Indigenous use

Seeking the Sacred with Psychoactive Substances: Chemical Paths to Spirituality and to God, Volume 2: Insights, Arguments, and Controversies, edited by J. Harold Ellens, Praeger, 2014.

This is part two of a two-part review of this publication in the Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality Series published by Praeger. Read part one here.

After the historical accounts and analyses of the first volume, the second volume consists of a collection of essays reflecting on current research into the spiritual aspects of the psychedelic experience from a broad spectrum of disciplines. Some of the theoretical problems of researching psychedelic-induced spiritual experiences are also addressed.

The book starts with three chapters by researchers involved with the Johns Hopkins group that studies psilocybin-induced mystical experiences. William Richards reflects on the difficulties of studying mystical experiences in a clinical setting and how entheogens provide a way to more deeply understand such experiences. He shows how they can be part of a healing program for patients suffering from end-of-life anxiety, addiction or depression and anxiety. He also touches upon one of the recurring themes of this second volume, which is the question whether the mystical experiences resulting from the use of psychedelics are genuine. Robert Jesse and Roland Griffiths give an overview of the research that has been conducted at Johns Hopkins with over 200 volunteers from different backgrounds. They elaborate on the relation between the mystical experience and its long-term effects on personality and the self-ascribed spiritual significance of the experience.

Then there are some anthropological essays on the use of psychedelics in modern-day religious and shamanic settings. Joseph Calabrese analyses the therapeutic use of peyote in the Native American Church, showing how for the Navajo the alteration of consciousness, the spiritual and the therapeutic are deeply connected. This is exemplary for many non-Western cultures. Evgenia Fotiou gives us an impression of the reasons people travel to the Amazon to partake in ayahuasca retreats, showing that such tourists are looking for a liminal experience and consider their journey somewhat of a pilgrimage. They look for personal transformation and healing, and display a conceptualisation of spirituality as both healing and transformational which is similar to the Native American Church’s.

Beatriz Labate and Rosa Melo write about the relation between an organized ayahuasca religion, the União do Vegetal (UDV), and scientific study. The UDV is actively involved with research into the therapeutic properties of Hoasca, their term for the beverage. This chapter is a review of a book they have published and a reflection on their motives for doing so, and it shows how the science is both formed by the group’s beliefs and simultaneously develops their beliefs and adds to them. The insights from science strengthen the group’s worldview.

An old essay by Walter Pahnke and William Richards, reprinted from a time when the use of psychedelics was not yet illegal, shows the promise these substances once held for science and society and reflects the idealism psychedelic science evoked in the sixties. The anecdotal chapter that follows is an interwoven personal history by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Stanley Krippner. It gives an interesting picture of the era and of some of its key figures.

We then read three chapters on the topic of the validity of psychedelic mysticism. Roger Walsh argues that these experiences are genuine and that psychedelics can, under certain circumstances and by certain people, be employed to attain mystical consciousness. Ralph Hood dives deeper into the science of measuring mysticism and shows that with the most elaborate rating scales we have developed, it is impossible to distinguish psychedelic mysticism from any other type of mysticism. In a wonderful essay, Dan Merkur attempts to elaborate a cartography of mystical experience, showing how the experience is coloured by beliefs and ‘overbeliefs’, a particularly insightful term he borrows from William James. He argues that such interpretation brings one away from the core mystical experience and closer to the cultural milieu in which one operates.

David Steindl-Rast makes a similar argument. The mystical core of religion is, according to him, the same wherever one looks and local interpretations have a tendency to stratify religion and turn the lived experience into dogmatic moralism. In his view, the mystical experience is always a challenge to the status quo of religion insofar as it has devolved into dogmatism.

The next four chapters can be regarded as interpretations of the mystical experience. Christopher Bache gives a highly personal account of his experience of death and rebirth under the influence of psychedelics, along with the insights and growth these experiences have enabled. This is then elaborated upon by Anthony Bossis, who is doing research into the use of psilocybin and mystical experience to alleviate existential distress in the dying, arguing that meaning provided by spirituality is essential to being at peace with one’s own end.

In a short essay, Thomas Roberts introduces the work around the perinatal theory of Stanislav Grof, who writes in the next chapter about the influence of psychedelics in science and therapy. This chapter resonates with Steindl-Rast’s, as it shows how the psychedelic experience shakes up certain dogmatic parts of academia and brings new insights to the fore.

The penultimate chapter by David Yaden and Andrew Newberg is about self-transcendent experiences by other means than psychedelics and the other classical ways to induce altered states of consciousness. They focus on the emerging field of non-invasive brain stimulation and show how such techniques will radically alter the way in which we think about spirituality on the one hand and healing and therapy on the other.

In the last chapter, Robert Fuller dives deeper into the arguments for and against the validity of chemical illumination, contending that the arguments against this idea are only partially true. He then goes on to link this debate to the one surrounding the legality of psychedelics and their spiritual applications. He concludes the book with an appeal to spiritual maturity, showing that we should only judge a certain form of spirituality by the way people are transformed by it and by the degree to which this transformation is beneficial for them personally and for society as a whole.

