When a neurosurgeon claimed he glimpsed the afterlife during a coma, skeptics offered a more earthly interpretation – a surge of DMT produced by his own body. Was his tale of eternity a trick of the brain, or a window into something science can’t explain?
Psychedelics are now at the center of a global conversation about mental health, mysticism, and even how we experience illness and death. In Altered States, host Arielle Duhaime-Ross explores how people are taking these drugs, who has access to them, how they’re regulated, who stands to profit, and what these substances might offer us as individuals and as a society. Listen to more episodes here.
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Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:00:01] What if someone you know said they went to heaven and came back? They tell you they were wrapped in light, love, and met God. Would you call it a hallucination? A dream? Maybe wishful thinking. When a neurosurgeon said he saw the afterlife while in a coma, he got a lot of pushback. Skeptics said his celestial journey was no miracle. It was a chemical trick of the brain. And these skeptics pointed to a specific molecule. DMT. It is known to induce profound, sometimes frightening psychedelic experiences, and our own bodies can make it. So, today on the show, reporter Haleema Shah looks at DMT and death. I’m your host, Arielle Duhaime-Ross, and this is Altered States.
Haleema Shah [00:00:57] This summer, I spoke to a man who saw, embraced, and no longer fears death.
Dr. Eben Alexander [00:01:04] Death is an adventure.
Haleema Shah [00:01:06] This is Dr. Eben Alexander. I met him near his home in Charlottesville, Virginia. He walks into the room with a long stride and a head of graying hair. He says he witnessed the afterlife and came back.
Dr. Eben Alexander [00:01:21] I’m seventy one years old and I live my life as an eternal soul who has a purpose to bring love and kindness and compassion and mercy to this world.
Haleema Shah [00:01:32] At 71, Eben tells his story as someone who was lost, then found. He was adopted and raised by a family that attended a Methodist church. He grew up to be a promising student, then a skydiver, then a Harvard-trained neurosurgeon, who still longed for his birth family. As an adult, Eben’s belief in the observable, measurable, and material deepened. He stopped praying, he says. But in 2008, when he was in his 50s, something happened that made Eben more than a man of science.
Dr. Eben Alexander [00:02:07] I’m known for having had a near death experience during a week long case of severe bacterial meningitis, a case that should have killed me.
Haleema Shah [00:02:17] He was hospitalized for over a week and spent most of it in a coma.
Dr. Eben Alexander [00:02:21] And yet, during that week in coma I had a profound spiritual experience.
Haleema Shah [00:02:26] An experience that he would come to understand as a near-death experience, or NDE. They’re often characterized by a tunnel, bright light, and encounters with spiritual beings. NDEs happen when someone is near death or is pronounced dead, but survives. Imagine someone who experiences cardiac arrest. When their heart stops beating and their body lies still, a bystander might step in and administer CPR. The heart restarts, but the person remains unconscious. Nearly 20% of cardiac arrest survivors say that during that time they experience a mystical, lucid journey.
Dr. Eben Alexander [00:03:08] What I went through in my NDE, the ultra reality of it, was far beyond anything I’ve ever experienced in my life.
Haleema Shah [00:03:18] Eben decided to write about it and told the world how he, a scientist, found proof of heaven. That was also the title of his New York Times bestselling book, and it took the media by storm.
News Clip [00:03:32] 2020 continues. Is there proof of heaven?
Haleema Shah [00:03:35] He was on Primetime News.
Dr. Eben Alexander [00:03:37] Well, I’d been to heaven. I mean, absolutely the most remarkable experience and and for me the amazing thing was that I had this rich experience while my brain was completely shut down, soaking in pus.
Haleema Shah [00:03:53] His trip started off ethereal.
Dr. Eben Alexander [00:03:55] I was rescued by this beautiful, spinning white light that had a a melody, indescribably beautiful melody with it, that opened up into a bright valley. And I had no body awareness, but I was moving up through it because I was a speck on a butterfly wing.
Haleema Shah [00:04:13] There was someone on the butterfly wing with him. A girl.
