I wrote last time about the futility of finding God through reason, logic, facts, evidence, doctrine, and so on. To do so assumes that God is “out there” somewhere, so that is where we think we need to look. In contrast to that approach, Elizabeth Brunig, the author of the essay I featured, believes we need to pay attention to our experiences and the feelings they generate within us. This is how we connect with the reality known most often as God.

Brunig’s experience was spontaneous. But can a spiritual experience be planned and intentionally generated? That was the topic of an article that appeared a year ago in The New Yorker by the popular writer Michael Pollan, provocatively titled “This Is Your Priest on Drugs.” (You can find a non-paywalled version here on Pollan’s website.) For many years, Michael Pollan was known as the best-selling and award-winning author of multiple books on food, healthy eating (“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”), and sustainable agriculture. More recently, he has been exploring the therapeutic potential of psychedelics (How to Change Your Mind was a #1 best seller in 2016) and the nature of consciousness.

It was these more recent interests that led him to write “This is Your Priest on Drugs”. In it Pollan reports on a study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and NYU on the clinical use of the hallucinogenic psilocybin by clergy of various denominations and religions. Psilocybin is a naturally occurring substance in many species of mushrooms and has recently been undergoing extensive study for its potential to treat depression, anxiety, PTSD, and related conditions.

In this case, however, the study’s interest was not in therapy but in psilocybin’s potential for generating “sacred experience.” About thirty religious leaders participated. Most were Christian clergy but several rabbis, an Islamic leader, and a Zen Buddhist roshi were also included.

The researchers knew that the religious and spiritual use of substances like psilocybin stretched back to ancient times, and was still found among some indigenous peoples today. The researches wondered what the result would be for modern day clergy if they used such a drug when they had never done so before (a requirement to participate).

Would psychedelic experiences enhance the well-being and vocation of religious leaders …? Would the experience renew their faith, or make them question it?

As a purely scientific study, the project had a lot of shortcomings, Pollan says. Yet the results were nonetheless significant, and provocative.

Among participants who had two sessions, the researchers found that a striking number—seventy-nine per cent—reported that the experience had enriched their prayer, their effectiveness in their vocation, and their sense of the sacred in daily life. Ninety-six per cent rated their first encounters with psilocybin as being among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives.

Every participant’s experience was unique, of course. A new paper based on interviews of about half the participants did show commonalities, however.

Interviewees tended to report “authentic spiritual or religious experiences,” the account notes. A priest is quoted as saying, “I wasn’t dreaming, I wasn’t imagining, I wasn’t hallucinating.” Many participants likened their experience to those of historical and scriptural figures. “I was able to experience what the mystics were for some reason able to experience spontaneously,” a pastor said. “I don’t think that . . . my experience was less than theirs.” According to the interviews, the divine was not usually embodied or visible but, rather, felt as a presence that suffused reality, or as a sense of oneness. “I realize my very pulse is God, my very breath is God,” a rabbi said.

Pollan picked up on the significance of leaders from traditional religions having and affirming very untraditional experiences. Because the participants felt they had genuine sacred experiences, many felt compelled to alter their understanding of the sacred.

It was common for participants to gain an appreciation for religions other than their own. “All the truths are in all the religions,” one rabbi said. “The active ingredients are all the same.” A Congregationalist … observed after his session that “pathways towards the truth are even more varied than I thought.” Some felt a marked tension between the conventions of their faith and the immediacy of their psilocybin experience. “I think I have less tolerance for institutional religion now,” a Presbyterian minister is quoted as saying. “There are other ways to connect with the divine.” Here was the entire history of world religions in a nutshell: orthodoxy and authority in tension with the direct spiritual experience of the individual.

In conclusion, Pollan turned to renowned church historian and religion professor, Elaine Pagels, for her reaction to the study.

Pagels has written extensively about the early years of Christianity, when religious leaders suppressed followers who were more mystical. In certain ways, clergy who embrace psychedelic rituals resemble the second- and third-century Christians that Pagels has written about, many of whom believed that revelation was potentially available to everyone, that God had a feminine dimension, and that it’s possible for individuals to experience God directly.

Organized religion often opposes such figures. Religions can’t survive if they’re wide open to the claims of every individual with supposed experience of the divine. “You can’t have people going around saying, ‘God told me to do this or that,’” Pagels told me. “Because you can really go off the rails.” Even so, she was heartened by the depth and passion exhibited by many of the religious leaders in the study. “Traditions can become fossilized,” she said. Religious institutions will need to be “enlivened and reimagined and transformed” if they are to survive and serve people today.

“Fossilized” is probably as good a word as any to describe the view of many people towards organized religion, even many who are still participants. Several of the study’s clergy expressed feelings of vocational burnout and frustration with the focus on institutional preservation of their religious bodies. That changed with their psilocybin experience.

None of the study participants saw their experience as pointing to a new religious path. Rather, most felt renewed to continue in their callings and their traditions. But their focus turned from rituals, doctrines and institutions to spiritual experiences. Like the Presbyterian minister quoted above, they had discovered that “there are other ways to connect with the divine.”

Churches have long incorporated practices that transcended mental beliefs and facilitated spiritual experience. Music is the most well-known, but sacraments, prayer, meditation, dance, vigils, and pilgrimage also have long histories. Today, there is renewed interest in the often institutionally suspect mystical tradition and in outdoor experiences in nature. The recent fascination with near death experiences (NDEs) fits in here, as well.

The key factor in all this is people learning to trust themselves. The difficulty with that is understandable because this hasn’t been encouraged for most of us, and certainly not by religious institutions. “Trust us to tell you what’s true,” has been their mantra. But people today need truth that they know in their hearts to give their lives meaning and direction, rather than truths they’ve been told by authorities to believe in their heads. Ultimately, what we are all seeking is Truth with a capital “T”, whatever you want to call it. And that is something that can’t be learned from a book or a teacher but we can only experience for ourselves.

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