Ram Dass said that back in the 1960's when they were doing study of LSD they would try to randomize/double blind these tests but it was very funny to see. There were one where they had clergy involved and it basically went, one person would be like "I think it is doing something" and another would be wandering around going "I SEE GOD! I SEE GOD!". It was obvious who had what.
> Almost a decade ago, a Baptist Biblical scholar, a Catholic priest, several rabbis, an Islamic leader, a Zen Buddhist roshi, and more than a dozen other religious leaders walked into a lab—and took high doses of magic mushrooms.
Wild. Maybe what the world needs.
Just a little PSA for anybody getting curious about psychedellics from this post. If you have a family history of psychosis/scizophrenia etc., don't fuck around with it.
Especially if you've tried before and you've felt paranoid (or same with weed) then really, it's just not for you.
On the other hand, if you have some psychosis in the family tree, or felt paranoid from LSD/MDMA/THC, then try out meditation, cause you might find the divine is already close to your sober mind.
I highly recommend the whole book "Sacred Knowledge" by William Richards (one of the author of the studies).
“To most people who are even moderately experienced with entheogens, concepts such as awe, sacredness, eternity, grace, agape, transcendence, transfiguration, dark night of the soul, born-again, heaven and hell are more than theological ideas; they are experiences.” - Thomas Roberts
This phrase is quoted in "Sacred Knowledge" by Richards, yet I find it the most suitable summary of this overview of scientific research on psychedelics and religion.
We hear about mystical visions from LSD ("acid"), psilocybin ("shrooms"), and DMT from many "spiritual but not religious" people and self-proclaimed shamans. But how does it relate to vision by ordinary people (ones who never tired, and wouldn't try if it weren't for legal, scientific research)?
And how does it relate to prayer, mediation, and mystical visions by Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus? How do monks and priests compare their psychedelic experience with their regular practice? Do they all turn to Zen Buddhism, or entrench in their religious background?
Regardless if you are deeply religious, or a non-spiritual atheist, I believe you will reconsider a few things after reading this book.
Pretty much nothing of substance in the writeup. All about studying and flaws.
I don't know if my brain is just wired up differently, but I've taken both LSD and Psilocybin many times and I did not find the experiences spiritual at all. I don't even know what people are talking about when they talk about spiritual experiences.
There’s also this guy who you might have heard of, who created a little thing called Alcoholics Anonymous:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_W.#Psychedelic_therapy
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-5922.13027
Apparently he was so serious about the potential for LSD to help alcoholics, that he almost got thrown out of Alcoholics Anonymous, the recovery group he helped create. He had written to a Catholic friend about this.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/aug/23/lsd-help-alc...
> LSD, by mimicking insanity, could help alcoholics achieve a central tenet of the Twelve Step programme proposed by AA, he believed. It was a matter of finding "a power greater than ourselves" that "could restore us to sanity". He warned: "I don't believe [LSD] has any miraculous property of transforming spiritually and emotionally sick people into healthy ones overnight. It can set up a shining goal on the positive side, after all it is only a temporary ego-reducer."
> But Wilson added: "The vision and insights given by LSD could create a large incentive – at least in a considerable number of people."
> His words were found in a late 50s letter to Father Ed Dowling, a Catholic priest and member of an experimental group he had formed in New York to explore the spiritual potential of LSD.
"William James, considered the father of American psychology ...., is said to have to come to many of his own most central ideas at least in part through hallucinatory experiences with nitrous oxide"
That's a pretty good explainer for psychology. We have a Coke addled Freud who is the father of it all and another drug abuser shepherding the USA.
I wonder how many people have tried to replicate their experiments and succeeded?
I come from a Muslim family but aren’t deeply religious myself. My first LSD trip felt deeply spiritual and echoed themes from the paper on psychedelics and religion. Here’s what I took away, which might interest anyone curious about this topic:
- Prophetic Sensation: It was so profound that, 5,000 years ago, I could’ve thought it was a prophetic vision. I didn’t feel like I was speaking to God, but I got how prophets might’ve felt something divine.
- Inner Peace & Clarity: LSD brought pure joy, warmth, and peace. It stripped away mental filters, showing me the world as it is, not just how I see it.
- Accepting Death: I felt at peace with death, seeing it as a natural part of life. I’d never really thought about it before, but there was no fear—just acceptance.
- Divine Music: Music felt heavenly, amplifying the moment’s emotional and spiritual depth. It was like it carried the experience.
