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Old 04-01-2010, 06:41 PM   #1
Irving
Avalon Senior Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2008
Posts: 71
Default DMT and altered states of consciousness

I am currently reading Dr. Rick Strassman's DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Very interesting read.

For anybody who is unfamiliar with the book and Strassman's work, it is essentially about his professional inquiry into the psychedelic effects of DMT in over 60 volunteers between the years of 1990 and 1995.

It is the only government approved study to ever have been performed and it took Dr Strassman many years to finally get all of the permits and permission that he needed to stay legal.

DMT is a natural substance that is profoundly psychedelic and is found in various plants and is also found in the human body. Strassman quite reasonably suspects it's production to be in the pineal gland. The human brain readily intakes and uses up intravenous or smoked DMT and easily allows it to cross through the blood brain barrier.

The fact that the human brain readily processes DMT is very intriguing because the blood brain barrier allows the transfer of very few substances to enter the brain. So it is quite rightful to say that the human mind hungers DMT and gladly processes it in order to bring a subject into an altered state of consciousness.

An altered state of conciousness brought on by a 0.4 mg/kg dose of DMT peaks at about the 2 minutes mark and subjects feel as though they are coming down at about 5 minutes and typically feel returned to normal awareness around 30 minutes. So it is a very short lived, though intensive, psychedelic.

I have personally experimented with psilocybin mushrooms, LSD and mescaline in the past, which all contain DMT, but have never tried raw DMT and am very curious about the nature of this substance and it's effects. My attitude is from a very mature standpoint, I don't wish to give the impression that I'm trying to glorify drug usage. Does anybody have any experiences, insights or stories with DMT and the altered states of consciousness that it assists the mind in producing?

I have also recently read Graham Hancock's Supernatural: Meetings With The Ancient Teachers Of Mankind and I thought that it was a revolutionary work in the professional and highly educated literature of altered states of consciousness. Highly recommended.
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