A New Reformation - Thoughts on Psilocybin and Spirituality

"I'm an atheist, I don't believe there is a God," she affirms. "But then I began to feel this love. Just overwhelming, all-encompassing love." There is a long silence. "And the way I describe it is being bathed in God's love," she goes on, her voice cracking, "because I find no other way to describe it. I felt that I belonged, that I was part of everything and had the right to be here. How else do I describe it? Maybe what your mother's love felt like when you were a baby. This feeling of love was suffusing the entire experience.”

I'm talking with Dinah Bazer-New Yorker, grandmother, survivor. And unrepentant nonbeliever. She was diagnosed with mixed -cell ovarian cancer in 2010 at the age of sixty-three. Ordinarily more than half the women in Dinah's position don't outlive the dreaded five-year window past their diagnosis. But Dinah was one of the lucky ones. She caught her tumor early at stage 1C, ensuring much better odds of winning the battle. After six rounds of chemotherapy and two years of follow-up appointments, the cancer was in remission, and Dinah should have been feeling optimistic. But she couldn't shake her paralyzing fear of the disease that is never cured -only contained-and could always return with a vengeance.

In 2012 Dinah confessed her existential crisis to one of the nurses from the Perlmutter Cancer Center at New York University during a routine checkup. It was suggested she enroll in a first- of-its-kind study that their psychiatric team was conducting with Johns Hopkins University. On its face, the researchers were trying to determine if psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, could ease depression and anxiety in cancer patients. According to the findings of the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial released in the respected Journal of Psychopharmacology in November 2016, the vast majority found clinical relief--with 87 percent of NYU's twenty-nine volunteers reporting increased life satisfaction or well-being for months afterward.' Like Dinah, a full 70 percent rated their one and only dose of psilocybin as either the most meaningful experience of their entire lives, or among the top five. The numbers were consistent with the fifty-one volunteers from the Hopkins study, the results of which were published simultaneously.? Altogether, eighty tormented people dove into the unknown. Most left with a new lease on life, forever changed. The outcome is characterized as "unprecedented within the field of psychiatry.”

While the new batch of data was eye-catching from a therapeutic perspective, the research's weren't necessarily looking for the next Prozac or Xanax. There's not much money in a single- dose wonder drug. The pharmaceutical industry tends to prefer long-term users who get hooked on a steady regimen of renewable prescriptions. Instead the NYU team had joined their colleagues at Hopkins on the hunt for something far more valuable. The real question wasn't whether psychedelics might work for those confronting death, but why? And the initial answers had already led the scientists down a rather unscientific path, trespassing into corridors of the mind that once interested students of religion alone.

A decade earlier, in 2006, the Hopkins team completed the first psilocybin project since the 1970s, when research into the forbidden substance became largely impossible during the War on Drugs. Under tightly controlled conditions the psilocybin unleashed a profound, mystical experience that seemed to anchor the lasting emotional and psychological benefits recorded by the thirty-six volunteers. They had no life threatening illness, and were otherwise free of the debilitating angst that consumed Dinah. But these early results were shockingly similar to the 2016 collaboration with NYU: one-third of the participants rated their experience "as the most spiritually significant of their lives," comparing it to the birth of a child or the death of a parent. Two-thirds placed it among the top five.' when friends, family, and coworkers were interviewed, they confirmed the remarkable transformations in the volunteers' mood and behavior for months, even years, following their single dose.

From that moment on, Dr. Roland Griffiths upended his career to focus almost exclusively on psilocybin, creating what is now called the Johns Hopkins Psychedelic Research Unit. More than 360 volunteers and fifty peer-reviewed publications later, he's ready to call a spade a spade. In his 2016 TED Talk, Griffiths said the drug-induced ecstasy he routinely witnesses in the laboratory is "virtually identical" to that reported by natural-born prophets and visionaries throughout human history. The underlying experience itself, whether activated by psilocybin or some spontaneous internal flood of neurotransmitters, must be "biologically normal." if we are essentially wired for mystical experience, it raises the intriguing prospect that, under the right mind-set and environment, any curious soul can be instantly converted into a religious savant.