- Spiritual Connection: I didn’t think about whether religions are “true,” but it felt spiritual, like touching something bigger—hard to explain, but so meaningful.
- Right & Wrong Philosophy: I realized “right” and “wrong” are labels we create. Right feels like harmony, wrong like harm, but they’re fluid, shaped by context. Things just are, and we use these ideas to navigate life.
It was done at Harvard Divinity School in 1962
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_Chapel_Experiment
The Marsh Chapel Experiment, also called the "Good Friday Experiment", was an experiment conducted on Good Friday, April 20, 1962 at Boston University's Marsh Chapel. Walter N. Pahnke, a graduate student in theology at Harvard Divinity School, designed the experiment under the supervision of Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and the Harvard Psilocybin Project.[1] Pahnke's experiment investigated whether psilocybin would act as a reliable entheogen in religiously predisposed subjects.[2]
Promising title, but the article felt hollow... all surface, no depth. Skimmed anecdotes without probing them, offered no real insight or new perspective, and left me with absolutely nothing I couldn't have guessed from the headline alone :(
Better to stay sane...Have seen a lot of these kinds of articles, surely funding comes from somewhere...
The article opening sounds like a bar joke.
Also, I think this point is salient:
> He pointed to the risk of selection bias: those who volunteer are likely to be “spiritually hungering for a mystical experience,”...
I would go further and suppose that any Christian elder or leader who volunteered to do this had already demonstrated their unsuitability to speak on the matter of psychedelics and God.
All spiritual experiences are nevertheless an appearance in consciousness.
So consciousness can generate an infinity of experiences.
So no reason to think one experience is somehow more special than any other experience since all experiences passes and go no matter how profound you feel.
Even profound feelings are just appearance in consciousness.
Even if you die and go to heaven that's still appearance in consciousness.
Even time is an appearance in consciousness.
So given all that, is there anything to chase?
Are we stuck here forever?
Nothing to gain or loose.
some people should never take psychedelics.
in the last few years' surge of popularity, I found that your typical psychedelic advocate* would never admit this category of people exists. they were committed to the idea that everyone can, should, and must take these drugs.
this attitude is currently on a downturn, which is a good thing. people now admit that these drugs are not for everyone.
however, there's little solid understanding of exactly who should avoid psychedelics. it would be good to have a more solid scientific understanding of this. i imagine psychedelic advocates (which includes many scientists working on the topic) would be wary of such research, because it seems to similar to the history of government-sponsored propaganda "science" finding exaggerated harms of various illegal drugs.
however, scientific knowledge about who most likely will have adverse effects would be useful. that way people at low risk could use psychedelic drugs with the confidence that they are very likely safe. people at high risk can avoid them. this would be a great outcome.
The only problem here would be that if someone chooses not to use psychedelics, this might mark them as having certain traits that most people judge negatively. For example, history of severe trauma, family or personal history of psychotic disorders, and so on.
Given this, I think anyone who wants to normalize psychedelic drug use in their local community, ought to really fight to destigmatize such traits (and most communities won't accept this), or else more practically, promote an extreme commitment to privacy and personal choice.
*: I don't just mean people who do drugs, I mean people who think that doing drugs is mandatory to fix various spiritual/mental problems that prevent you from being a fully ethical being.
They are called mind altering drugs for a reason. Because you are actually somewhat aware of your mind being altered and loosening of the restrictions and rules that are created in mind for physical world.
This conscious or unconscious realisation during and after the trip leaves a profound impression on you that everything is about perception.
So where's the follow up in which others evaluate the participants? The results all seem self-reported. But did the participants improve in some measurable way as seen from the outside? Without outside evaluation, it's just people who took drugs reporting they mostly liked the results.
There's not much information in this article.
These studies are all deeply flawed. They find willing participants, give them some drugs, then ask how they feel about it. Of course they say they feel spiritual and connected with the world and all of that, that's what the drugs do. But I know plenty of people who claim that mushrooms or lsd were spiritually awakening and connected them with the world, who wouldn't think twice about stealing from an old woman's purse, robbing people, or worse. I know alcoholics who claim they don't have a problem and think drinking is just good fun, but are also violent assholes when they drink.
From the results paragraph in the top of the linked journal site:
> Furthermore, 42% rated one of their experiences to be the single most profound of their lifetime.
> Although no serious adverse events were reported, 46% rated a psilocybin experience as among the top five most psychologically challenging of their lives.
From skimming the paper, it looks like they don't do a correlation analysis between the various questionnaire responses, only between the groups and responses (perhaps correctly due to insufficient data), but I wonder: are you more likely to find the experience profound if it was challenging?
