Several months ago, Philip Smith, a friend of mine, told me that he understood my belief in psychedelics and in Christianity, but that he didn’t understand what I thought was the connection between the two. This is a fair question. In the present-day flurry of publicity about renewed interest in psychedelics, one reads much in the way of scientific and therapeutic interpretations of the value of psychedelics but not much about religious interpretations. In contrast, during the period when psychedelics first burst upon the scene, there was a lot of interest in the religious aspect of psychedelic experience, but usually expressed in the terminology of East Asian religions, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism (but not Confucianism). Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner adapted the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a psychedelic manual for guiding a psychedelic trip. Leary also wrote Psychedelic Prayers, a psychedelic interpretation of the Tao Te Ching. For a while, Leary declared that he was a Hindu. Alan Watts, a former Anglican priest, echoed Aldous Huxley’s endorsement of the Perennial Philosophy, explaining in vivid prose his understanding of the Supreme Identity of Atman and Brahman, the riddles of Zen Buddhism, the ideal of wu-wei, or non-action, and the usefulness of emptiness in the Tao Te Ching. In The Joyous Cosmology he went on to describe his psychedelic experiences as consistent with his previous writings. The poet, Gary Snyder, memorialized as the fictional Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, studied Zen Buddhism in Japan, although Kerouac himself maintained his Roman Catholic faith along with his interest in Buddhism. Allen Ginsberg evinced interest in both Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism. Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary’s mothering support figure at Millbrook, travelled to India, found a guru, and became Ram Dass. Also at Millbrook, Bill Haines adopted a Hindu framework, took a lot of LSD, and bullied into Enlightenment his devotees whom he had saved from addiction to bad drugs. And Art Kleps explained that members of his Neo-American Church considered LSD and other psychedelics to be sacraments because they lead to Enlightenment, which he defined as the realization that life is a dream and the externality of relations, an illusion. But he also stated an official equivalence between LSD and the Holy Ghost. So, yes, there were a few hints of a Christian understanding of psychedelic experience, but they were few and far between compared to the number of interpretations in terms of East Asian religious traditions. One notable instance of the consumption of psychedelics in a Christian setting was Walter Pahnke’s Good Friday Experiment, the “Miracle of Marsh Chapel.” It was a double-blind study in which Christian divinity students received either a placebo or a dose of psilocybin in a basement room while the sounds of the Good Friday service in Marsh Chapel upstairs were being piped in. Both immediately afterwards and decades later as confirmed by a follow-up study, the subjects who had received the psilocybin reported it as a life-changing experience for the better. However, Leary, who was Pahnke’s academic advisor for the experiment, reported in High Priest that he was disturbed by the Christian proselytizing that the experiment inspired in one of the participants, and it was clearly not a direction that he wished to pursue, nor one that caught on very much among the legions of psychedelic trippers of the era, with the exception of the enthusiasts of the evangelical Jesus Movement, who disavowed psychedelics when they turned to Jesus.
I should also mention that Albert Hofmann, the discover of LSD, reported that he saw right away the religious or spiritual significance of the LSD experience, which he connected with visionary experiences he had had as a child. But he seems to have conceptualized this religious significance in terms of a sort of nature mysticism, and not in Christian terms. There is also a shamanic tradition of the use of psychedelic plants, which sometimes, as in the Native American Church, incorporate Christian elements but more often adhere to a non-Christian tradition. So, one might think that there is something inherent in psychedelic experience that causes a tendency for people to reject Christianity in favor of East Asian or tribal religion, or nature mysticism; or, in accepting Christianity, to reject psychedelics.
