http://realitysandwich.com/voyaging_dmt_space_with_dr_rick_strassman_md

from a large and awesome interview with Rick Strassman regarding his work and latest book.

It was obviously hard to come up with a model, at least in my mind, at least with what I knew at the time, to really be able to accept and hold and take the stories that people were telling me, and come up with a theory that I could live with scientifically and personally and ones that would make sense to the volunteers. I just started off with the most gross explanations and worked up from there when those got rejected. The grossest explanation is obviously that of the brain - this is your brain on drugs - you give people DMT their brain does this - this is why people where having these entity contact experiences.

But every explanation that I tried fell on fairly much deaf ears on the part of the volunteers. They either rejected the ideas about this being a brain on drugs, or the other approach that I was taking that was pretty much a psychological approach - these were unexpressed dreams or impulses or drives or motivations to be special or to belong or to have exciting experiences - kind of the Freudian approach. So when that didn't work, I tried to learn as much as I could as fast as I could, in terms of what Jung had said about UFOs and aliens, so I tried using those models or explanatory systems to kind of encompass people's experiences. That didn't work. I tried the more generic approach of interpreting what they were experiencing as dreams, but that didn't work either.

I tried and discarded various levels of interpretation until I finally just figured I'll just start to do an experiment assuming that what people are undergoing is real and that indeed they are experiencing or making contact with real, externally verifiable, discrete, freestanding sorts of beings. This is what they're saying and this is what they're doing and this is what is going on between them and the volunteer.

What happened as a result of that is that people became a lot more comfortable in sharing with me the full range of their experiences. I stopped fighting and trying to pigeonhole a round peg into a square hole - trying to fit their experiences with the theoretical constructs that I was stuck with. I think as a result of my change in attitude or approach that I was getting deeper and richer reports from people about what was going on. But still, as a scientist, I'm into mechanisms of action and when I started to write the book, I started to hunt around for scientific models that might encompass free-standing, sentient, independently existing, outside just one's mind, explanations for what people were undergoing.

So even though I'm no expert on quantum physics or any of the more far-out psychedelic views of cosmology, I did learn a little bit of this phenomena that is known as dark matter, which is non-visible matter that neither generates light nor reflects light, but still makes up 95% or more of the mass of the universe. It seemed to me that if it makes up that much mass of the universe, it could very well be inhabited, and it would just be a question of changing the receiving characteristics of consciousness through chemical changes that occurred with DMT to be able to perceive things that were normally not perceivable. And there are plenty of examples of that in everyday reality - I mean, with a microscope we can see tiny things we couldn't see normally - with a telescope we can see things very far away we can't see normally, with ultraviolet sensors we can see things that we can't normally see - so the only difference, maybe from a philosophical point of view, is that the change in our receiving powers are not tied in with a machine - they're more in our subjective/receptive consciousness rather than with a piece of metal and electricity and glass and things that can magnify or somehow change the things that we're capable of seeing.

So it's a bit of a stretch, but I don't think it's completely that crazy. The main thing that prevents further movement along the model that I'm talking about is just the verifiability between two people - like can two people see the same thing at the same time - like if you have two people looking through the same microscope at the same time, they can pretty much see and describe the same thing - but is it possible for two people to take DMT at the same time, or not even at the same time, and be able to see the exact same thing?

I don't think that we're going to come to the answers either through science or through religion. I think it's going to be some kind of hybrid. Science is a bit too constrained in the model building, and most religions are too constrained through the maintenance of their institution at the expense of the truth. As a rule, if you can establish the veracity of your findings through science, it's believed. It isn't excluded necessarily because someone disagrees with your findings. So I think it will require some kind of hybrid of scientific religion or spiritual science to be able to take into account the entire range of the phenomenon, the ethical implications that's available and also maintain the peer review and the cross-checking of your findings that occurs within the scientific model. Yeah - so it's pretty out there. It's kind of a large view and if I get one half of one percent done before I die, I'll feel pretty good about that.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/opinion/13brooks.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

i've been harping (along with plenty of others) along this general tack for years now, and am glad to see this viewpoint popularized and mainstreamed.

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment. Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real. This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.

If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion.

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

http://filmtalks.socialka.net/post/2007/10/09/the-life-of-buddha/

BBC documentary on the life of Guatama Buddha.

http://www.alterati.com/blog/?p=1442

and a commentary on as well as full length video of the movie Blueberry, a psychedelic Western with Juliette Williams, Ernest Borgnine and Eddie Izzard among others. there's also a pretty good documentary on Amazonian shamanism by the same director.

http://www.dudeism.com/

a site devoted to the Dude's spiritual tradition. i've done some writing on this in the past, and have been a practicing Dudeist for quite some time, but this is the first time i've seen the philosophy given its own cult and website. far out.

What makes a dude?

Is it being prepared to do nothing at all? Whatever the price? Isn't that what makes a dude? Of what value is achievement, competitors bested, obstacles overcome? Strong men also get high. Strong men also get high.

Astute readers and fans of the cult film The Big Lebowski will note that the above is a shameless reworking of one of its scenes. In the original, a wealthy old cripple posits “What makes a man?” and expounds on his achievements and a lifetime of moralistic rigor. The charge he is addressing, a washed-out ex hippie who goes by the name “The Dude” smokes a joint and concludes that all that makes a man is simply “a pair of testicles.”

Yet, though The Dude’s philosophy runs deeper than that, it is simply not his habit to impose his assertions upon the world, nor the lifestyles people have chosen, least of all his own. He neither judges the corrupt old man nor takes umbrage at his condescension. As he will say later, in response to a tongue-lashing offered by a purple-clad pedophilic bowler, “Well, that’s just, ya know, like, your opinion, man.” The Dude is a pacifist, though not only that, for pacifism is a political stance. He is the 1960s peace symbol in human form – tarnished, a bit dated, but still the chubby anti-Mercedesian ideal upon which many once hung their hopes for the future. Moreover, he is the torch-bearer in a long tradition of Dudeism that has been handed down through the ages, a spiritual heir of such luminaries as Lao Tzu, Heraclitus, and Charlie Brown’s dog Snoopy. After riding the movie’s manic rollercoaster of reversals and revelations, our hero offers up his last, unflappable adage: “The Dude Abides.” But against the terminal upheavals of mankind’s history, true dudes have always abided. The reason for this is plain: Life is full of strikes and gutters. So fuck it, let’s go bowling.

http://dreamflesh.com/essays/dionysusrisen/

an essay dealing with the strongly alienating dualistic mind/body split inherited from Christianity which still pervades our culture. it discusses how the prevailing mythical structure of a culture reflects its worldview, and how the separation of mind/spirit/good/light/reason and body/matter/bad/dark/sensation was mirrored in the forking of one integrated dying-and-rising god into the sharply divided Jesus and Satan. a sort of "marriage of heaven and hell" is a metaphor for the solution to this state, as are androgynous Dionysus, and his mother, the Goddess. the piece samples mysticism, gnosticism, paganism, buddhism, Blake, Nietzsche, LaVey, McKenna and more.

Christianity has taken the dying-and-rising godform and split it in two. One half is an ethereal, goody-goody shell; the other a virile beast, dwelling beneath the ground we walk on and utterly evil; both at war with each other. Redemption in Christianity is a puny cop-out. Their god is a man stripped of what we feel guilty about, all sex and visceral energy thrown into a reviled scapegoat called Satan.

If the West is to begin to heal this split, we must re-fuse these elements, and rediscover the whole. And as we experience the flesh and spirit coming together in the true body, so we must experience the union of Satan and Christ in a living archetype, a true dying-and-rising god, embodying the life and death of biological existence.