Even as a child, I was interested in spirituality. Not in those exact words, of course, but I was always a little weird: an introvert, I was happy to play alone and invent worlds. I disliked formal religion and loathed religious school, but I’ve had some sense of the sacred for as long as I can remember, and was drawn to devotion and mystery. I still don’t know what I make of the word “God,” but I remember feeling a Wordsworthian sense of the sacred walking in the woods around my summer camp.
And for thirty years, even when my work took me in other directions, I always came back to it. I find “weird religion” fascinating, even when it is preposterous. I wrote a book about an eighteenth-century antinomian heretic, and have watched all the Netflix shows about cults. I’ve worked as a rabbi, meditation teacher, and ritualist; I wrote, under a pseudonym, a book of heretical blessings and songs.
Unlike many of my fellow travelers, I don’t see this as a unique and special gift. Some people like golf, some like food, some like spirituality. But I know that I have always been fascinated by the strange, sometimes profound, capacities of the human soul, whatever that means. In high school and college, I became what some people call a “nightstand Buddhist,” reading about meditation, Zen, and emptiness. I also discovered Jewish mysticism, and would eventually get a master’s and then a doctorate in Kabbalah and Jewish thought. I have many fond memories from that ancient, pre-internet time of rummaging through used bookstores, or discovering some rare book in a university library. It felt like there was another world hidden within this one—just as the esoteric teachings themselves insisted.
Still, in those early years, my relationship to mysticism was intellectual, not experiential. One reason for this was that I was in the closet at the time, which for me meant repression not only of sexuality but of life in general. I could read poetry about love and mystical testimonies about ecstasy—but these experiences were for someone else, not for me. And while I had a few psychedelic experiences around this time as well, they were textbook examples of what not to do: little guidance, little companionship, little information. It was only much later—maybe a decade later—that I came to see points of congruity between those experiences and the contemplative states cultivated in meditation and other spiritual practices.
That finally changed around my thirtieth birthday—Saturn Return, if you like—when I came out, got serious about meditation (first in a hybrid Jewish-Buddhist form, then in Western Theravadan Buddhist ones), and finally had some of the experiences that I’d been reading about for ten years. I remember my first weeklong silent meditation retreat quite clearly: the frustration, the effort, the bliss of the concentrated mind, the sadness, and, eventually, the clear sense that this is what the psalmists and poets had been talking about, finally, at last.
This was an atypical motivation for taking up meditation. Today, most of my students come to meditation for reasons of dukkha—suffering. They’re experiencing anxiety, stress, grief, or pain, and they’ve heard meditation can help with these things. I came in because I’d read about mysticism and wanted to experience it.
Of course, to do that, you first have to go through a lot of dukkha—the “dark night of the soul,” as John of the Cross describes it. On that first retreat twenty-three years ago, I saw and felt my loneliness, my desperate attempts to achieve my way to love, my self-loathing. Gradually, the dawn did come, not because I escaped from the dark, but because, eventually, I learned to embrace it—to surrender my resistance to the real. I went on many more retreats, including long ones; I was silent for almost five months in 2008-2009, which is why I talk too quickly now. I came to experience some of the steps toward awakening that Buddhist texts talk about—baby steps, to be sure, since I remain resolutely neurotic. And I saw that it was possible for the mind to change—for the brain to change, as we now know. I could become more present and less of a jerk, better in relationships, more human, more compassionate. Empathy is not a bug.
It felt like there was another world hidden within this one—just as the esoteric teachings themselves insisted.
Psychedelics also played a role. I went to Burning Man for the first time in 2001, and would return thirteen more times. I experienced ways of living, of seizing the day, that I’d not even thought to imagine. The capacity psychedelics have to loosen one’s conceptions of self and world helped me to expand beyond the confines of the life I had been leading. And so I set about living a life with many faces, which I do not recommend from a career development perspective, but which has certainly been a good ride. I started a magazine, a queer spiritual nonprofit, even a rock band that played at CBGB’s. In the 2000s, I worked as an LGBTQ activist. In the 2010s, I was a legal affairs columnist covering the first Trump administration (which had a lot of legal affairs). After years of resistance, I was ordained as a rabbi by my primary meditation teacher, Rabbi David Cooper, in 2013. In the 2020s, I worked for a meditation app, started a Substack, and, for a time, was a regular panelist on CNN. I also went to a lot of radical faerie gatherings, became authorized to teach jhana meditation in a Theravadan lineage, and wrote several books about spiritual practice, often yearning for it to be taken more seriously than it is.