Griffiths's colleague, Dr. William Richards, has been testing that hypothesis since the 1960s, when he codeveloped the very scale to measure these peak states of consciousness, the Mystical Experience Questionnaire. Richards himself holds the dubious distinction of administering the final dose of psilocybin in 1977 at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, the last legal refuge for this research before an extended hiatus. Together with Griffiths, he was the first to get the ball rolling again in the early 2000s, once the federal government was persuaded by the "high standards of scholarly competence" at Hopkins, one of the top medical schools in the country?

In his 2015 book, Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences, Richards maps out the essential features of the perfect psilocybin journey: transcending time and space, intuitively sensing the unity and sacredness of all things, accessing knowledge that is normally not available. Oftentimes there is a merging of the everyday personality with a larger, more fundamental whole. Words fail to capture the unsinkable conviction that the experiencer has somehow glimpsed the ultimate nature of reality, an insight that seems "blatantly obvious" at the time, and is usually accompanied by intense feelings of joy, tranquility, exaltation, and awe.

On the ineffability scale Dinah is certainly no exception. I'm wondering why an avowed atheist would appeal to "God" to describe the infinite love that "bathed" her as the psilocybin supercharged her biochemistry. "Why not the love of the 'universe,' or the love of the 'cosmos,' or the love of 'mature"?" l ask.

"Because 'God' is as good as the 'universe and the 'cosmos' and 'nature.' These are all things we really don't know. I've always thought heaven and hell were absurd ideas. I am not interested in mysticism at all. I tend to think of it as a bunch of baloney. And I don't think there's any meaning to life. But it doesn't matter to me, because my own experience is all I have. I've had very religious people ask me, 'You don't believe in God?' And I say: 'No, I believe in Love." And I can still feel it sometimes.”

"Even now ... seven years later?”

"Oh yes.”

But words don't always fail. Dinah can dredge up poignant specifics about the visions, now indelibly tattooed on her psyche, that unfolded during the psilocybin session in 2012. Lying comfortably on a couch, with her eyes under a sleep shade and headphones pumping a soothing mix of classical and instrumental music, she tackled the therapeutic portion of her six-hour journey in pretty short order. In her mind's eye Dinah saw what she immediately recognized as her fear and anxiety: "a big, black lump like coal under my rib cage, on the left-hand side, which was not where the cancer was. It was not my cancer." Enraged, she yelled some colorful language at the inky intruder like a proper New Yorker. And in an instant it was gone. For good.

The nasty part out of the way, Dinah had nothing left to do but enjoy the playlist that had been skillfully cobbled together by the NYU team. "So I just drifted away. I was living in the music, like a river." That's when the love of "God" entered Dinah's life, staying with her for the remaining hours on the couch, and the many years since. But something else happened too. And the researchers believe it holds the key to the whole experience.

The sequence is tricky to verbalize. Dinah is keen that I not misquote her by writing something as sentimental and cliched as "being at one with the universe." So she describes a process in which there was a "dissolution of the self" and a "melting away of barriers." She remembers the moment when concepts like "internal" and "external" no longer held true. "I'm not just standing there, looking out at the world anymore. I'm part of the world." After a lengthy pause while she harvests the right phrase, Dinah refers to this fleeting moment as "a state of pure being." She recalls taking several deep breaths, exhaling with force, just to hear the air escape her chest. She needed to prove that her physical body was still there, that it still existed somewhere in time and space. The source of her awareness, once so easy to locate, was suddenly everywhere and nowhere at once. And then it all made sense. In that unsettling, parallel reality-wading effortlessly to the violins-Dinah arrived at the realization that "birth and death actually don't have any meaning." When forced to clarify, she adds, "It's more of a state of always being."

"Always being?"

"Always being. So being now and always. There's no beginning or end. Every moment is an eternity of its own."

A poetic breakthrough from a skeptic. That's precisely what Dinah's guide, Dr. Anthony Bossis, was hoping for. As a professor with NYU's Department of Psychiatry and its director of palliative care research for the psilocybin study, the clinical psychologist's professional specialty is the "existential spiritual and psychological distress" that preys on so many Americans as they approach death. Recent statistics show that depression is up 26 percent for those at the end of life. In a culture that generally avoids the topic, subcontracting the gritty details over to a ballooning hospice-care industry, Bossis believes we simply "don't end well" in this country.

