Frying into the fourth dimension

Everything we do, sooner or later, gets down to chemistry. The food we eat is reduced until it becomes a stream of chemical soup, its compounds and molecules finally available for absorption. Our muscles and nerves act and react as a result of the instantaneous chemical signals released by the various cells and tissues involved. All those skull-filling thoughts and memories trigger because of an incessant chemical interplay among a ridiculously complex network of neurons, axons, maurons and gleefs.

That said, it doesn’t seem all that preposterously weird to consider the following: that our journey into the next world of existence beyond this life could be made possible by a chemical reaction, involving a simple substance we can make within our heads. This chemical exists in us for one purpose, which is to act as an inter-dimensional blasting cap, so to speak, capable of launching us out of the material world and into the realm of spirit.

Doesn’t look like it’s gonna be a big week for Christmas shopping tips here in Babylon.

I just read a fascinating book called DMT: The Spirit Molecule, by Rick Strassman. In it, he puts forth the hypothesis, based on a study he conducted at the University of New Mexico in 1995, that the psychedelic drug DMT is made by a gland in our brain, the pineal, and it makes DMT to—Holy Metaphysics!—facilitate the soul’s jump into another dimension. Talk about a sparky little topic to bring to your next Bible study class …

Strassman didn’t base his theory on half-baked ideas stolen from obscure cuts on Jefferson Airplane albums. His fully baked study was sparked when he found out that, back in the ’60s (when else?), it was discovered that DMT is manufactured in our bodies. Now wait just a doggone second, Strassman thought. Why on Earth would we ever have need or reason to self-manufacture something as wild and crazy as DMT? The discovery that DMT, the potent accomplice of many a rain forest shaman, is endogenously made by us haunted Strassman.

DMT, an extremely obscure drug, is both hailed and feared for one remarkable effect, that of making the user feel he is truly some place else. Not as if he were in another reality, but that he truly is some place else. Users invariably report this feeling can be ecstatic, terrifying or just very goddamn incredibly weird.

Strassman’s study proved to be inconclusive. For every test subject who had a DMT experience that even mildly supported his daring hypothesis, there was one that threw a quantum curve ball into the mix. And there’s the question of what happens to the poor slob whose head/pineal gland gets instantly flattened by a boulder or chopped off by a guillotine? Would he be s.o.l. with the afterlife? Doesn’t seem fair.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this brief time visiting my happy-go-lucky cave out here in left field. Now, back to those stocking-stuffers!