Eight years ago, I became a parent—rather late, at the age of forty-six. Suddenly seven-day retreats were not so possible, let alone three-month ones, and my meditation practice shifted from abstruse altered states to basic mindfulness, from quiet retreat centers and faerie gatherings to cribs, dishwashers, and fairy houses. Of course, I knew this going in, but I couldn’t help but pine for the experiences of awareness, stillness, equanimity, and the sacred that I’d had on those long retreats.
So, after around a ten-year break, I returned to psychedelics, not at all-night raves at Burning Man but in quiet, intentional contexts, both on my own and in a small group of which I was a part. I’m still an infrequent user—it’s quality, not quantity. But I have found the practice profoundly rewarding, in a variety of different ways. Often I gain perspective on a challenge I’m facing, or see that I’m facing a challenge that I hadn’t consciously been aware of. I find I am able to cultivate the equanimity and sense of the numinous that arise in jhana meditation states even on low- to mid-doses of psychedelics. And particularly with the Bufo alvarius medicine, I’ve reconnected with and deepened some of the most profound encounters with nondual reality from my meditation and mystical practices. Ineffability is a common feature of such experiences, and it’s a bit of a cliche to say they “defy explanation,” but in this case, the cliche is correct.
Strangely, at exactly this time, society’s relationship to these compounds began to shift as well, to the point where I can get paid to study psychedelics and religion at Emory, write about it online, and teach about it at Harvard, where last spring we held a symposium on psychedelic use in monotheistic religious traditions. Synchronicities (or coincidences if you prefer) are the coin of the realm in psychedelic studies, so you can make of this what you will.
The term “psychedelics” refers to compounds, some found in nature and others synthesized in labs, that, at high enough doses, cause significant temporary changes in perception, mood, and cognitive processes, producing both powerful short-term experiences and durable long-term changes. While knowledge and use of these compounds by some indigenous cultures go back millennia, the term is recent: it was coined by psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond in 1956 and is a neologism meaning “mind-manifesting” (or “soul-manifesting,” if you prefer that rendition of psyche), which is often what these things do: they occasion not only imagery, synesthesia, and enhanced sensory experiences but, often, insights into one’s own mind, shifts in how one understands the world, and experiences that are felt to be profound, even sacred.
While there are many psychedelic compounds out there, most attention is devoted to around a dozen. Naturally occurring ones include psilocybin (found in psychoactive mushrooms), mescaline (in peyote cactus), DMT (in the chacruna plant, one of the ingredients of the Amazonian ayahuasca brew), its cousin 5-meo-DMT (found in various grasses and the venom of the Bufo alvarius toad), and ibogaine, found in the Central African iboga plant. Synthetics include LSD, MDMA, ketamine, and man-made versions of the natural compounds just listed. At high doses, cannabis can also act as a psychedelic, but it generally isn’t regarded as one.
You’ll notice that I’ve avoided using the words “drugs” and “hallucinogens” in describing psychedelics. Those terms have a variety of negative connotations— “hallucinations” are rarely sources of insight, “drugs” are rarely sacred, and to add one more term, “intoxication,” while sacred in some cultural contexts, generally denotes a form of impairment in ours. After fifty-plus years of the “War on Drugs” (which, according to former President Nixon aide John Erlichman, was devised to undermine the counterculture and Black Power movements), these terms come saturated with stigma, not to mention indelible visual associations with frying your brain like an egg.
Probably the most common question I get about psychedelics—usually couched in more careful language than this—is “Can these drugs make you go crazy?” The short answer is no for most people, but not never. Psychedelic use is generally contraindicated for people with a family or personal history of mental illness. But even for healthy people, it’s critical to have the right “set and setting” (in the familiar psychedelic parlance): a deliberate and careful mindset, and a supportive and safe physical space. For beginners, it’s highly advisable to also have some expert facilitation or at least “trip-sitting.” The statistical risks are relatively low. For example, a 2023 study of lifetime psychedelic users—not occasional or one-off-therapeutic ones—showed that 1.3 percent had ongoing perceptual issues, but that included people with preexisting bipolar or psychotic disorders. That is a serious number, but it’s nothing like what I was told in the 1980s: stories of people jumping out of windows or ruining their lives after a single trip. Short term “bad trips” are more common, but can still be navigated if you’re with a facilitator, or can follow John Lennon’s advice (cribbed from the 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience) to “turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.” Usually (though not always), a bad trip is a result of fighting the trip you’re on.
Having said all that, there is a very problematic tendency for psychedelic advocates to rebut the drug war’s unbalanced paranoia with an unjustified and unqualified cheerleading. That is inaccurate, reckless and wrong. This stuff is not for everyone, and as the so-called “psychedelic renaissance” percolates through the world of internet influencers, there’s a lot of irresponsible hype out there. (As it happens, one of the main reasons to decriminalize at least some psychedelics is to ensure a more transparent regulatory regime in which safe access is more possible for more people. More on that below.)
Fortunately, psychedelic compounds have been used responsibly for thousands of years, judging from archeological evidence, and we have at least some idea about how indigenous cultures have done so: carefully, in ritual contexts, with experts, and as “plant medicines” that can be used for obtaining wisdom or prophecy, effectuating healing, occasioning mystical experiences, building community, contacting other realms or encountering supernatural entities, or wielding magic and power. These traditions are also very much alive today, particularly in North and South America, Asia, and Africa, as is the continued persecution and exploitation of them.
Viewed in this light, the denigration of psychedelics as dangerous hallucinogenic drugs begins to look not only inaccurate, but also offensive—especially as Christian missionaries viewed such practices as savagery and often massacred their practitioners. While contemporary psychedelic history is fairly recent—LSD was synthesized in 1938 and first utilized in 1943, and Aldous Huxley’s mescaline trip which generated his book The Doors of Perception took place in 1954—indigenous psychedelic histories are very long indeed. It’s not that diverse indigenous cultures across history all shared the same hippie-ish universal spirituality; they definitely did not. But they weren’t just tripping either.
I began this essay talking about my own spiritual path, partly to situate psychedelics within it, and partly because talking about “spirituality” in the abstract can be irksome and unproductive. The term means everything and nothing; for many people, it connotes the narcissistic, unserious little sibling of religion. For some, it’s practically a slur. Does it mean anything at all?
For most Westerners, spirituality has do with experiences of God—or, if you prefer, the divine, the sacred, the trans-personal. Most but not all: one might feel a sense of the numinous—the mysterious, the awesome, the holy—without attributing it to a deity at all. Some spirituality is religious, some isn’t—just as some religion is “spiritual” in this sense, while some is not.
Broadly speaking, spirituality is not a matter of what one is told or believes, but what one experiences directly. And such experiences often involve an altered state of consciousness. This needn’t be as dramatic as the ego dissolving into the vast interconnected lattice of being (though I do highly recommend that). It could be as simple as the warmth that I experience lighting Shabbat candles with my daughter, or the heart of someone kneeling in prayer—anything that shifts the mind out of what neuroscientists call the default mode network, or what the rest of us call the ego, the self, the “you” that’s worrying about status and survival, viewing the world from the perspective of I, Me, and Mine, and into something else, perhaps a flow state, or a quality of enhanced presence with another person, or something that might be described as holy. Such small shifts of consciousness can enrich our lives and make them extraordinary, even while doing the dishes.
Such spiritual experiences are usually the result of a spiritual practice: prayer, meditation, ritual, trance, the ingestion of a psychoactive substance, contemplation, movement, art-making, deep connection with others, exercise, sex—all of these can generate spiritual experience. It’s not the what; it’s the how. And ideally, spiritual experiences generate ethical, compassionate action. The point of Moses going up Mount Sinai was not to get high on the mystical experience of God—it was to have that experience and bring back the Ten Commandments. The shaman communes with spirits in nature not just to trip, but to bring back much-needed healing or information or power to the community. You do yoga, or go to the spa, or go to church not only for relaxation or inspiration—but to be a better person, a better spouse, lover, parent, friend.