Instead of "a bad death marked by needless suffering," he sees psilocybin as a "meaning-making medicine" with enormous potential." Not just for the dying, but for everybody.

The historic partnership with Hopkins gave Bossis a front-row seat to the cutting-edge research of Roland Griffiths and William Richards that had fascinated him for years. His unforgettable sessions with Dinah and dozens of other volunteers brought home the real-world consequences of the seemingly unreal experience at the mystical core of these psilocybin trials. For Bossis, Dinah is the ultimate example of the sustained positive impact that can be triggered by an unexpected rendezvous with "God's. love." Even for an atheist.

While language can never do justice to what Dinah experienced, she undoubtedly made contact with what Bossis calls a "timeless dimension" that fosters "non-attachment" to all the pain, despair, and stress of being human, allowing a connection to something "more enduring" within. In a personal email Bossis explained why such an irrational event can reliably generate so much meaning for those on the verge of death:

Participants in our study often described this experience with the newfound knowledge that consciousness survives bodily death--that we are not only our bodies--which is a profound gift to a person with a body that is failing, and will soon stop functioning due to advanced disease. It has been described as a transcendence of past, present, future. Timelessness in the moment. I've heard participants speak about feeling "outside of time." The insight that we are not bound by the material world is a powerful one. It is psychologically, existentially and spiritually liberating.

In order to identify with that grander, more expansive aspect of themselves the part that might never die in Dinah's "state of always being" a shedding of the familiar has to occur. Surrendering the physical body and losing all sense of time and space can feel disorienting, like a little death all in itself. "As if a foreshadow of what's to come," Bossis writes, "some of the volunteers say 'this is what death will be like, this is death.** William Richards has been documenting the same phenomenon since the 1960s, using the identical words as Dinah to describe the transition into "mystical realms of consciousness as 'melting' or 'dissolving,' even as being deliciously seduced by a divine lover." In Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences, he further adds:

The mind may undergo one or more intense experiences of death and rebirth and awareness of the ego (that is, that part of your mind that functions with your name in everyday life) may ebb and flow. Similarly, awareness of the body lying on the couch may come and go as one might expect to experience in a state of deep trance.... This threshold between the personal (that is, the everyday self and the transpersonal (that is, more fundamental or universal dimensions of consciousness) is conceptualized by different people in different ways. Most commonly, the term "death" is employed as the ego (everyday self feels that it is quite literally dying. Though one may have read that others have reported subsequent immersion in the eternal and experiences of being reborn and returning to everyday existence afterward, in the moment imminence of death may feel acutely - and for some terrifyingly-real.’

And right there, plain as can be, is the stated goal of every mystic or saint who has ever tried to put any of the world's religions to the ultimate test. To die before you die. Or rather, to psychologically maim the ego-even for a brief instant- in order to be initiated into an understanding of what lies beneath all the thoughts, feelings, and memories that have gone into the lifetime construction of our false, or at the very least incomplete, sense of self. The little ego (Latin for "I) that seems so firmly in control is just an elaborate illusion. And only half the story, as brilliantly narrated by the Harvard-trained neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor in her 2008 book, My Stroke of Insight.

With minute attention to every detail, Bolte Taylor recounts the cerebral hemorrhage she suffered in 1996, when the rupture of a blood vessel in a very strategic area of her left hemisphere sent all "calculating intelligence" out the window. The half of her brain responsible for categorizing and organizing sensory input simply went off-line. Suddenly there was no more "brain chatter." No dialogue with her inner voice that adviser that helps us navigate the external world by comparing incoming data from the five senses to past experiences, and running split- second algorithms to determine the best course of future action. It's the kind of linear, rational thinking that reminds us to restock the refrigerator or put gas in the car before it's too late. It prompts us into the bathroom when nature calls, leaving infants and toddlers to soil their diapers. Before the ego has fully formed, this mental back-and-forth takes a few years to mature and lock in place. But once it does, the left hemisphere assumes daily command, forcing the right hemisphere's more immediate awareness of the present moment into the shadows of forgotten childhood.