Dr. Eben Alexander [00:04:19] I’ll never forget the way she was sitting, the way she was dressed, the way she looked at me. And she looked at me with this very loving smile.
Haleema Shah [00:04:27] Eben says she was a biological sister he’d never met. She guided him through this realm and she gave him a message.
Dr. Eben Alexander [00:04:35] You are deeply loved and cherished forever. You have nothing to fear.
Haleema Shah [00:04:43] He heard something.
Dr. Eben Alexander [00:04:46] I heard that sound of Om, that eternal resonance of all of infinity and eternity.
Haleema Shah [00:04:52] During his voyage through the heavens, Eben was just a soul in its happy place. But on his hospital bed, he was surrounded by family praying for his return. He couldn’t hear them, but one face and voice got through. It was his 10-year-old son.
Dr. Eben Alexander [00:05:10] He’s telling me, Daddy, you’re gonna be okay. Daddy you’re gonna be okay. Daddy, you’re gonna be okay. As if it he said it enough, it would work. I didn’t even remember what a father and son were. I didn’t recognize him, but there was something about the connection between us. When I saw him pleading with me, I knew I had to come back.
Haleema Shah [00:05:29] When Eben returned to what he calls the earthly realm, something else happened. He made a full recovery from his coma. But he’d changed. He was suddenly a spiritual man embraced by an all-encompassing deity. He was talking about Om.
Dr. Eben Alexander [00:05:48] And I guess the reason I used Om as the identifier for that God force was to me the word God when I came back from my NDE was a puny human word with a lot of baggage. And I recognized that, you know, it was not about this debate about God, Allah, Brahman, Vishnu, Jehovah, Yahweh, Great Spirit, but actually an acknowledgement of the commonality.
Haleema Shah [00:06:12] Eben has a prophetic answer to a question that’s probably as old as humanity. What happens when we die? People have answered these questions by turning to religion, science, and clairvoyance. I have distinct childhood memories of a psychic medium with a peroxide blonde bob. She had heavily lined eyes that didn’t blink much, and her name was Sylvia Brown. She shared the stage with Montel Williams and Larry King.
Larry King [00:06:38] You communicate with dead people.
Syliva Browne [00:06:39] Yes.
Larry King [00:06:39] You do psychic readings.
Syliva Browne [00:06:41] Yes.
Larry King [00:06:41] You work with the police on murders and message. What do you believe happens when you die?
Syliva Browne [00:06:46] You go through the tunnel and you go to the other side and it’s a beautiful place with actual buildings and art museums and
Haleema Shah [00:06:55] This was the 2000s. My grandmother was on one of her visits to the US from Pakistan, and I remember she once suggested that my mom ask Sylvia about my late father. The idea had crossed my roughly nine-year-old mind too. And then I quietly wondered, can Sylvia talk to dead Muslims? But to believe the unbelievable, people need the right messenger. Sylvia spoke the language of daytime TV and the paranormal. Eben is fluent in languages that carry far more weight in America: Christianity and science.
Dr. Eben Alexander [00:07:31] The quote I often give to explain exactly the transformation I had as a scientist. It’s a quote from Werner Heisenberg, who won the Nobel Prize, and he said that the first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will lead you towards atheism, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.
Haleema Shah [00:07:48] That quote is contested. Heisenberg’s children don’t think their dad said that, but the idea rang true with Eben anyway. His NDE led him to make the case for an eternal spirit, or consciousness, or mind. He argues that consciousness is not a byproduct of the physical brain. It can exist without our bodies.
Dr. Eben Alexander [00:08:10] Our souls do not cease to exist when the body dies. In fact, our souls and our awareness expands, it becomes much grander. And to me, that is something we can call heaven.
Haleema Shah [00:08:22] Belief in an afterlife and an everlasting soul is a heresy for many scientists, especially the materialists, who believe matter is the source of all that is real, and our material brains create consciousness. But Eben doesn’t buy that anymore.
Dr. Eben Alexander [00:08:39] The brain and mind are obviously m tightly interconnected, but the mistake we’ve made in science in physicalist or materialist science is thinking that only the physical world exists and the stuff we can measure in the physical world is the only thing relevant to science, and that is a tremendous error.
Haleema Shah [00:08:57] Skeptics rolled their eyes at his so-called proof of heaven. They questioned how much he knew about death since he was only nearly dead. They challenged his credibility. In 2013, an Esquire reporter found a series of malpractice cases against Eben. He settled five over an 11 year period. To Eben’s skeptics, this was a disgraced doctor seeking to reinvent himself.
Haleema Shah [00:09:26] Scientists don’t understand NDEs. The typical medical explanation is that the unconscious person was in a hallucinatory or dreamlike state. That their brain was on low power mode, too weak to respond to stimuli, but active enough to draw on memories and prior beliefs. But Eben says his brain was too damaged to make this up.
Dr. Eben Alexander [00:09:49] These bacteria were devouring my brain. They’d already eaten all the glucose in my cerebrospinal fluid, and they were really attacking the brain. There was no part of the neocortex spared that might have offered up any kind of dream or hallucination or phenomenal conscious experience. Not only that, my brain stem was badly damaged from the get-go.
Haleema Shah [00:10:10] If his comatose brain was too weak to conjure a trip to the afterlife, his almost comatose brain might not have been. There were plenty of critiques and theories about Eben’s NDE.
Dr. Eben Alexander [00:10:25] Early on when I went public with this, Sam Harris criticized my telling of my experience and said Alexander obviously had a DMT experience, you know, case close.
Haleema Shah [00:10:35] That theory was probably the most interesting one. Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and prominent figure of the New Atheist Movement, wrote about it on his blog. But you might know him from his viral debates with religious people.
Sam Harris [00:10:48] If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, you have lost your mind. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you’re just a Catholic.
Haleema Shah [00:11:09] He said, Eben’s NDE bore an uncanny resemblance to a psychedelic trip with DMT, or dimethyltryptamine, the psychoactive ingredient in ayahuasca. It induces short, mystical, and sometimes terrifying experiences. And while an Amazonian shaman might extract it from local plants, you don’t need to go quite so far to find DMT. It exists inside our own bodies. Scientists find these homegrown chemicals in the blood, plasma, urine, cerebrospinal fluid, even the brain and lungs of mammals. And Harris’s argument builds off something that’s been speculated before. Maybe the body produces a surge of DMT at the moment of death. Maybe what Eben experienced as heaven was actually him getting high off his own body’s supply. After the break, does a DMT trip mirror death.
Haleema Shah [00:12:21] Over 30 years ago, a psychiatrist named Rick Strassman ran a series of DMT studies at the University of New Mexico. His work is so foundational that his name came up in almost every conversation I had about death and DMT.
Rick Strassman [00:12:38] We do know that you know the near death state is very visual, very emotional, memories come back. DMT, you know, has those kinds of effects as well.
Haleema Shah [00:12:48] He popularized the speculative theory that DMT might surge during near death experiences in a seminal book.
Rick Strassman [00:12:55] The title of you know the DMT book is, “The Spirit Molecule.”
Haleema Shah [00:13:00] A practicing Zen Buddhist at the time, Rick theorized that DMT is produced in the pineal gland, a pea-sized organ at the center of the brain. Borrowing from Buddhist and Hindu traditions, the gland is often referred to as the third eye because of its location. Rick wanted to find the biological basis of spiritual experiences. But this was the war on drugs era, so he ran studies looking at DMT’s impacts in case it had medical use.
Rick Strassman [00:13:30] It was just so weird. There was no one in this country, you know, giving psychedelics and there was no one in in the world giving DMT anywhere.
Haleema Shah [00:13:40] There weren’t a bunch of people lining up for this research, but he managed to find 60. The first ones through the door were his friends.
Rick Strassman [00:13:48] Mostly white collar professionals, you know, lawyers, physicians, psychologists. They were the kinds of folks you would expect at a you know psychedelic event in you know the late nineteen eighties, early nineteen nineties.
Haleema Shah [00:14:01] Nearly all the DMT sessions were held inside an Albuquerque hospital, a pretty sterile place for a psychedelic experience. His team refurbished room 531, a roughly 15 by 15 foot space. He hired carpenters to cover the tubes, pipes, and hoses. The bright white walls were repainted blue. The room was outfitted with blue chairs with a subtle pattern. Rick was going for soothing, but not dull. He got a rocking chair for himself from where he’d observe study participants. They would lie on a bed as he gave them somewhere between .05 and .4 milligrams of DMT intravenously.
Rick Strassman [00:14:42] I would just you know sit there, you know, praying, like I hope they’re having a good time. People could have an extraordinarily wonderful time and you wouldn’t know it, or people might be having a horrific hellish time and you wouldn’t know it until they you know began talking with you.
Haleema Shah [00:14:56] Thirty minutes, maybe forty. That’s about how long participants would be on a trip. Rick warned them that it started fast, sometimes before the injection was even done. It would often start with a rush, then a sound.
Rick Strassman [00:15:12] Oftentimes there would be a high pitched kind of whine like
Haleema Shah [00:15:21] Then a breakthrough and visuals.
Rick Strassman [00:15:25] You’re almost instantly transported into this realm of light. Colorful, morphing, kaleidoscopic, fractal like.
Haleema Shah [00:15:34] Beings.
Rick Strassman [00:15:35] The majority of the folks felt an intelligence that would even materialize into recognizable things, which you took all manner of shape and form. You know, humanoid, robotic, insect like, plant like, even sentient furniture.
Haleema Shah [00:15:56] Sometimes, it was harrowing.
Rick Strassman [00:15:59] One person felt you know paranoid and trapped like a jack in the box popped out and was kind of leering at him. The Jack in the Box character said, I’ve got you now, I’ve got you now. And he felt quite scared.
Haleema Shah [00:16:13] Sometimes it was comforting.
Rick Strassman [00:16:15] The insights, the ideas which were you know transmitted were kind of trite, like you know, love is all there is.
Haleema Shah [00:16:25] Realer than real.
Rick Strassman [00:16:26] Everyday reality pales in comparison with the reality value of the DMT experience.
Haleema Shah [00:16:33] But is the DMT experience the same as Eben’s so called journey through the afterlife?
Haleema Shah [00:16:43] There are some obvious overlaps between an NDE and a DMT trip. Bright light, realness, God, even sentient beings. It actually led Rick to suggest in his book that dying people should go on a DMT trip as a kind of dress rehearsal for death.
Haleema Shah [00:17:01] Why do our bodies produce DMT?
Rick Strassman [00:17:03] Oh, who knows? I I mean only God knows.
Haleema Shah [00:17:07] Some researchers think it helps us through traumatic moments to dissociate and go to a safe place. Some say that it’s neuroprotective to reduce brain damage after injury.
Rick Strassman [00:17:20] You could speed recovery from a stroke in experimental animals in the presence of DMT.
Haleema Shah [00:17:26] There’s one problem though. No one has ever proved that DMT surges in humans during a stroke, a coma, or death. But Rick managed to inspire one scientist who wanted to study it.
Jimo Borjigin [00:17:39] I actually contacted Dr. Strassman and said, Oh, if you don’t have any data, those would be kind of things that we could collaborate on.
Haleema Shah [00:17:47] This is Jimo Borjigin. She’s a professor at the University of Michigan’s Medical School, where she studies the dying brain.
Jimo Borjigin [00:17:54] I was born in China and grew up in the environment that life after life or soul or heaven or hell that’s never in my education.
Haleema Shah [00:18:06] She says her brain is averse to religious ideologies. She wanted to explore naturally occurring DMT and NDEs. So she got Rick to consult on a study at her lab. It examined 36 rats whose brains were implanted with microdialysis probes. The idea was to measure in real time whether rats’ brains secreted DMT after a lethal injection.
Jimo Borjigin [00:18:34] In our twenty nineteen paper published in scientific reports, which show very increase of a dimethyltriptamine DMT in the dying rats.
Haleema Shah [00:18:44] Her data showed that in a few rats, DMT levels increased fourfold or even fivefold. But in most, It was far less.
Jimo Borjigin [00:18:52] Many people thought that was the evidence to show in the DMT levels increased in the dying animals.
Haleema Shah [00:19:00] But Jimo wasn’t quite as convinced by that data. Because a one to five fold increase in DMT is small potatoes when compared to other chemical surges. In a study looking at other neurotransmitters in dying rats, Jimo saw a quote, stupendous increase.
Jimo Borjigin [00:19:17] That include dopamine, which increases more than fortyfold, norepinephrine, which is responsible for alertness, increased to more than sixty fold compared to the baseline. And we see serotonin levels surges more than two hundredfold in the dying rat.
Haleema Shah [00:19:36] In other words, the surge of DMT doesn’t even come close to the surge of other neurotransmitters, which all have pretty remarkable effects.
Jimo Borjigin [00:19:44] Norepinephrines increase your alertness. So I think a norepinephrine level to me perhaps is associated with the realer than real sensation that these survivors report. Dopamine on the other hand is associated with the feeling good, you know.
Haleema Shah [00:20:00] And she thinks it’s significant that serotonin is in the mix because it binds to receptors in the body that are associated with hallucinations.
Jimo Borjigin [00:20:08] So perhaps seratonin levels increase in the dying states are contributed to visual hallucinations and seeing light and so forth.
Haleema Shah [00:20:20] But these theories are all limited by the lack of human data. Jimo says a human study would be hard to design. It would require volunteers who agree to spending their final moments being hooked up to an EEG machine and having their bodily fluids measured for neurochemicals. Moreover, since the volunteer dies, there’s no way to confirm whether they saw a light, a deity, or something else when they experienced a surge of brain activity. What we do know is that NDEs have been reported for a long time and by people all over the world.
Dr. Bruce Greyson [00:20:58] They’re written in the ancient Greek and Roman literature. There are accounts from ancient Egypt. They’re in Polynesia. They’re in Australian Aboriginal cultures. They’re everywhere.
Haleema Shah [00:21:09] This is Dr. Bruce Greyson, a retired psychiatrist. I called him up because he’s also one of the top scholars of NDEs at the University of Virginia Charlottesville. And yes, you can be a scholar in that. Around the 1970s, NDEs became a sort of academic discipline. Along with telepathy, NDEs fall under the category of parapsychology, which, depending on who you ask, is a fringe science or a pseudoscience. Bruce says he wasn’t primed to believe in this stuff.
Dr. Bruce Greyson [00:21:42] I was raised in a scientific household. I went through college and medical school with that mindset that all our thoughts and feelings are produced by the brain. There’s nothing else.
Haleema Shah [00:21:50] Bruce’s interest in NDEs started with a patient he met while in training. She said she left her body while unconscious and was able to accurately describe events in a different hospital room. He couldn’t explain it, and when he learned other people had similar experiences, he found himself studying NDEs for the next 50 years. Today, Bruce and his colleagues at the University of Virginia Charlottesville maintain a database of over a thousand NDE reports. And the accounts have strikingly similar elements.
Dr. Bruce Greyson [00:22:25] Such as a sense of overwhelming peace and well-being when they are in fact in dire straits. They often feel a sense of leaving their physical bodies and accurately report what’s going on around the body from an out-of-body perspective. They may encounter other entities that they feel are not physically present. Some of them they may recognize as deceased individuals or as what they think are deities. They often go through a review of their entire lives, and at some point they may come to a decision to return to their bodies or are sent back.
Haleema Shah [00:23:02] Bruce developed a 32-point questionnaire to measure NDEs. It includes questions that range from, did you have a feeling of peace or pleasantness? To did you see deceased spirits or religious figures? It’s used in near-death studies around the world and referred to as the Greyson Scale, named after Bruce, though he wishes people would stop calling it that.
Dr. Bruce Greyson [00:23:28] I prefer not to call it the Greyson scale.
Haleema Shah [00:23:30] Really?
Dr. Bruce Greyson [00:23:31] I have never called it that. No, I have always called it the NDE scale.
Haleema Shah [00:23:36] Most people score 15 out of 32 on the scale. Eben Alexander, whom Bruce knows personally, scored 29.
Dr. Bruce Greyson [00:23:44] Which is very high in the top two or three percent.
Haleema Shah [00:23:48] The deceased relative, the joy and peace of heaven, the meeting with Om. It’s all reflective of the classic NDE. But the thing that also struck me about Eben’s experience is that it sounds so American. Heaven and Om are not American inventions, but they are everywhere in this country’s spiritual lexicon. How influenced are NDEs by where you are and how you were raised?
Dr. Bruce Greyson [00:24:18] Most people who have a near death experience will say, you know, there just aren’t any words to describe it. So they have to use metaphors because there aren’t words for it. And your metaphors come from your culture. So for example, people all over the world and going back through time will talk about a warm, loving being of light. And if you’re an American, Jewish or Christian person, you may say that was God, or you may say that was Christ.
Haleema Shah [00:24:49] I’ve read papers about NDEs on the other side of the world. And yes, they also feature the classic elements Bruce describes. But there are other things that are just so culturally specific. People in a study from Iran reported meeting Shia imams or meeting Ayatollah Khomeini.
Haleema Shah [00:25:07] If they reflect your prior religious belief or your cultural context, can that be an indication that the memories and teachings that are stored in the brain are playing a role in the experience?
Dr. Bruce Greyson [00:25:19] Well, of course, every experience that we talk about, no matter where it’s coming from, it has to be filtered through the brain and through our language. The fact that culture determines how you describe it does not mean that the culture determines whether or not you have an experience or what kind you’re going to have.
Haleema Shah [00:25:36] Bruce doesn’t put much stock in theories that suggest DMT or other brain activity produces NDEs. The data is too limited. Instead, he sees things more like Eben Alexander.
Dr. Bruce Greyson [00:25:49] So I think I’m open to the idea that there is consciousness beyond the physical brain that can survive death of the physical brain.
Haleema Shah [00:25:56] But I wondered, what if someone, somewhere, someday in the distant future managed to prove that humans release a surge of DMT or some other chemical during near death experiences?
Haleema Shah [00:26:10] Would that change your mind about consciousness at all? Or would it I don’t know, would it just kind of complicate
Dr. Bruce Greyson [00:26:15] It would certainly complicate things. It would make us more likely to look at what’s going on with this DMT surge.
Haleema Shah [00:26:21] But it wouldn’t negate Bruce’s view of consciousness or the spiritual nature of NDEs.
Dr. Bruce Greyson [00:26:27] I think there are different ways of looking at any object. It can be looked through a spiritual lens or a physical lens. And those are not necessarily conflicting ways of looking at things. They’re complementary ways. You know, when you’re moved by a beautiful sunset, that can be felt as a spiritual experience. It’s also obviously a physical experience. Does one negate the other? Not at all.
Haleema Shah [00:26:53] Eben Alexander was tired of people dismissing his experience of heaven as just naturally occurring DMT. In 2018, a decade after his NDE, he decided to see the difference for himself.
Dr. Eben Alexander [00:27:09] I had a colleague who was very experienced in this kind of thing, and he facilitated my ability to smoke some five-methoxy-DMT
Haleema Shah [00:27:20] Also known as 5-MEo-DMT. He wanted to settle the score once and for all about psychedelics and near-death experiences. But it’s worth noting here that the comparison was limited. 5-MEo-DMT and DMT are psychedelic tryptomines, but they have different chemical structures and effects. But Eben forged ahead and took the drug anyway. On his trip, he saw fractal imagery that he described as tremendous.
Dr. Eben Alexander [00:27:51] There was some sense of beings, you know, of entities that were there. And I sensed them as friendly and indestructive and and knowledgeable. So I didn’t feel alone in the process. I felt kind of guided and helped.
