DMT: The Spirit Molecule

by Rick Strassman

The overlap between consciousness alteration induced by psychedelic drugs and that induced by meditation attracted the attention of writers outside of academics, including the English novelist and religious philosopher Aldous Huxley. Huxley underwent his own remarkably positive mescaline and LSD experiences under the watchful eye of the Canadian psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, who visited him in Los Angeles in the 1950s. Huxley soon wrote about his drug sessions and the musings they inspired in him. His writings on the nature and value of the psychedelic experience were compelling and eloquent, inspiring many individuals’ attempts to attain, and researchers to elicit, spiritual enlightenment through psychedelic drugs. Despite that fact that his ideas stimulated a massive movement toward popular experimentation with the psychedelics, Huxley was a staunch advocate of the theory that only an elite group of intellectuals and artists should have access to them. He did not believe that the common man or woman was capable of using psychedelics in the safest and most productive ways possible.5