This is your faith. *This* is your faith on drugs. An ecumenical clergy study w/magic mushrooms 🍄
So, this is a really interesting read, even if you can only gloss the landing page with the first few interview questions and answers.
https://link.newyorker.com/view/5be9fbed2ddf9c72dc89731fnrurr.ew7f/373f5452
This story starts with an ad: “Seeking Clergy to Take Part in a Research Study of Psilocybin and Sacred Experience.” A group of researchers at Johns Hopkins and N.Y.U. set out to answer some questions about psychedelics and religion: Would a high-dose psilocybin trip enhance the well-being and vocation of religious leaders? Would the experience renew their faith, or make them question it? Would a bunch of religious professionals taking mushrooms reveal a common core shared by all religions?
https://link.newyorker.com/view/5be9fbed2ddf9c72dc89731fnrurr.ew7f/373f5452
This story starts with an ad: “Seeking Clergy to Take Part in a Research Study of Psilocybin and Sacred Experience.” A group of researchers at Johns Hopkins and N.Y.U. set out to answer some questions about psychedelics and religion: Would a high-dose psilocybin trip enhance the well-being and vocation of religious leaders? Would the experience renew their faith, or make them question it? Would a bunch of religious professionals taking mushrooms reveal a common core shared by all religions?
Comments
And no, I have never partaken!
Yeah but afaicr Allegro thinks that Jesus is one of the machine elves, which is quite different from the study in the OP; seeing the effect of psilocybin on religious faith and belief.
You’ve written a lot about psychedelics, and heard a lot about people’s trips. What surprised you about the stories from these religious leaders?
I was struck by the fact that these people regarded these mystical experiences as authentic—not simply as a drug experience. Several people had encounters so transformative that the course of their careers have been altered. Three of them have started separate psychedelic organizations. So, in a way, they’ve had a conversion experience—but it was conversion to the value of psychedelics, within their faiths.
And I was struck that their experiences were not always consistent with the imagery or symbolism of their own faiths. One Christian theologian said God was like a Jewish mother. In fact, most of the people I interviewed felt that the divine they encountered was feminine. That blew their minds; and it blew mine, too.
I suspect the guy who encountered God as a Jewish mother already had the Jewish mother archetype in his mind via popular culture. See Jung's phallus in the sun, reported by a patient who, research later uncovered, had likely already read about the idea in books before entering into therapy.
It makes me smile.
Just about everybody had an encounter with the divine, and for the most part it was a feminine, nurturing, sweet presence. We have such a patriarchal understanding of religion, and most stereotypes of God are gendered masculine. So I think it’s ironic, and somewhat humorous, that under the influence of psychedelics God turns out to be more female than male. I enjoyed finding that out.
I understood stetson to be saying that that wasn't even an archetype.
Side note; before he went completely off the rails Allegro did some reasonable work in Near East studies, to the point where FF Bruce convinced him to switch to theology.
Right. Jung argued that his case-study demonstrated the existence of archetypes, because a patient who had never heard of the solar phallus saw it when he looked into the sun one day in the garden of the sanitorium. But we now know that he had already read about it in books, so that has to be entertained as a pretty likely conduit for the idea.
That said, I suspect it probably is the case that the mechanics of terrestrial fertility have led multiple cultures across the world to speculate that the sun is masculine and the earth feminine. Just that it's doubtful this manifests itself in the human mind as implacably as Jung wanted to believe.
I’ve learned that the human brain has special times called "critical periods" when it's easier to learn new things. Magic mushrooms and similar drugs might make these times happen. I think thats really interesting. Back when I was more religious, there was sort of talk about people being ready to become christian and accept Jesus and things like that. (I didn't like this, because I thought it was like making a sale to a customer. Persuading them.)
This is what I read recently. Its not about the mushroom drug though similar. Hope it is okay to post this.
https://www.zmescience.com/medicine/mind-and-brain/new-version-of-lsd-boosts-brain-plasticity-without-the-psychedelic-trip/
No worries. It is a valid point to ask why particular socially-derived images bubble to the top of human-consciousness.
Most of what I know about Jung is via academic and media references, and The Portable Jung, edited by Joseph Campbell. If you have any interest in jungianism, Campbell is pretty accessible(I think his Skywalker Ranch stuff is up on YouTube).
The marxist Marcuse called Jung "the right-wing of psychoanalyis", I think because it allegedly reinforces repressive social categories as groovy archetypes. In another corner of the political quadrant, the right-wing libertarian Szasz made the same broad argument with approving connotations, something something everyone gets to find the identity that suits them best under the bonds of contractual psychiatry.
Having just spent a week in Holland, we were having a discussion about cannabis. About whether we would partake in the specific delights there. I would have no problem. But none of it would be about deeper spirituality - for me it would just be about helping my mind to chill for a bit, and finding a way of relaxing.
I think, in fairness, my mind manages to wander all over the place and find all sorts of connections without any extra drugs. I would be more interested in stopping that than enhancing it.
Maybe, but that begs the question of how you define 'deeper spiritual engagement', because that's going to mean different things to different people, and ISTM that the voice missing in the conversation above is that of groups who do use various substances [*] as a enabler of deeper spiritual engagement.
[*] Which in itself is a slippery concept, how do you classify things like breathwork, what's the physical/spiritual impact of incense use, how do you litigate claims that charismatic groups are entering a trance state etc etc etc.