Haleema Shah [00:28:04] But it didn’t come close to his NDE.
Dr. Eben Alexander [00:28:09] To compare my DMT experience with what I had during my near-death experience is kind of like trying to look at something through a keyhole. It was very difficult to discern any information. And yet compare that with the way I described my NDE, which was a penthouse panoramic vista to the horizons of reality about the nature of all existence.
Haleema Shah [00:28:33] When it comes to death, studies about NDEs offer us some threads to pull on, but they don’t come close to answering the big question. What happens after? I was 13 when my grandmother asked that question. She’d just been widowed, and like me and millions of other Muslims, she was taught that death has a script: an angel, a waiting period, judgment, then heaven or hell. But one night after my grandfather died, she paused by my mom’s bedroom door and flatly asked where his soul was now. We all fell back on our scripts, probably so we could put the unsettling topic and ourselves to bed. Maybe that’s also why so much of the public couldn’t look away from Eben’s account. It’s another script, one that’s bright and benevolent. A proof of heaven that quiet the dread of not knowing. And in many ways, the DMT theory offers another script. If a drug can mimic death, maybe we can know what we’re in for. Maybe we can do what Rick suggested in his DMT book. Use the psychedelic as a test run.
Rick Strassman [00:29:56] I you know ran that by my Zen Buddhist monk friends. You know, they said, you know, number one, what happens if it’s a bad trip? And number two, what happens if you’re wrong? You know, what happens if there is no relationship between being dead and the DMT experience? You might be chasing a wild goose and you know then you’re shocked, you know, when it isn’t anything like a DMT experience.
Haleema Shah [00:30:21] A lot has changed since Rick Strassman wrote his DMT book 25 years ago. He’s in his 70s now. He’s returned to his Jewish roots, and he’s changed his mind about some things.
Haleema Shah [00:30:32] Would you now ever take DMT to prepare for death?
Rick Strassman [00:30:37] Me? No, no. I would just get my ducks in a row.
Haleema Shah [00:30:44] What does that mean like writing a will or just, you know?
Rick Strassman [00:30:47] I mean, you know, you want to develop your virtues, you wanna be a good person. You wanna think, you know, godly thoughts, you don’t wanna have a lot of regrets. You wanna be a you know good person on your deathbed.
Haleema Shah [00:31:02] My grandmother died during the pandemic. I couldn’t be with her. She’d gone back to Pakistan and was thousands of miles away. But the nurses said something that gave my family comfort. Before her last breath, my grandmother uttered one word. Sarfaraz, the name of her sister who died just months earlier. Was her sister there to guide her tenderly to the other side? Had death been gentle, inviting even. One day, I’ll know the answer, and someone else will be left behind to wonder where I’ve gone. They might believe that death was a gateway to an afterlife or to nothingness, but they won’t be able to prove either. And whether death is ushered by angels or feel good chemicals, or both or neither, I think we’re all just hoping it doesn’t matter. That death is good if we’ve been decent people. Because we have no control over how we die, just how we live.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:32:22] This episode was reported and produced by Haleema Shah. Altered States is a production of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and PRX. Adizah Eghan is our senior editor. Our executive editor is Malia Wollan. Jennie Cataldo is our senior producer. Our researcher is Cassady Rosenblum. Our associate producer is Jade Abdul Malik. Our audio engineers are Terence Bernardo and Jennie Cataldo. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. Special thanks to David Presty. Our executive producers are Malia Wollan and Jocelyn Gonzales. And our project manager is Edwin Ochoa. Our theme music is by Thao Nguyen and Nate Brenner. I’m your host, Arielle Duhaime-Ross. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review Altered States wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll be back next week.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:33:07] Most well-known psychedelics remain illegal around the world, including the United States, where it is a criminal offense to manufacture, possess, dispense, or supply most psychedelics, with few exceptions. Altered States does not recommend or encourage the use of psychedelics or offer instructions in their use.