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About This Show
When it comes to unexplained phenomena, it is just that. Unexplained. We try to approach this from as many different ways as possible, and to throw out the assumptions that have driven research for a very long time. These strange experiences people have, no matter what you want to label or catagorize them as, are real in some way. They have been reported throughout history and across cultures. If nothing else, they are a very Human experience. None of the theories we have may even come close to divining what we are actually experiencing, if they did, we would have some answers. We do not know what Reality is, what life or death are, or truly why we are here. We do know that our senses filter much out, and our memories do not work like we think they do. New approaches are needed if we are ever to make any progress at all in understanding what we are interacting with. Some of that comes from understanding ourselves, and some of that comes from having a truly open mind in confronting those things that defy explanation. We need new eyes, perspectives, and better questions. That is the goal of Where Did the Road Go? To go places that have not been tread before, and explore new things from new angles. To leave the well worn road, and wander...
In our second of two interviews with Dr Rick Strassman, we discuss Rick's latest book, DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible. This is a very different conversation than part one, as Rick's work has taken him in a very different direction. He examined prophecy, as experienced in the old Testament, as possibly connected to the DMT experience. Again, if you order the book from Rick's website, he will sign them for you.
Dr. Rick Strassman joins us to talk about his first book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences. Luke and I talk with Dr. Strassman about the difficulties in getting this type of research done, as well, of course, as the far reaching implications of what it all may mean. We follow up this with next week's interview on Strassman's latest book. You can check out his website and he will autograph books if you buy them from him directly.
Rick Strassman was born in Los Angeles, California in 1952. He attended public schools in southern California's San Fernando Valley, and graduated from Ulysses S. Grant High School in Van Nuys in 1969. As an undergraduate, he majored in zoology at Pomona College in Claremont California for two years before transferring to Stanford University, where he graduated with departmental honors in biological sciences in 1973. During summers in college he worked for RedKen Laboratories, developing cosmetics and a line of hair dyes, and also performed laboratory research at Stanford, on the development of the chicken embryo's nervous system. He attended the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in the Bronx, New York, where he obtained his medical degree with honors in 1977.
Dr. Strassman took his internship and general psychiatry residency at the University of California, Davis, Medical Center in Sacramento, and received the Sandoz Award for outstanding graduating resident in 1981. After graduating, he worked for a year in Fairbanks, Alaska in community mental health and private psychiatric practice. From 1982-1983, he obtained fellowship training in clinical psychopharmacology research at the University of California, San Diego's Veteran's Administration Medical Center. He then served on the clinical faculty in the department of psychiatry at UC Davis Medical Center, before taking a full-time academic position in the department of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Albuquerque in 1984.
At UNM, Dr. Strassman performed clinical research investigating the function of the pineal hormone melatonin in which his research group documented the first known role of melatonin in humans. He also began the first new US government approved and funded clinical research with psychedelic drugs in over twenty years. Before leaving the University in 1995, he attained the rank of tenured Associate Professor of Psychiatry, and received the UNM General Clinical Research Center's Research Scientist Award.
In 1984, he received lay ordination in a Western Buddhist order, and co-founded, and for several years administered, a lay Buddhist meditation group associated with the same order. Dr. Strassman underwent a four-year personal psychoanalysis in New Mexico between 1986 and 1990.
He has published nearly thirty peer-reviewed scientific papers, and has served as a reviewer for several psychiatric research journals. He has been a consultant to the US Food and Drug Administration, National Institute on Drug Abuse, Veteran's Administration Hospitals, Social Security Administration, and other state and local agencies. In 2007 he founded, with Steve Barker and Andrew Stone, the Cottonwood Research Foundation (www.cottonwoodresearch.org).
From 1996 to 2000, while living in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, Dr. Strassman worked in community mental health centers for Washington State in Bellingham and Port Townsend. For the next four years, he had a solo private practice in Taos, New Mexico. After two years working on the edge of the Navajo Reservation in Gallup NM, he returned to northern New Mexico in 2006, where he served at a mental health center in Espanola. Since mid-2008, he has been writing full-time.
He currently is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.
Ardy Sixkiller Clarke has done some original research that she relates in her book, Sky People; Untold Stories of Alien Encounters in Mesoamerica. We discuss some of these stories and her impressions of the way contact is viewed in the Maya culture.
Dr. Ardy Sixkiller Clarke vowed as a teenager to follow in the footsteps of two 19th-century explorers, John L. Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, who brought the ancient Maya cities to the world's attention. Dr. Clarke set out on a seven-year adventure (from 2003 through 2010) through Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico, collecting stories of encounters, sky gods, giants, little people, and aliens among the indigenous people. She drove more than 12,000 miles, visiting 89 archaeological sites (Stephens and Catherwood visited only 44) and conducting nearly 100 individual interviews.
Dr. Ardy Sixkiller Clarke brings to the field of ufology degrees in history, English, psychology, and educational leadership and a background as a teacher, university professor, junior college and university administrator, licensed therapist and psychologist, and social science researcher. As a Professor Emeritus at Montana State University and former Director of the Center for Bilingual/Multicultural Education, Dr. Clarke, who is Cherokee/Choctaw, has worked with indigenous people for most of her career. Her first book in the field of ufology was the best-seller Encounters With Star People: Untold Stories of American Indians. She is also the author of twelve children's' books and the best-selling academic text: Sisters in the Blood: The Education of Women in Native America. She lives in the middle of the Rocky Mountains in Big Sky Montana.
This was supposed to be Part 4 of the history of UFO's with Aaron and Mike Clelland, however, Mike fell asleep. So we talked to Aaron about his new book that was just released, The Paranormal and the Paranoid: Conspiratorial Science Fiction Television. We also went into Roswell, the slides, 911, and the new book on conspiracies that he is now working on. Very diverse and far ranging conversation.
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In our second of two interviews with Dr Rick Strassman, we discuss Rick's latest book, DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible. This is a very different conversation than part one, as Rick's work has taken him in a very different direction. He examined prophecy, as experienced in the old Testament, as possibly connected to the DMT experience. Again, if you order the book from Rick's website, he will sign them for you.
Dr. Rick Strassman joins us to talk about his first book, 
