with Mitch Schultz, director of The Spirit Molecule DVD
On the road in Peru with Mitch Schultz, who talks about the making of his documentary The Spirit Molecule, based on the Rick Strassman book of the same name, and why he was driven to make an independent documentary about DMT. In 2002 Schultz had his first experience with dimethyltryptamine and the entities therein: nothing would ever be the same. Schultz convinced Dr. Rick Strassman to lend his story and credibility as the narrative backbone of the documentary, studying DMT in controlled medical conditions with legal patients under the auspices of the US government from 1990-1995.
Why has nature seeded DMT throughout most living things: as a strategic neurotransmitter, a language for nature to communicate within itself? What is the value of contact experiences with entities in inner space? How can film communicate a glimpse of the DMT realm, and how ready are mainstream audiences for it? Join experiential journalist Rak Razam and filmmaker Mitch Schultz in search of the answers...
In Part II with Susan Blumenthal (DMT test subject)
In the early 1990s, Susan Blumenthal participated in Dr. Rick Strassman's DMT tests in New Mexico, the first legal psychedelic experiment in a generation. Blumenthal was in a study group with Strassman looking at the Tibetan Book of the Dead but was one of the least experienced psychonauts who went in. Terrified, disembodied, and strewn across the universe, Blumenthal underwent an alien contact experience and enlightenment while finding the birthing place of souls and, ultimately, God.
Inside the DMT-realm, she experienced entities testing her, just as she was being tested on the outside, hooked up to cardiac stabilizers and medical intervention gear. Her accounts of Strassman's DMT experiments vary from those recounted in the book, focusing less on the medical and more on the contact experience with insects, reptiles and geometric entities of the invisible landscape. Here she shares intimate details of those now-famous tests with experiential journalist Rak Razam...
Originally aired on: Nov 3, 2010