During Bolte Taylor's stroke, it wasn't about what happened before, or what comes next, but what's happening now. The same timeless now that awed Dinah with its endlessness:
"every moment is an eternity of its own." Could this be how newborns see the world, before they even realize they're separate beings, independent of their mothers? Every parent gets a kick out of that developmental milestone when babies finally realize they have arms, staring in disbelief at the hands attached to their alien limbs. "Whoa, I'm a weird-looking thing." Bolte Taylor recalls reacting to her body during the initial stages of the stroke, while she mounted the Cardio Glide for her morning exercise routine. Like "a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria," the scientist felt no worry, no concern, and no grief whatsoever. And with total contentment, she prepared to die.

But like Dinah and the hundreds of psilocybin volunteers ushered through a harrowing ego death in recent years, Bolte Taylor survived, reborn with fresh eyes and childlike wonder into the half of her brain that went missing with the pacifier. She calls it "the deep, inner peace circuitry of the right hemisphere." Once it was reactivated, she could find solace in that "sea of silent euphoria" throughout the eight years it took to fully recover from the stroke. Similarly Dinah tells me she can relive the sensation of being "bathed in God's love" if she's just able to slow down. She doesn't meditate as often as she'd like, but whenever she does, that divine love wells up. The NYU playlist can trigger it too. Bossis gave her a copy after the psilocybin session, which Dinah particularly enjoys listening to on Thanksgiving. Whatever kind of "God" this is, it has nothing to do with tired doctrine or stale dogma. It's a felt presence that never judges, never condemns, never demands anything in return. Certainly not blind belief. When I visited William Richards at his oasis of a home outside Baltimore in the early summer of 2018, he distilled his decades' worth of research like a Zen master: "Once you've plunged into the ocean, does it really matter whether or not you believe in water?"

Dinah might not have been looking for it, but what she got was a genuine religious experience. And it's the kind of experience that just might speak to the rising tide of seekers who could spend a lifetime in the church, temple, or mosque and never once feel the rapture that is consistently delivered in a single afternoon at Hopkins and NYU. Over a billion people across the planet are now religiously unaffiliated, including one in five Americans and Europeans, and almost half the British public." The "un-churching" of America is being driven especially by the 40 percent of millennials who don't identify with any faith whatsoever. That figure is more than double what it was a generation ago. The God now rejected by America's largest generation, 73 million people, is not the God of Dinah Bazer. A God that you can actually experience in a direct and personal way is a God that makes sense. A God that erases depression and anxiety like a cosmic surgeon, obliterates the fear of death, and sends a shock wave of love through your fragile heart is a God that lives in high definition. And a God that could hardly be expected to start a war against nonbelievers.

More troubling is the God of organized religion and his army of spokesmen-those priests, rabbis, and imams who stand between superficial definitions of heaven and a common-sense public who have every right to demand proof. When the answer to their doubts is condescending moralism, contrived from an outdated and impenetrable holy book, it's time to cut out the middleman in the private search for transcendence. The result is the 27 percent of all Americans fueling the spiritual-but-not-religious (SBNR) phenomenon. It has been called "the most important religious development of our time" because the trend is clear and will only surge in the years to come. With unprecedented access to the teachings of the world's faiths, we are living in an age when the rallying cry of the SBNRs has never been more achievable: "to be the student and beneficiary of all traditions, and the slave to none.”

If there's a spiritual crisis in the West, it's because the defenders of the three great monotheistic faiths have forgotten their roots. When Yahweh appeared to Moses in a burning bush, it was a terrifying ordeal. The emancipator of the Israelites feared for his life and shielded his eyes from the God who would later warn, in Exodus 33:20, "You cannot see My face; for no man can see Me and live!" Christianity's greatest missionary, Saint Paul, was struck blind for three days on the road to Damascus by a flash of heaven-sent light, followed by an auditory hallucination of Jesus. Thereafter Paul would claim continued supernatural communication with the Son of God. The entire Quran was dictated to Muhammad word for word by the Angel Gabriel, who revealed Islam's scripture in a series of trances. One of Muhammad's earliest biographers, Ibn Ishaq, records the belief of family friends that the young prophet suffered a stroke. Modern scholars say he was prone to "ecstatic seizures.”