Psychiatric treatment undertaken on a voluntary basis. As opposed to, eg. involuntary commitment.
I know, of course, that I've left myself wide open for attack on this. But it seems to me important to bring up.
(slight chuckling at the last part of that little extract)
Two points; There can be an unfortunate conflation of the psychedelic with the spiritual simply because the former is mysterious and internal to the mind and the latter is also mysterious and appears to be internal to the mind, but there's no necessary correspondence between the two. It doesn't automatically mean you start 'tapping into the cosmic', no more than being well into a bottle of vodka means that you start speaking in tongues - or whatever, it is 'just' another state of mind, you could experience a range of things including nothing. If you take theories around these substances triggering episodes of neuro-plasticity seriously, then 'most' of what is going in is analogous to a really really intense fever dream.
Secondly; groups who use psychedelics or entheogens as part of spiritual practice tend to view and describe their practice in almost sacramental ways (at least that's the closest parallel I can think of). With the actual substance being a small part of a larger process of preparation and framing.
In that sense I agree with you that there is something 'off' in what is described in the article. It's throwing people into the former and then asking them to react to the resulting hallucinations *as if* it were some kind of experience of the divine without the framing, context and community of the latter.
My reaction exactly.
It can do. But it doesn't always.
There's a line in the Orthodox Liturgy about us offering 'rational worship.' That doesn't mean we are like Spock. But it doesn't mean we are as high as kites either.
Sounds as though it’s based on Romans 12.1.
True - it was a personal comment about my response, not intended to apply to others. It was my sense having listened to them talking about is and their experiences.
Not sure. But see Altered States for an overlap between religious hallucination and sensory deprivation.
(Being a grandiose manic I’m more likely to experience myself as supreme being, lol)
St John Chrysostom appears to have suffered from stomach problems due to a particularly zealous fasting regime.
I'm sure some of the Desert Fathers and Mothers may well have had 'issues' brought on by isolation and deprivation from food, sleep etc.
I'm not sure it's entirely the case that Julian of Norwich starved herself, although I doubt she ate as much as we tend to today. She also appears to have had some kind of contact with the outside world and wasn't completely isolated.
I've heard Quakers suggest that George Fox may have had various 'issues'.
But we all have issues of one form or other.
I'm not really sure what experiments of the kind we've been discussing here tell us one way or another.
Indeed.
Closer to the present; it's quite possible that at least one of Edward's converts during the Great Awakening starved herself to death.
But again, if these things are going to be explored *as praxis* then the singular experience of a few individuals is somewhat less useful as a barometer than the groups around the world who regularly engage in this way (via entheogens rather than starvation).
Actually, if you just YouTube "Altered States religious hallucinations", you can see all of them. They're actually rather tangentially connected to the rest of the narrative(which is sci-fi but with a realistic atmosphere), and are enjoyable as stand-alone pieces.
But I would be willing to bet that SLEEP-DEPRIVATION has in at least a few cases contributed something to mystical visions. I never had one per se, but when coming off a string of unscheduled work shifts, I did sometimes have musical numbers in my mind's ear that took on a life of their own.
FWIW, in an 'own voice' Epiphanies sense, if I may be so bold, I also think that @Heavenlyannie's observations ring true.
I'm inclined to go with her comments on these things as well as @chrisstiles's caveats about the singular experiences of a few individuals not being entirely representative.
I'm no expert on any of this. I can recall a few instances from my full-on charismatic days where I'd still maintain that we went 'beyond' what might be dismissed as pure hype and suggestibility.
I'd say the same about transcendent moments or a sense of the numinous in more sacramental settings.
None of these things have to involve self-hypnosis or the inducement of trance-like states or altered states of consciousness.
In saying that, I'm not making any value judgement on any particular style of worship or Christian tradition. Christian mysticism - and mysticism more generally - takes on many forms.
Sure, repetitive actions such as the 'ecstatic' whirling of whirling Dervishes or rhythmic drumming or clapping can induce trancelike states and choreographed liturgical rituals can have sometimes have a soothing or almost hypnotic effect.
But I don't think your average charismatic congregation or Anglo-Catholic parish are working themselves into some kind of trance week by week. Far from it.
I must read some Julian of Norwich, it is on my list of things to do this summer.
But, of course, the experience of mania might also be destructive - we don’t get to choose. And I assume the taking of psychedelic drugs might have similar results and cautions.
(I have never felt the need to take mood enhancing drugs, my own manic depression is quite enough emotional rollercoaster for me, but I know why some manics do as the experience of mania can be beautifully exhilarating).
Right, but I'm talking about what it looks like from the outside looking in (which is the perspective of most of this thread as well as the newyorker article). ISTM that most groups that regularly dwell at the edges of physiologically 'odd' states are well aware of the dangers of getting 'carried away' and interpreting something that's physiologically singular as spiritually singular.
Which is where my critique of the premise lands, it's importing an alien practice into a spiritual context which hasn't evolved to handle it.
Ok. Got you. That makes sense.
But they are also not truth. And finding the truth in these experiences is very complex and difficult.
And I think I have met people who are - well, not entirely well and with it - who have "insights" and experiences that may be absolutely valid for them, but the interpretation as it relates to Christianity is massively complex. Yes, you may have experienced angels. But that is not necessarily canon.