Maybe related, a book Varieties of Spiritual Experience by David B. Yaden and Andrew Newberg - the title pays homage to William James, considered the father of American psychology and author of The Varieties of Religious Experience.
@dang can we change the article link to the much more detailed New Yorker article? Several comments noting the current link is a pretty thin summary
https://www.newyorker.com/newsletter/the-daily/michael-polla...
No Islamic leader in their right mind would try taking magic mushrooms or any forms of intoxication. That is a red line. So I seriously doubt the experience of the person who went in and took it. Which means the question remains unanswered: how would a person of the Islamic faith describe the experience obtained from magic mushrooms?
By the words of the Quran, the response is
They ask you about wine and gambling. Say, “In both there is great sin,
and some benefits for people. And their sin is greater than their benefit.”
And they ask you as to what they should spend. Say, “The surplus”. This is
how Allah makes His verses clear to you, so that you may ponder.
My protest to the context of HN, this study furthers the idea that God/religion/belief is a mystical hallucinated idea (and does not belong any greater in rational belief than does the experience of magic mushrooms). But such equivalencies being drawn here would be hasty and ignorant and a logical fallacy. First, if Person A believes in X and Person B believes in Y and goes through an experience causing Person B to also believe in X and calls Y a similarly relevant belief, does not make Person A and Person B similar, nor does it make X and Y similar. It just means the experience is mind altering. Second, these studies observe the outcomes, describes the outcomes, and hypothesizes the empirical causes, but in the case of this study it is observing hallucinations in believers of faith and finding similarities in reasoning to their preconcieved beliefs, causing it to claim that hallucination is equal to belief.
I’m pretty sure a heroic dose of mushrooms made me lose 20 IQ points, so…”it’s definitely not for everyone” lol.
I wonder if a similar thing to the dwarfing high of heroin applies to these psychedelics. Would the amazing awakening experience I'd have with an LSD trip make all other mentally exciting moments and smaller awakenings I come across in day to day life more boring in comparison?
if you are interested in a rabbit hole, look up the appearance of the acacia shrub in the bible, a source of DMT, and how some people associate it with the burning bush. quite a trip.
I've said before that I think the geometric patterns in hallucinations resemble analog signal feedback, inside an analog signalling system (your brain) that has been impaired by a chemical. other dimensions and beings aren't necessary to the explanation. there are theraputic uses for breaking cycles of thought, but I'd argue a non-spiritual view of drugs based on signalling feedback and channel impairment is sufficient to describe their effects.
I vaguely remember some televised British experiment in which a clergyman replaced his usual bread with poppy seed bread -- toast for breakfast, sandwich for lunch, etc. -- then at the end of a month or so tested positive for some opioid threshhold
a corollary is - can a clergy still practice if implanted with a neuromodulator device, i.e. deep brain stimulation, for epilepsy, or Parkinson's, or depression?
Those studies should also include if the individuals taking substances become better or worse for the lives of the people around them in a sustainable way.
Lord have mercy, I reject satan and all his pomps.
When clergy take psilocybin . . . God sees them?
Pretty sure giving them to non-clergy eventually created clergy
it's no surprise to me that people who believe goats talks like to trip lol
I have taken boatloads of psychedelics in my life. If I could do my life over again I would have traded every single trip for having read Orthodoxy and the Everlasting Man by Chesterton before I was 25. Tripping gives you zero insights into the divine, it is not revelation, you don't get closer to God. There are real answers, but we as civilization have been deliberately moving away from under false premises, and the world has gotten worse and worse. Drugs can't fix this. If you want a better world, you should not dull your perception of it.
Something that would be much more beneficial for all humanity is if more of the clergy actually preached the bible, instead of trying to explain it away, which is almost exclusively what the clergy I have engaged with tries to do.
“Almost a decade ago, a Baptist Biblical scholar, a Catholic priest, several rabbis, an Islamic leader, a Zen Buddhist roshi, and more than a dozen other religious leaders walked into a lab—and took high doses of magic mushrooms.”
I seriously wonder what this Catholic priest was thinking.