In response, I would first point out that an interest in Asian religious traditions, as a fashionable new source of spiritual inspiration for Western seekers who thought they knew Christianity all too well, preceded the widescale use of psychedelics. Alan Watts can serve as a star example of someone who was already preaching the virtues of Asian religions before he tried psychedelics and then interpreted the experience in those same terms he was already using. So, for some, it may have been a case of people expressing what they believe they have learned from psychedelic experience in the terms they use to talk about whatever they are accustomed to thinking of as the most important and profound aspects of life. For others, it may have been a case of following the leaders. This would explain why so many psychedelic enthusiasts nowadays talk in terms of neuroscience and medical and psychological therapies instead of Zen koans. In other words, I think the association of psychedelics with East Asian religious traditions, nature mysticism, or shamanism, in the minds of people of my generation, including me, was an effect of intellectual fashion. That doesn’t mean it was insincere or shallow, but just that there is no reason to take it as the final word on psychedelics and religion.
I call myself a psychedelic Christian not because I understood my peak psychedelic experiences in Christian terms when I had them, but because I have since come to believe that the historical fact that I was young at a time when psychedelics were all the rage is on the same footing as the fact that I happened to be born into a Christian family living in a culture molded by Christianity; that is, that both these facts are instances of God’s grace. Memories of my peak mescaline and LSD experiences help me to understand what Jesus says about the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven, in the Gospels, and to understand what the Apostle Paul says about God making foolish the wisdom of the world. To explain my thinking on the subject, I list here some facts which I notice and some articles of faith connected with them:
Facts
Some things that I care about the most are not under my control, nor under the control of any other individual human being or group of human beings.
One of those things is the fact that out of all the people who have ever lived, are now living, or will ever live, I am exactly one of them, and I know which one. And I believe this is true for each person who ever lives, from his or her own first-person perspective.
I don’t understand how such a personal fact can be caused by, or arise out of, an impersonal, uncaring universe.
It makes sense that God could be the reason for this personal fact, since God is a person and perhaps doesn’t want to be the only person. I don’t know how God does it, but at least I can see why God would do it.
God could also be the one who is in control of all those other things, usually lumped together under the heading “nature”, that are undeniably not under my control or under the control of any other people, individually or collectively. Something or somebody is in control, or else things would be more unpredictable than they are, and I have already said why I think it is a “somebody” and not a “something”.
Articles of faith
Everything is fundamentally all right.
If death were permanent unconsciousness, something would be fundamentally wrong.
Death is not permanent unconsciousness.
If death were survival as a disembodied spirit, something would be fundamentally wrong.
Death is not survival as a disembodied spirit. I have always had a body and always will.
If death meant that I would no longer have a first-person perspective, something would be fundamentally wrong.
Death does not mean that I will no longer have a first-person perspective.
If I neither loved nor were loved, something would be fundamentally wrong.
I love and am loved.
If free will were an illusion, so that nothing was really up to me, or if only trivial things were up to me, then something would be fundamentally wrong.
But the most important thing, which is accepting the gift of everlasting life, is up to me.
The faith that everything is fundamentally all right is confirmed both by peak psychedelic experience and by what Jesus says and does. I can see no reason to believe in the possibility of becoming permanently unconscious. It looks like a real possibility from the outside, but not from the inside, and consciousness is the inside. Neither experience nor a priori reasoning can produce a rational belief in it. But fear makes it appear real. So, it doesn’t follow that I don’t need Jesus to tell and show me I have life everlasting. Without him, with only psychedelic experience and reasoning to support my faith, I would be less sure. Personal experience and pure philosophy are necessary but not sufficient, for me anyway. Like the father in Mark 9:24 who cried out, “I believe; help my unbelief!”, I waver, and reading the Bible and going to church helps me, in a way that continuing to take psychedelic trips didn’t. But when LSD worked, it worked; and at that time, I would read the Bible only to try to interpret it in terms suggested to me by my reading of Alan Watts, and I didn’t even consider going to church, as I thought it was controlling, judgmental, uncool, and anti-psychedelic. It took a long time of tripping, and then studying and teaching philosophy and world religions, before reading the Bible, praying, and going to church worked again; but now they do,* and that is why I call myself a psychedelic Christian.
*I’m not saying that Christianity is true because it works, but that it works because it is true.
Listen to the great Christoph Bull in a jazzy mood that sounds psychedelic and Christian to me: