9
Overview
One of the theses of this book is that similarities between the DMT state and Hebrew Bible prophecy reflect similar underlying mechanisms. We therefore first need to determine how close the resemblances are between the two sets of experiences. In part III, which makes up the largest part of this book, I will present a thorough description of the prophetic experience, comparing and contrasting it with reports from my DMT volunteers. DMT excerpts that originally appeared in my book DMT: The Spirit Molecule are cited as (DMT, pg), whereas those appearing here for the first time have no citation.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
When writing a scientific paper, authors divide the manuscript into several sections. One of these is “materials and methods.” Materials are who or what constitute the source of the experimental data. Are research subjects humans or rats? If rats, what strain? If humans, what are their gender and age? Materials also include the variables you are measuring, such as blood hormone levels or the accuracy with which an animal runs through a maze. Methods are how the authors collect and analyze the data that they gathered. How did they measure those hormone levels or the accuracy of maze running? In addition, methods refer to the statistical treatment of the data, which indicates whether the results are due to chance or the experimental intervention itself.
Materials
Prophetic figures and DMT volunteers are the “subjects” of this study. The data they provide are their accounts of the prophetic and DMT states. These two sets of individuals and their narratives are not entirely comparable. In the case of the DMT research, I was present in the room in our General Clinical Research Center with the volunteers. I knew many of these men and women quite well, especially the first set of subjects. We shared culture, psychology, and understanding of the context of their drug sessions. I closely observed, supervised, and monitored their sessions, and carefully interviewed them immediately after the drug effects had worn off.
The “clinical data” I will use for articulating the prophetic state of consciousness, on the other hand, are reports from the Hebrew Bible of men and women who lived thousands of years ago in the ancient Near East: present-day Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq. The altered state they entered was not the result of “drug administration” but “prophecy” coming upon them. They possessed vastly different psychology, language, culture, and worldview than the research subjects; that is, vastly different sets and settings.*52 I never met nor spoke with them at any time before, during, or after their prophetic experiences.
Nevertheless, I believe that the prophetic figures and the DMT volunteers have more in common than not. The Hebrew Bible paints those whose prophetic experiences it records as being similarly fleshand-blood individuals with their own lives, and their own fears and hopes for themselves, their families, and their larger community. As did the DMT volunteers, they also wrestle with how to understand and articulate what has happened to them by virtue of having entered into these other worlds.
Methods
When setting out to compare the prophetic and DMT states, I quickly realized I could employ tools I already had developed from my DMT research. These were the categories of subjective experience I used in constructing the Hallucinogen Rating Scale, which quantified phenomenological elements of the drug effect. These categories, what we called “clinical clusters,” are more or less separable functions of consciousness we constructed using Buddhist psychological and clinical psychiatric models.1
These clinical clusters are:
I began “binning” Hebrew Bible verses that referred to any spiritual—that is, prophetic—experience it records into these categories. When Jeremiah, for example, complains of abdominal pain during his prophetic state, I placed that verse into the somatic category. In the case of Ezekiel’s vision containing rapidly moving and brightly colored angelic beings, I binned that verse into the perceptual category.*55
BEINGS
The appearance and behavior of beings in the Hebrew Bible, as well as their relationship with those apprehending them, share many features with those we find in the DMT state. In the chapters that follow, I compare the characteristics of the two sets of beings using the categories I have just discussed. For example, prophetic and DMT beings look and sound a certain way; possess and effect particular emotional qualities; and demonstrate will, intellect, and awareness. Just as compelling, if not more so, are the interactions that take place between the beings and those who perceive them. This property was so striking that it led me to develop an additional category with which to compare the DMT and prophetic states: “relatedness.”