According to a natural law view, the reason for taking a psychoactive substance is a major component in determining whether taking it is licit. A bad intent corrupts the act. So, if I have a martini in order to calm my nerves, or choose to savor the goodness of a glass of beer, then knowing what we know about the effect of alcohol in moderation and our own personal response to the quantify in question, there is nothing wrong happening. (Catholics are not teetotalers. We like our wine.) Indeed, if you are in a state of high anxiety that impedes the use of reason, taking something to calm your nerves would be therapeutic and restorative. But if we consume alcohol in order to get drunk or buzzed, then this is morally illicit, as the intended effect — the distortion of perception and the impeding of the operation of our rational faculties — is immoral. This is because, on a natural law view, our nature is to be rational animals — to know reality as it is, which is what the senses and reason are for — and to intentionally thwart our nature, and especially that which is most essential to our humanity, our rationality, is bad for us as human beings. (It also produces emotional distortions, which are, again, something bad for us.) That is why it is an affront to human dignity to trip, and we intuitively perceive this when we see a drunk or someone who is high. They disgust us, they arouse pity in us, or, in less serious cases, we laugh at them, because the comedy is the result of them failing to be rational and thus human.
The principle of double effect also tells us how and when taking a substance with harmful side effects is licit. The intent is, again, an essential component, and recreational drug use is simply never licit for that reason as explained above.
The idea of using drugs to produce a “spiritual experience” is also nonsensical. That is because it isn’t a bona fide spiritual experience. It is a hallucination, a corruption and suppression of the perceptive and rational faculties which is how we come to know reality. It does not clarify our perception of reality per se, but darkens it by producing mental and emotional distortions. A true spiritual “experience”, if you want to call it that, would involved the heightened or elevated operation of perception and rationality, not their diminution. So the real McCoy is exactly opposite. That people subjectively report having gained insight is either a side effect of the hallucinogen disrupting some pattern of denial or whatever, or merely an error of perception (which is expected, as people high on drugs aren’t thinking clearly and have a poor ability to appraise the validity and value of their thoughts).
True spiritual maturity is sober. Hallucination is the exact opposite of sober. It is a fraudulent ersatz, not some royal road to the divine or whatever.
By taking drugs they immediately invalidate their legitimacy and licenses as clergy, so not sure this means anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people
What are the odds that peddlers of religion would turn to promoting chemical drugs on the side ...
Why do people insist on complicating all this so much ... just take a hit of whatever and experience it for yourself.
I swear psilocybin affects the sense of importance, sacredness, meaningfulness. One can be staring at the most boring thing and see the Universe in it. Doesn't mean there's really anything important nor useful in it. Just like a shot of dopamine affects feeling of pleasure, psilocybin affects the brain's feeling of "importance".
What I find interesting is that the line between a religious experience and a brain chemistry event seems a lot thinner than we usually think. The clergy didn’t lose their faith after taking psilocybin. Instead, they seem to hold their beliefs a bit more loosely and focus more on what they feel in the moment. In some ways, this feels like something humans have always done. Whether it's prayer, meditation, fasting, or psychedelics, people keep looking for ways to quiet the noise in their heads and feel connected to something bigger. The methods change, but the need stays the same.
I go to raves, I take very modest amounts of LSD (100 maybe 150 micrograms), and the whole experience turns into very spiritual session where I dance with my entire being and let myself disolve into the Great Void.
It has lasting effects that go way beyond the effects of the drug.
However I think it's complicated to derive generalisms like saying it's a drug for everyone and everybody should take it. It's definitely not for everybody.
I'm also not going to be a hypocrite and say that you shouldn't do it. What I'll go and say is that it's your journey to figure out what you are going to invite into your life. In any case, depending on what you believe, you aren't actually here to figure things out. You already did. You are here to remember.
In more secular terms, you are here to do the required work to understand yourself, your circumstances, stand on the shoulder of giants and study the great minds that came before you. That will give you the necessary foundational philosophy to withstand and understand these experiences, should you choose to go through them. This is the only way to acquire a foundational respect for these substances and these experiences.
Have I done this work? Have I achieved the required level of understanding to make heads and tails of these experiences? Not for a while at least. It was rough the first couple of times. Very violent and crude, like rushing naked through a sea of people while being completely sure that that night is the last night of your life (I wasn't actually naked, it just felt like that and that everyone was eventually going to merge with me and that I should feel ashamed of it).
But with time and with the necessary exposure to understand the basics of existencialism I think I managed to pin down a more gentle form of this experience that can help me remember how to lay myself bare to the goddess and just be there when I dance.
So I think I can extend this invitation to anyone that feels brave enough to lift the reins of existence and reality and expose yourself to the truth. That everything is a story about the end of the world. About the beginning. And about everything at once.
It's scary, it's blissful and it's totally worth it.