All in all, this second volume provides thought-provoking material. It shows both the promise and the limits of psychedelic spirituality and urges us to keep looking further towards a better understanding of both the psychedelic experience and our consciousness in general. Many essays emphasise, or implicitly argue from, the hypothesis that the mystical experience is the common core of all religions, which has often been stated before, but the literature that criticizes this idea is notably absent from these volumes.

The two volumes together provide an overview of and reflection on the various ways in which psychoactives were and are used within spiritual and religious contexts. It is the broadest-ranging academic publication to date on the subject. It will shape the debate for years to come.

Seeking the Sacred with Psychoactive Substances: Chemical Paths to Spirituality and to God, Volume 1: History and Practices, edited by J. Harold Ellens, Praeger, 2014.

This is part one of a two-part review of this publication in the Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality Series published by Praeger.

The idea that psychoactives play a significant role in many historical and contemporary religious practices is not radically new, but the fact that their use is so widespread and that they are practically everywhere one dares to look may come as a surprise to many readers of this tome. The first volume of this brilliant collection of essays by a wide variety of authors is dedicated to the history and practices regarding the use of psychoactives in religion.

The volume starts with an essay by the eminent scholar Thomas Roberts, who argues for three main ideas: 1) that in the current era, religion is changing from the word propagated through scripture to increasingly democratised, personal sacred experiences cultivated within the lives of individuals; 2) that the common core of all religions is mysticism, in other words the idea of a perennial philosophy; and 3) that psychedelics can cause mystical experiences. If we follow this line of argument, the essays in this volume are either illustrations or explanations of these principles.

To start with the latter, we find two essays by Michael Winkelman detailing the way in which shamanic consciousness played a key role in human evolution. He argues that altered states were selected for by the process of evolution, because they allowed for the knitting together of groups of early hominids, making them more resilient. He finds neurological correlates of all the major components of the psychedelic experience within the evolutionary development of the human brain, extending to well before humans separated from other species, but highly developed only within them. These essays show that humans were primed to have these experiences and are sensitised to a wide variety of substances in order to further their survival.

The historical examples extend all the way into antiquity and even prehistory, showing that various sacred substances were part of important cultures worldwide from a very early point in history. The spread of cannabis throughout Europe and Asia, for example, stretching almost over the entire Eurasian continent in a time when cultural exchange was previously thought to be limited, is remarkable (essay by Chris Bennett). Similarly, the use of psychoactives within Greek and Roman cults extends beyond the large-scale rituals at Eleusis, and furthers the idea that psychoactives provided the bass drone that reverberated throughout religious life within the roots of Western culture (essays by Carl P. Ruck and David Hillman). There are even arguments for the use of psychedelics within some sects in medieval Roman Catholicism, showing that even organised religions – whose history we now consider to be free of such drug use – were at some point influenced by them (essay by Dan Merkur).

In modern times, of course, psychoactives played a large role in the spirituality of the hippies, to which a two-part chronology is dedicated. They also influenced the spread of Buddhism and other Eastern spiritualities in the West. The former is discussed in some of the most interesting essays in the book. Author Dan Merkur strikes a good balance between dutifully reporting the phenomenon and maintaining a critical stance towards it. The essay on the latter subject is a transcription of a discussion between James Fadiman and Buddhist scholar Kokyo Henkel, which is a great way to approach the subject in a lively manner. Their exchange shows the importance of psychedelics in the growth of Buddhism in the US, giving one of many examples of how the psychedelic experience inspires people to start their own spiritual practice.

Two of the chapters stand out because they are descriptions of personal experiences and thereby examples of how psychoactives can be used within modern post-secular religious practice (essays by Julian Vayne and Clark Heinrich). While these are not necessarily the most interesting, they do illustrate the way in which rituals can be devised around the use of psychoactives in order to engender spiritual experience.

The last two chapters, by Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast and professor of psychology of religion Ralph W. Hood, respectively, are more reflective. Steindl-Rast argues that psychedelics provide a genuine path towards spiritual experience and that we shouldn’t prevent anyone from walking this path in a conscientious way. Hood argues that the study of the spiritual aspects of the psychedelic experience should be methodologically careful, and he shows that trying to isolate the spiritual experience from its surrounding ritual and community can distort the results. Both propose that the use and study of psychoactives be embedded in spiritual communities, bound by rituals and mutual compassion.

The broad scope of the essays in this first volume urges one to reconsider the long-held belief that psychoactives merely ‘played a role’ in the history of religion. Instead they suggest that this role was extensive and might even have been decisive in the formation of the spiritual faculty in man. With the obvious exception of the two essays on personal experience, all essays are well-documented and provide a plethora of references for those wanting to double-check if the authors don’t read too much into the available evidence. This volume provides a wealth of ideas and knowledge for anyone interested in the spiritual aspects of the psychedelic experience.

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