RELATEDNESS
In the course of binning scriptural examples of the prophetic state into the aforementioned five mental clusters, I began sensing that I was ignoring a major property of the state. On further reflection, I noted that the missing factor also existed in the DMT experience, but I hadn’t felt its absence as sharply when analyzing those results, perhaps due to my original preoccupation with the unitive-mystical Zen enlightenment experience. This category is that of relatedness and concerns the nature of the interactions between the beings and those perceiving them. Examples include healing, harming, guarding, and most important, communicating information.
Relatedness provided a new metric by which I could now compare and contrast the DMT and prophetic states. As will become clear, it has helped me generate additional evidence supporting my contention that the Hebrew Bible’s interactive-relational model of prophecy is a more suitable model for the DMT experience than is Buddhism’s unitive-mystical one.
COMPARING MESSAGES
In the prophetic experiences of the canonical prophets, the phenomenology of their visions almost always is less important than the information they convey. We see this in how often someone introduces the prophetic experience simply by stating that he or she “received the word of God” and describes no associated visual or other perceptual features. In contrast, the DMT experience was generally message-poor and phenomenology-rich. This finding required that I switch my frame of reference when constructing message categories for the two states.
What I mean by this is that the DMT experience was my frame of reference when I compared the two states’ phenomenology. I binned prophetic excerpts into my well-established DMT categories of perception, cognition, and others. However, when comparing the two sets of experiences’ message content, the more highly developed, complex, and sophisticated prophetic message forced me to reverse this process. I first developed message categories through analyzing the prophetic message and then binned DMT excerpts into them. For example, the Hebrew Bible’s Golden Rule suggests that we love our fellow as we love ourselves and is therefore an “ethical” message. If one of the DMT research subjects described having come to a realization of something akin to the Golden Rule during his or her session, I binned that comment into the same “ethical” category into which I placed the Golden Rule.
It is because of this different frame of reference that I will vary how I present the prophetic and DMT excerpts when comparing their messages. Instead of beginning with examples of specific phenomenological categories from my DMT volunteers and following with biblical ones, I will explicate the biblical message categories first, provide scriptural examples, and then present corresponding excerpts from the DMT volunteers.
THE APPROACH OF THE MEDIEVAL JEWISH PHILOSOPHERS
I was surprised by the medieval Jewish commentators’ relative lack of assiduousness in articulating a unique state of prophetic consciousness. At the same time, I was gratified because this provided an opportunity for me to approach prophecy in an innovative manner. Most of our authors define prophecy simply as apprehending God or His angels.2 This approach to characterizing the prophetic state contrasts with the greater emphasis we find in handbooks for practitioners of kabbalistic meditation, who needed guidelines for gauging their progress toward union with God.*56 Those benchmarks consist of specific alterations in consciousness, which kabbalistic authors analyzed in much finer detail than did the medieval commentators.3
Maimonides does list some features of the prophetic state; for example, feelings of energy and inspiration, and whether the experience occurs while awake or asleep. However, his primary contribution to the phenomenology of prophecy consists of constructing a prophetic hierarchy.4 He draws on certain elements of prophetic experience to establish one’s prophetic rank, instead of using those elements to establish a more value-free purely descriptive catalog. He takes this stance in part because of his desire to maintain—especially in the face of his controversial scientific approach to prophecy—Moses’s rank as the greatest of all the Hebrew prophets. This is critical for his own project because he must maintain the inviolability of Mosaic law within normative Judaism, whose leader he was at the time.
As an example of these contrasting approaches, Maimonides points to the floridly psychedelic nature of Ezekiel’s visions as evidence that his level of prophecy was lower than Moses’s, in whom the medium is nearly entirely verbal. My analysis of Ezekiel’s prophetic experiences refers to their possessing certain visual, somatic, emotional, and auditory properties that overlap with those of the DMT state. Maimonides also suggests that Abraham’s dread during his nighttime vision (Gen. 15:12) reflects a lower level of prophecy than Moses’s, because the latter usually did not experience fear when communicating with God. By contrast, I refer to Abraham’s dread as an emotional feature of his prophetic experience, comparable to that which sometimes swept over the DMT volunteers.