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STEPPING ON HOLY TOES + 299 while being with our volunteers: watching the breath, being alert, eyes gazing straight ahead, ready to respond, keeping a positive and aware attitude, letting the research subject's experience unfold without unnec- oe > essary interference.” My understanding of meditation also helped me guide people through the stages of the DMT experience. For example, I applied the Abhidharmas model of mind when coaching volunteers not to get swept away by the onslaught of colors, or to investigate the space within the grains of wood in the door if they kept their eyes open. Suggesting volunteers let go, focus on the breath and body sensations, keep an open but fluid mind to whatever came their way—all of these were tools I had acquired during decades of meditation practice and study. Another example of how psychedelics and Buddhist meditation met was in the development of our rating scale. Previous paper-and-pencil psychological questionnaires that measured psychedelic drug effects had serious shortcomings. They assumed that psychedelics were "psychotomimetic" or "schizotoxic," and therefore they emphasized unpleasant experiences. Many of these scales were devel- oped using volunteers, sometimes ex-narcotic-addict prisoners, who were not told what drugs they were given, or what the effects might be. To offer an alternative to these tools for measuring the psychedelic experience, I used an Abhidharma- and skandha-b&sed method of char- acterizing mental states. This purely descriptive model meshed well with what's known as the "mental-status" approach to interviewing psychiatric patients: You talk with someone and gently investigate the quality of their basic mental functions, such as mood, thinking, and perceptions. The familiar Abhidharma terms "form," "feeling," "perception," "con- sciousness," and "habitual tendencies" became the framework or structure within which the rating scale's questions emerged, and how we classified replies to those questions. However, instead of calling them skandhas, "clinical clusters" seemed more appropriate and palatable for a Western scientific audience. We gave and analyzed this new questionnaire, the Hallucinogen Rat- ing Scale, or HRS, at the end of every DMT session for the entire project.