seemed a good time to design and implement a study with this truly psychedelic endogenous compound.

WHAT DMT IS

DMT, or dimethyltryptamine, is the simplest “classical” psychedelic. This family of compounds also includes LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline. While the duration of their effects differs, they all occasion similar subjective effects and share nearly identical pharmacological properties. DMT is a strikingly small and simple molecule. Its molecular weight, the sum of the weights of all its individual atoms, is only slightly greater than that of glucose, or blood sugar. DMT is the product of several biological modifications of dietary tryptophan, the same amino-acid building block with which melatonin and serotonin synthesis begins. While scientists knew of DMT’s presence in psychedelic plants as early as the 1940s, it was not until the mid-1950s that we learned that DMT itself was profoundly psychedelic.8

DMT is widespread throughout the plant kingdom. Hundreds, if not thousands, of species possess it, a unique abundance of which exist in Latin America. Many indigenous cultures in this region use DMT-containing plants for their psychedelic properties in healing, recreation, hunting, and spiritual practice.9 The increasingly popular Amazon psychedelic tea ayahuasca contains DMT as its visionary ingredient.*24 DMT also occurs in every mammal that scientists have studied, including humans.10

The discovery of endogenous DMT in humans in the 1960s initiated a wave of provocative research attempting to determine an association between DMT and psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia using the psychotomimetic model. While results were inconclusive before the first wave of human research with psychedelics ended in 1970, they did confirm DMT’s psychedelic properties and established that it was physically and psychologically safe when administered to healthy volunteers.

DMT possesses certain unique features among the psychedelics that make it particularly intriguing. One is that it seems essential for normal brain function. I say this because of data indicating that DMT is one of the few compounds for which the brain will exert energy to get into its confines. The blood-brain barrier prevents most endogenous and exogenous substances from entering the brain from the bloodstream. However, compounds the brain requires but cannot synthesize on its own receive special treatment, such as glucose for fuel and certain amino acids for protein synthesis. DMT is another such compound.11 If DMT were necessary for brain function, it would explain this startling finding and suggest a critical role for DMT in the regulation of human consciousness.

More recently, we have learned how mammals synthesize endogenous DMT, and it appears that lung tissue is the major site for its production in rabbits12 and humans.13 Researchers have identified the gene responsible for the enzyme that finalizes DMT synthesis. After inserting the human gene into a virus and infecting mammalian cells with that virus, those cells begin producing DMT.14

Human research with DMT, and with all other psychedelic drugs, ceased with the enactment of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 in the United States and comparable laws elsewhere.*25 While scientists had discovered a highly promising avenue of inquiry, it had yet to attain the level of maturity that comes from unrestricted study of the relevant phenomena. For example, scientists had not yet developed sensitive enough technology to determine whether differences existed in DMT levels between normal and psychotic people. We knew nearly nothing about ayahuasca. And there was no consideration of the possible role of endogenous DMT in spiritual experience.