"There is no other way to start a religion," says the Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl- Rast. "Every religion has its mystical core. The challenge is to find access to it and to live in its power." In what he calls the centuries-long "tension between the mystical and the religious establishment," the technicians who yearn for real experience are always butting heads with the authorities who are just trying to keep the house in working order. According to Brother David, "time has an influence on the system: the pipes tend to get rusty and start to leak, or they get clogged up. The flow from the source slows down to a trickle." When that happens, the experience of Dinah's God recedes into the mists of history. The written word that tries to capture the original encounter inevitably replaces the personal experience of awe. So that "live doctrine fossilizes into dogmatism," and the ethics and morality that attempt to translate "mystical communion into practical living" are reduced to moralism,2 But despite the dogmatism and moralism that inevitably muck up the system, the mystics have always come along with an embarrassing reminder for the self-appointed enforcers of the establishment's rules and regulations. When it comes to "God"-a word rarely used by the mystics--there is total unanimity on one crucial issue of paramount importance.

God does not reside in a holy book.

Whether it's the Bible or the Quran, the mystics have never found God by reading about God. There is no class, no lecture, no homily that will ever bring you closer to God. Because there is, in fact, absolutely nothing you could ever learn about God. For the mystics, the only way to know God is to experience God. And the only way to experience God is to unlearn everything the ego has been trying so vigorously to manufacture since our infancy. In order to stop wetting the bed and become productive members of society, that "deep, inner-peace circuitry of the right hemisphere" has been sidelined along the way. To bring it back online, say the mystics, the simplest and most effective method is to die before you die.

It's why the Sufis, the mystics of Islam, have been called "the impatient ones." Rather than wait until their actual death, the spiritual experts of the world's second largest religion rank one task more urgent than any other: recovering an "awareness of one's full identity" in this lifetime. The twelfth-century Persian pharmacist Attar once said, "So long as we do not die to ourselves, and so long as we are identified with someone or something, we shall never be free." His protégé, Rumi-the Sufi master and in recent years bestselling poet in America-was in total agreement: "If you could get rid of yourself just once, the secret of secrets would open to you. The face of the unknown, hidden beyond the universe, would appear on the mirror of your perception."

It's why a fundamental concept for the Kabbalists, the mystics of Judaism, is Ayin (Nothingness). "When a man attains to the stage of self-annihilation he can thus be said to have reached the world of the divine Nothingness. Emptied of selfhood his soul has now become attached to the true reality. " Rabbi Lawrence Kushner has written extensively about the process that he calls a "rehearsal" for our moment of transition: "Just as the death of each creature is in turn a rehearsal for the death of a species and a galaxy and a cosmos. The great rhythm of going out and returning. Now this kind of death is not an end but only the beginning of a transformation that will generate a rebirth. You cannot be reborn until you are willing to die."

And it's why the German theologian Meister Eckhart, the mystic par excellence of medieval Christianity, put so much emphasis on the "self-effacement" that is the one condition precedent to finding God: "If you could naught yourself for an instant, indeed I say less than an instant, you would possess all." Eckhart describes the nullification of the ego as a process of unlearning, in which "the soul must lose her being and her life" in something like Bolte Taylor's "sea of silent euphoria." "We cannot serve this Word better than in stillness and silence: there we can hear it and there too we will understand it aright-in the unknowing. To him who knows nothing, it appears and reveals itself.”

To this day all visitors to Saint Paul's Monastery on Mt. Athos in Greece, one of the most important sites of Orthodox spirituality, will come face-to-face with a beautiful Greek saying mounted on the wall of the reception area: "If you die before you die, you won't die when you die.”

Notice the complete absence of the word "God" in the preceding quotations. Something tells me that if the mystics were in charge of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the world would be a very different place. Where even a pragmatist like Dinah might find herself agreeing with the old adage about mysticism: atheists and mystics both essentially believe in nothing. The only difference is that mystics spell it with a capital N. And if enough consenting, healthy adults could experience what Dinah experienced with proper preparation and guidance, even once in their lives, we just might have a new Reformation on our hands.

By Brian Muraresku
From the book, “The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name”