Psychedelics, Mystical Experiencing, And Organized Religion

Thursday, 5 June 2025, 11:16 am
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Having been prone to so-called mystical experiences since before I knew what they were, I’ve never sought altered states, or used psychedelics to have one. So I wonder, is the use of psychedelics to have mystical experiences a mistake, or can they open the door?

A long, carefully crafted but ridiculously entitled essay in the New Yorker, “This Is Your Priest on Drugs,” purportedly answers this and other questions, though it leaves basic assumptions unexamined and unquestioned.

The questions at the core of a 2015 program at John Hopkins, “Seeking Clergy to Take Part in a Research Study of Psilocybin and Sacred Experience” were:

“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?”

The disturbing subtext of the New Yorker essay, and the push by the well-funded John Hopkins researchers to get religious leaders to experiment with psychedelics, is the unexamined need to preserve and reanimate organized religion.

No one asked, then or now: How responsible is organized religion for bringing humanity to this hellish pass? And should religious belief, theology, dogma, ritual and intermediation be preserved at all?

The author of the New Yorker essay, Michael Pollan, summarized his untroubled takeaways from the study:

“I was struck by the fact that these people regarded 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.” 

The conclusions of the study are as dubious as the attempt to place mystical experiences in the context of organized religion. For example, Pollen says, “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.”

Only that’s not exactly what the study found out. The only Muslim and one of the few women in a study (which skewed 97% white and nearly 70% male), Sughra Ahmed, reported after her psilocybin trip that God was neither masculine nor feminine. “God was above gender, above everything . . . an existence, not a figure.”

“And God was love,” she said, adding, “It was just mind-blowingly clear how wrong we have it as human beings, and how we need to nurture love, to put it at the center of our engagement with humanity and animals and the planet.”

One clergyman gave the game away when he said: “We need to be cautious about theologically prescribing psychedelics, because you don’t want to mess too quickly with the institutional structures that support the entire culture.” What culture, this utterly diseased and dysfunctional one in America?

Or the inchoate, capitalistic, consumer and entertainment-driven global culture, tinged locally with dying remnants of the geographically distinct cultures in which people formerly lived?

Elaine Pagels, an historian and professor of religions at Princeton, was not being ironic when she stated, “Traditions can become fossilized.” The truth is that traditions, removed from the contexts of formerly intact cultures, inevitably become empty, meaningless, hollow and irrelevant to the individual and humanity.

With respect to the study, as a rabbi said, “I guess the punchline is that if you enroll people in a study and tell them they’re gonna have a sacred experience, then some people will have a sacred experience.’

The experiences the participants had on psilocybin varied greatly. As reported, “a Catholic priest from Mexico heard directly from Jesus, but a Protestant minister said with a shrug that “there was nothing particularly Christian about it.”

One needs to be careful, and not because you’ll discover that all belief systems are impediments to mystical experiencing, but because it’s not all sweetness and light.

Despite the glowing reports of ecstatic experiences and visions, one woman, Rita Powell, the Episcopal chaplain at Harvard, declined a second session because her first brought her face to face with “the abyss.” Powell said that her facilitators had not prepared her for something so dark.

“One of them kept trying to reassure me that experiences of psilocybin were good, and beautiful, and unitive,” she said. “It seemed like kind of sloppy hippie stuff about love and harmony.”

There’s a saying: “Be careful opening the door; Darkness finds it much easier to enter than Light.”

The project of leading desperately thirsty religious leaders to the holy waters of mystical experience through psychedelics will not satisfy the thirst of the dwindling flocks they’re trying to lead. And if the remedy of partaking in sacramental psychedelics is for everyone, what in God’s name do we need priests, pastors, rabbis and imams for?

As far as psychedelics as a means for the individual to initially experience the sacred, I remain agnostic. Perhaps they can open the door, but there are no shortcuts to transformation.

Besides, directly experiencing the immanent sacredness of life isn’t just about the individual having “mystical experiences;” it’s about the transmutation of the individual and humankind.

What we call “mystical experiences” are essentially precursor states of a higher order, painfully and haltingly emerging consciousness of human beings. There is nothing ‘mystical’ about them actually. So-called mystical experiences are normal when the norm is not the noise of thought, and one learns the art of allowing stillness and silence to be the baseline state of the brain.

For me (and it cannot be just for me), stillness of mind comes naturally through passive watchfulness of the inner movement of thought and emotion in the mirror of nature. Without seeking anything “more,” I see meditation as a daily cleansing of the brain’s palate and palette.

The intent is not to have a mystical experience, or reach a state of insight, much less “attain enlightenment,” but simply to cleanse and order the mind and brain. The numinous, or the immanent, or whatever one calls it, appears as it will.

A pastor said, “I was able to experience what the mystics were for some reason able to experience spontaneously…I don’t think that my experience was less than theirs.”

Yes it was, because it was artificially induced, and because he compared it. Comparison, with others or one’s own previous experiences, must be completely negated for experiencing the sacred to occur.

Less than a kilometer’s hike from the locked gate at the end of the gravel road into Upper Park, there’s a stupendous volcanic gorge that even many people in town have never seen. A huge fire was intentionally started near there last year, so the first sight of the unmarred beauty of the gorge since then was a shock.

In previous years, I’d take a meditation overlooking the gorge once a week. After a few minutes, the sense of familiarity with the scene returned, given my many meditations at the stunning spot in the past. However, familiarity is the enemy of beauty, and memory is the enemy of meditation.

Watching memories arise in the same way I watched the vultures soar overhead, the past dissolved in awareness. Sensory acuity deepened, and effortlessly, the brain and body became fully present.

The door to a deepening meditative state opened, and the unknown, which is the essence of beauty, obliterated the known. The steep, volcanic walls of the gorge, and the browning grass on the slopes of the canyon that surrounds it, were seen again as if the first time, allowing the ineffable sacredness of life to be.

Martin LeFevre

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail