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The anthropologist Weston La Barre emphasized the ancient importance of shamanism by noting that the typical interpretation of “the world’s oldest profession” was not prostitution, but shamanism. The shaman was an essential part of every tribe—the ɹrst doctor, priest, oracle, and keeper of wisdom, all embodied in the same person.67 The shaman’s profession required him, or her, to reliably enter visionary states on demand. The use of psychedelic drugs was brought to a high art for this purpose, possibly including the Amanita muscaria mushroom, which some believe was the basis of the transformative beverage called Soma by early Brahmin priests. Soma may have been the catalyst for the ancient revealed Hindu texts, the Vedas, and ultimately yoga as a transformative practice.68 Other methods developed by shamans included music, dancing, controlled breathing, drumming, fasting, breathing intoxicating vapors, and meditation
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SMADHI X DMT
y identical to the yogi’s ecstatic state of deep absorption, called samadhi. Strassman was aware of this, so he proposed that endogenous DMT may be activated in advanced meditation, and that this may be the biochemical cause, or at least a correlate of, mystical experiences. Because of the striking similarities in how these states are described, one could even predict that DMT-induced and meditationinduced ecstasies might share similar reports of transpersonal connections, including clairvoyance and telepathy as described in the Yoga Sutras. And they do.
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A miracle does not happen in contradiction to nature, but in contradiction to that which is known to us of nature. —Saint Augustine
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With this mentality, you have to be “cool,” “zen” and quiet, that is, feel nothing and be in a muffled torpor.
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Mysticism Defined What is the religious feeling that Einstein admired? The father of American psychology, William James, provided one of the clearest deɹnitions. It involves four key characteristics: The ɹrst is ineffability, meaning it cannot be adequately expressed in words; it must be experienced to be fully understood. As James wrote in his classic book The Varieties of Religious Experience, “No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists” (p. 371).83 The second characteristic is a noetic quality, meaning that the mystical experience is felt to be a state of knowledge. According to James, noetic refers to “states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of signiɹcance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time” (p. 371). The third feature is transiency, referring to the time course of these experiences. In objective time, spontaneous mystical experiences may last only a few moments, or in rare cases a few hours. Subjectively they seem to last far longer. The fourth is passivity, in which the onset of the mystical state might be sparked by meditation or other means, but once that state begins it is no longer felt to be under control by the mystic. According to James: “[It is] as if [the mystic] were grasped and held by a superior power”
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