Spirituality is not a matter of what one is told or believes, but what one experiences directly.
Of course, sometimes this doesn’t happen. Spiritual states can be pretty awesome, and even a little addictive, so you might just cultivate them to get high. Also, the human ego tends to the narcissistic. I can compare my spiritual attainments to yours and aggrandize my ego, or, if mine seems lesser, envy your greatness. I can do what’s called “spiritual bypass,” cultivating lofty, amazing spiritual mindstates to avoid the messy work of interpersonal relationships, or political engagement, or caring about the vulnerable. This is a drag, and it happens all the time. Abusive clergy, narcissistic social media influencers, annoying psychedelic douchebags—the forms vary, but the phenomenon exists. It sucks.
There’s much more I could say about spirituality; it’s something I’ve been writing about for twenty years. But for now, let’s just say it has something to do with practices that generate experiences of something other than our ordinary mind, which may or may not be defined as sacred or holy or divine, and which may or may not lead to transformations in how we live. And psychedelic use can be such practice.
Not always, of course. Contemporary psychedelic practice may be recreational, or therapeutic/medical, or spiritual in nature. Or blends of all three: someone’s recreational use of MDMA at Burning Man may also be spiritually significant and of possible therapeutic benefit. Many indigenous cultures have no distinction between spiritual and physical healing; a curandero can do both. And even “purely” recreational use doesn’t mean mere escapism or superficial thrill-seeking (though even those can be perfectly fine); what is recreation but re-creation, after all? These days, daring to have fun is practically a form of resistance.
The medical and therapeutic space is the most well-developed of the three categories, in terms of current research, attention, and venture capital investment. The number of peer-reviewed scientific studies of psychedelics has risen from 250 per year in the 1990s to over 2,000 per year today. There have been double-blind studies showing the efficacy of psychedelic interventions on treatment-resistant depression, opioid addiction, alcohol addiction, smoking addiction, PTSD, anxiety, acute anxiety (including at the end of life), and other conditions. It was thought that the first such approval would be granted last year for MDMA-assisted therapy, but for a variety of reasons—including the fact that the FDA doesn’t regulate therapy—it was not. Still, several applications are currently pending at the FDA, and the consensus is that it’s just a matter of time until these treatments are licensed and available. Meanwhile, ketamine therapy is already legal, since ketamine has been FDA-approved for other conditions for many years and is available “off-label.” A version of ketamine called esketamine was FDA-approved for depression in 2019, with data suggesting it is effective for 70 percent of people with treatment-resistant depression. There are, according to Google Maps, six ketamine-assisted therapy clinics in Indianapolis alone.
Here, too, the lines are blurry. Someone may sign up for “secular” psychedelic assisted therapy, only to have an unexpected spiritual experience—my colleagues at Emory are researching how often this happens and how best to work with it. I think it’s a real possibility that the mainstreaming of psychedelic therapy may lead to a wave of “accidental mystics,” and I think the overlap of these categories will be a challenge for Western medicine to sort out.
But for the rest of this essay, I will focus on the ways in which psychedelics are being utilized for explicitly spiritual or religious ends, and why, particularly in the context of a societal crises of meaning and mental illness, the subject should be taken seriously.
Psychoactive substances have been used in cultures around the world for millennia. A lot of the psychedelic past, especially the parts written about in bestselling paperback books, is almost certainly invented. But much is not: ritual psychedelic use is a longstanding tradition in many indigenous communities, all of which differ from one another and all of which are shaped by history. For example, Native American use of peyote reflects longstanding tribal traditions, the mixing of tribal groupings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, resistance to American colonialism, and a replacement for site-specific rituals that took place on lands confiscated by American governments. The Native American Church, founded in 1918, blended these traditions with Christianity and sought to make peyote ritual practice legible to American legal and constitutional order.
To take another example, the woman who transmitted Mazatec use of sacred mushrooms to Westerners, Maria Sabina, likewise syncretized Christianity with local practices, as did the founders of the Santo Daime ayahuasca churches in Brazil. It would be a mistake to project colonialist imaginings of some “pure indigenous people” onto the actual lived experiences of indigenous groups, or to imagine some indigenous unity stretching across the globe. Indigenous spiritualities are complex, evolving, and diverse.
Beginning in the nineteenth century, Westerners began experimenting with psychoactive compounds, including opium (“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree” began Coleridge’s “vision in a dream”), and, in the twentieth century, LSD, mescaline, DMT, and so on. This story has been told many times, and the cast of characters is usually the same: Huxley, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Allen Ginsberg. But psychedelic spirituality has always been more multiform than such histories suggest. Some twentieth- and twenty-first-century psychonauts are inspired by Asian contemplative traditions, others by Meso-American indigenous practices; the beliefs of some (Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, Daniel Pinchbeck) are esoteric and resemble science fiction, while others are naturalistic mystics. Some psychedelic churches (my Harvard colleague Jeffrey Breau prefers the term “Novel Psychedelic Spiritual Communities”) are eclectic, hippie-ish, New Agey, and more than a little culty, while others recoil from those sensibilities and have constructed structures of accountability, safety, and decentralized leadership in light of all those Netflix shows. There are even small but increasing numbers of Jews, Christians, and Muslims who have integrated psychedelic practice into their religious lives. There is no one form of psychedelic spirituality, no one purpose animating it, no single truth that is revealed across cultural and historical contexts, no matter how many times some people insist that there is.
What is recreation but re-creation, after all? These days, daring to have fun is practically a form of resistance.
Stan Grof, a pioneering psychedelic researcher, has called psychedelics “non-specific amplifiers,” and I think that’s an extremely helpful concept, precisely because it accommodates so much. Sometimes the amplification is sensual; while I cannot advocate breaking any laws, I have heard that Burning Man attendees on MDMA have had some remarkably “amplified” experiences dancing, or having sex, or starting a profound conversation with someone they just met at an art installation in the desert. Other times, the amplification is spiritual, or embodied, or psychological. Contrast the Burner with someone confronting childhood trauma in a supervised psilocybin session. Or imagine the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious leaders who participated in the 2015 Religious Leaders Study conducted by Johns Hopkins and NYU, 96 percent of whom reported the experience to be the “among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives.”
Let’s pause here for a moment. Those study participants have devoted their lives to religion. In addition to years of study for ordination, many have advanced academic degrees as well. They’ve led funerals and baby-namings, they’ve prayed and studied and celebrated and mourned. And yet 96 percent said this was among the most spiritual experiences of their entire lives. What is going on?
Clearly, there is something about psychedelics that, whatever is happening on a neurological level, opens the mind to wonder. Huxley, gazing at a bouquet of flowers on his mescaline trip, wrote, “I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.” This is not, as some popular accounts have it, confusion or blurriness or hallucination; in Huxley, there are no “cellophane flowers of yellow and green towering over your head” (not that there’s anything wrong with those). There is the bare fact of istigkeit: being-ness, in the flowers themselves.
In the same milieu as Huxley’s bouquet, mid–twentieth century scholars like W.T. Stace—influenced heavily by contemporary neo-Vedanta—created taxonomies of the mystical experience (psychedelic and otherwise) that eventually became codified into the “Mystical Experience Questionnaire” which, in its current form, identifies thirty characteristics of the mystical experience, including
- Freedom from the limitations of your personal self and feeling a unity or bond with what was felt to be greater than your personal self.
- Experience of pure being and pure awareness (beyond the world of sense impressions).
- Experience of the insight that “all is One.”
- Awareness of the life or living presence in all things.
- Feelings of reverence, amazement, tenderness, tranquility, ecstasy, awe, joy, timelessness, and ineffability.
As Meg Ryan said, I’ll have what she’s having. And, to be clear, I have, both in intensive meditation and in psychedelic practices. These experiences are not beyond our capacity. They changed my life for the better. And part of my psychedelic practice today is intentionally remembering them, re-experiencing them, re-remembering that the ordinary self is only one way of looking at experience.
To repeat, mysticism is not the only type of psychedelic spiritual experience, and the Mystical Experience Questionnaire often misses what is most important for practitioners, who may report a whole host of other phenomena: contact with entities, deceased relatives, other dimensions, or spirits in nature; healing on a spiritual and material level, especially healing from personal or intergenerational trauma; insights into one’s own personality or life purpose. Sometimes the experiences are delightful, sometimes quite difficult. Sometimes there are visual elements, sometimes not. Sometimes there is a specific bit of personal content that gets centered—a particular relationship or blockage or trauma—and sometimes the experience can be more amorphous.
Often what psychedelics “amplify” is determined by pre-existing beliefs: some Christians may experience an intense love of God akin to the writings of generations of Christian mystics, while some non-theists might experience a merging into the universe. Some may split the difference, experiencing a sense of sat chit Ananda, being-consciousness-bliss, which, while not conceptualized theistically in a Western mode, resonates with South Asian spiritual traditions (that triad itself comes from Vedanta Hinduism). Whether any of these phenomena are “true” is beyond my pay grade to decide, but they definitely arise as mental experiences, have the felt sense of truthfulness, and are often transformative in any number of ways.
What is going on, scientifically speaking? As I mentioned, psychedelic science is fairly mature when it comes to clinical data. But, as with conventional pharmaceuticals, the mechanism—how it works—is not yet well understood. On the level of the brain, there appear to be several processes happening at once. In layperson’s terms (and I am a layperson), one of the most interesting hypotheses, backed up by neuro-imaging data, is that these compounds temporarily scramble the usual neurochemical functioning of parts of the brain—basically, the default mode network shuts off. It’s like a hard reset on a computational device. And during and after that happens, because the ordinary grooves of brain activity are suddenly offline, there’s a temporary kind of chaos—and a large increase in neuroplasticity. The visualizations of neuronal activity under the influence of psychedelics compared with normal conditions look like a road map of Dubai set next to one of rural Mongolia. It’s remarkable. As with meditation, the brain is able to make new neural connections. A traumatic response that may have been “wired in” is re-wired. The brain can forget connections between thoughts that it had not “seen” before.
Of course, I’ve painted with a broad brush here; neuroscientific accounts of psychedelic experience are far more nuanced and detailed than this. And, in a sense, they are orthogonal to the phenomenology of the psychedelic spiritual experience, just as neuroscientific accounts of love or grief are addressing different questions from philosophical or psychological ones. But something is definitely going on.
Let me briefly step back from the precipice of cheerleading.
First, unlike some in the field, I do not have the view that the use of these psychedelic compounds is present in every spiritual, religious, or contemplative tradition, or that there is some evidence for ancient psychedelic use at the root of Christianity or Judaism. There have now been several articles persuasively refuting these claims, or at least noting that there is not, as yet, evidence for them. It is also worth questioning what these ancient psychedelic hypotheses are meant to do and what they are supposed to validate (psychedelic experience? Christianity? God?).
Rather, I think of spiritual practice as having a grammar and a vocabulary. The vocabulary is the set of tools and practices that are used in a given religious or spiritual context: chanting, drumming, prayer, song, dance, text study, meditation, mantra practice, fasting, sleep deprivation, magic, psychedelics. These vary. Some cultures use exogenous agents: the Sufi use of hashish, biblical use of wine, Native American consumption of peyote, perhaps even the sacrament as mysterion. But others do not.
The grammar of the altered-state experience, however, is relatively consistent: change the mind, have an experience, and then integrate that experience into your life and your community. That grammar applies to Ezekiel in the desert, John the Revelator, the prophet Muhammad, Moses, the whirling dervishes of Sufism, Gautama Buddha, a Shipibo medicine worker, Ramakrishna, the Kabbalist Abraham Abulafia, a yoga influencer. Do the practice. Change the mind-state. Integrate and interpret the experience.
In this light, I want to suggest that the use of psychedelics in contemporary spiritual contexts is, to paraphrase the Jewish-Buddhist bard Leonard Cohen, like “new skin for the old ceremony.” The vocabulary is new to non-indigenous people; the grammar is old. And we need a new skin, because our lives are unimaginably noisier and busier than those of our spiritual ancestors. So of course we will reach for new tools and practices to cultivate spiritual experience. One could even say, although it is a theological utterance, that these newly available pathways have entered Western civilization precisely as our civilization is hurtling toward rapid change that is perhaps terrifying, perhaps dazzling, but, in any case, seemingly a point of inflection in human history. I admit that I am not enough of a mystic to take this on as a point of belief—but I am not enough of a skeptic to dismiss it either.
More moderately, though, consider the crisis of meaning in twenty-first century America, and its various correlate-crises in loneliness, substance abuse, deaths of despair, masculinity, and political fragmentation. We social apes are more isolated from one another than at any point in our evolution. The myths and stories that bound us together—no longer do. Technology has brought us together in some ways, driven us apart in others. There are many possible responses to that crisis—religion, community, culture, contemplative practice. There are many ways for humans to cultivate the better angels of our nature. But psychedelics have shown remarkable promise in treating the symptoms of contemporary malaise, and perhaps even addressing some of their root causes.
Let me step back from a second precipice as well. There are serious risks involved in psychedelic use, and serious problems with the ways in which they are being used today. There have been cases of abuse, both in cult-like communities and in supposedly buttoned-down clinical studies. There have been cases of psychedelics being given to people who should never have done them. And there has been psychedelic-amplified ego inflation, narcissism, and extreme carelessness at the highest levels of our society. “Non-specific amplifiers” can be really bad news, and our current health infrastructure is not yet prepared to deal with the consequences.
There is also a lot of money, hype, exploitation, eugenic flirtation, and pseudo-science in the psychedelic field. It’s a good thing that the field is politically diverse—recent psychedelic conferences have featured Rick Perry and Rep. Dan Crenshaw. But it’s also a bit of a Wild West. And there have been vindictive battles and backlashes, from conservative Christians concerned about demons to some on the Left concerned about appropriation and commodification. It’s messy working with non-specific amplifiers.
Neither drug prohibition nor unbridled psychedelic enthusiasm is the responsible approach to these powerful compounds. In the religious context, we need decriminalization of sincere religious psychedelic use that ensures safe, legal access and prevents abuse and harm. The threat and stigma of criminality needs to be clearly removed in order for responsibility to be ensured. We also need standards of care, transparency, ethics, and accountability. Psychedelics radically increase suggestibility—this is part of why they are effective, but also why they can be abused by unscrupulous or inexperienced facilitators. And we need more studies measuring the adverse effects and risks of psychedelics, not to rain on the parade but to ensure that if psychedelics become more available—in therapeutic, religious, or recreational contexts—we do our best to prevent harm and ensure safety.
There are many ways for humans to cultivate the better angels of our nature. But psychedelics have shown remarkable promise in treating the symptoms of contemporary malaise, and perhaps even addressing some of their root causes.
Having stepped back (or tried to) from these precipices, let me close by returning to my story.
For around thirty years, I’ve devoted my professional life to political, legal, and social activism and journalism on the one hand; and to spiritual practice on the other. For many years, these seemed like entirely different—even antithetical—realms. But for the last decade, it’s become terrifyingly clear how intertwined our country’s political and spiritual lives truly are. Profound feelings of dislocation, loss, and rage animate the dominant political movements of our time. We have lost much of our capacity for civil discourse and disagreement. We are quick to demonize those with whom we disagree and depict them in such extreme terms that they would not recognize themselves. We are insufficiently able to empathize with those who are seen to be other than us, and this drives real-world actions with real-world consequences.
Do I think psychedelics will either save humanity or, in the alternative, get everyone to agree with my political opinions? I do not. But this imperfect species has always depended on tools and practices that enhance our capacities for coexistence and compassion, because we know from experience that we need them to survive. And I think psychedelic practice is one of those tools—perhaps one exceptionally well-suited to this moment in our history, in which acute economic, technological, religious, social, cultural, and political changes seem to be threatening the bonds of society.
For all their limitations, psychedelics can generate what Abraham Maslow called peak experiences—moments in which our layers of socialization, our yearnings for security or status or wealth, even our personalities are temporarily peeled away, and we see through different, fresh eyes; we see our mind manifested before us; we glimpse a reality not defined by barriers that seem to keep us apart. And through mechanisms we do not yet fully understand, these temporary experiences can occasion lasting transformations. We do not fully un-see what we have seen, even after the doors of perception close up again.