is anyone familiar with the so called 'death molecule' aka dmt? i've heard vlogs on youtube of describing it as a before/afterlife experience.
I am intimately familiar with it, having read Dr Rick Strassmans book 'the spirit molecule'. I've never heard it referred to as the death molecule.
The thing you have to know about DMT, is that 99% of what you'll read is bullshit based on Strassman's theories. Strassman is a credible scientist, but in his book he didn't make it clear where he was talking about solid science, and where he was speculating about his own theories and hypotheses - his hypotheses aren't unreasonable, but they're certainly not proven.
Strassman is famous for performing the first human experiments with psychedelics in over 30 years, he performed these experiments in the mid-1990's. He began with DMT and later did some psilocybin experiments. He administered DMT to over 60 human subjects multiple times, and comprehensively documented their experiences.
DMT is found endogenously within the human body, it's found in the blood of every human, I believe more recently it's been demonstrated to be produced by the lungs(!). Strassmans theory was that it's produced in the pineal gland (along with melatonin -sleep hormone), and he hypothesised that it might be released in massive quantities during experiences like death, psychosis, hallucinations, dreams, alien abduction experiences etc...
A reasonable hypothesis because: 1. it's utterly weird that the human body produces one of the most powerful known psychedelics
2. No one has any idea what DMT does in the human body.
He didn't go as far as proving it was responsible for dreams, near-death experiences etc... It's not uncommon for people to report they feel like they physically died. A lot of common DMT experiences are bizzare interesting - entity contact is common - seeing insect/machine/clown like beings that attempt to communicate with the patient -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_elf