Psychedelic Prophet: The Messenger Book One

Not only have I never taken any psychedelic drug of any type, I have never taken any illegal drug at all. Similarly, I have never had any type of mystical experience whatsoever, though I am certainly open to such a thing and have total confidence that many other people have. But here, as in many matters, others go where I have not tread.

Pollan, famous mostly for books on food, decided to explore drug-induced alterations of consciousness, and this book is the measured result of his spelunking in the caverns of the mind. I suppose that psychedelics might be interesting for me. So all this is abstract to me, and will remain so. In other words, Pollan is not an evangelist or proselytizer for drug use; his advice is thoughtful, rather than enthusiastic. The first two hundred pages are history.

In any case, Pollan starts by talking about recent revived interest in using psychedelics, primarily psilocybin, derived from mushrooms, to treat conditions such as depression and anxiety among terminal cancer patients, as well as more mundane problems like nicotine addiction. Then we are taken backward, to the original synthesis of LSD and its use, and misuse, over subsequent decades, as well as the history of other psychedelics.

The focus is on psychedelics as a class, not on the many varieties thereof, few of which are specifically delineated. Pollan mostly talks to various figures, ranging from scientists now carefully studying psychedelics in accordance with strict regulations, to elderly hippies and their younger disciples still flogging LSD as a miracle that will bring mankind together. He took, at separate times, three drugs: He details the run-up to each use in excruciating detail, and also narrates the actual experiences, which are pretty disappointing, both to the reader and, for the most part, to Pollan.

He did not have any earthshattering mystical experiences, and the Toad was terrifying. He did have various experiences revolving around dissolution of the ego, the most common characteristic of all psychedelics, something that he, a mostly no-nonsense, goal-oriented person, found quite interesting and valuable. He saw and interacted with dead relatives.

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But all in all, this is pretty pedestrian, and most of what is interesting about drug trip descriptions in this book comes from quotes from people other than Pollan. Certainly, if I suffered from untreatable depression, or someone close to me did, I would consider psychedelic therapies. Still, we can pick out of this several interesting facts, or at least facts I found interesting. Adults develop useful mental shortcuts that cut out the sense of open-ended wonder, and the drugs seem to, in some instances, restore it, or a facsimile of it.

There is also a side-mention, not explored further, that Europeans have far fewer mystical experiences under the influence of psychedelics than do Americans, which seems like it would bear further exploring, but the topic never recurs. More broadly, all the discussion in the book offers an obvious question—what does the use of psychedelics, and what they appear reveal to the user, say about the nature of reality and of consciousness?

Despite the desperate flailing of materialists like Steven Pinker , there is no evidence whatsoever that consciousness is the product of the brain, rather than an external phenomenon mediated by the brain, as Henri Bergson, among others, would have it. Of course, there is little evidence of the latter, either.

Pollan, certainly, is sympathetic to the idea that psychedelics reveal evidence for the latter, though he is very cautious in his approach. On the other hand, I think that one single fact, that neither Pollan nor anyone else that I know of discusses, strongly suggests that all psychedelic experiences are merely internal manifestations of the mind.

This is that no new substantive knowledge is ever gained. For me, though, the most interesting aspect of all this is what it might say to us about the nature of consciousness, and the existence of the transcendent realm — and ultimately, of God. When you do psychedelics, are you in some sense encountering the transcendent realm? Or is it entirely a hallucination? Put another way, are the trippy perceptions you have manufactured entirely by your brain, or does the drug make you sense something that is actually there, but hidden from perception under normal conditions?

Or some of both? Bill Richards is a psychiatrist who was involved with the early scientific explorations of psychedelics. Richards emerged from those first psychedelic explorations in possession of three unshakable convictions. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers as well as believers. Second, that whether occasioned by drugs or other means, these experiences of mystical consciousness are in all likelihood the primal basis for religion.

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And third, that consciousness is a property of the universe, not brains. On this question, he hold with Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, who conceived of the human mind as a kind of radio receiver, able to tune in to frequencies of energy and information that exist outside it. Pollan quotes another scientist who was involved with psychedelics as a volunteer in a Johns Hopkins trial:. Turner is now an ordained Zen monk, yet he is also still a physicist, working for a company that makes helium neon lasers. I asked him if he felt any tension between his science and his spiritual practice.

Yet what happened at Hopkins has influenced my physics. I realize there are just some domains that science will not penetrate. You need a different kind of apparatus to peer into that. In , Hopkins neuroscience research Roland Griffiths published a landmark paper based on these trials. The famed religion scholar Huston Smith d. The Johns Hopkins experiment shows — proves — that under controlled, experimental conditions, psilocybin can occasion genuine mystical experiences. In doing so, it offers hope of nothing less than a re-sacralization of the natural and social world, a spiritual revival that is our best defense against not only soullessness, but against religious fanaticism.

And it does so in the very teeth of the unscientific prejudices built into our current drug laws. What is a mystical experience? According to Pollan, William James set out four criteria that he says separate authentic mystical experiences from counterfeit ones:. The experience is ineffable. People who have undergone them struggle to convey what the experience is like. The experience is noetic. People who have these experiences often change their lives in meaningful ways. The experience is passive. I have to interject something personal here. In my life, I have had four or five mystical experiences.

Two of them were profound, life-changing events. One of them I may write about one day. The other I never will. Those experiences not only have to do with why I am a religious believer, but also with why I am the kind of religious believer that I am. Note well that Pollan himself tries several types of psychedelics as research for this book, under supervised conditions, and does not become a religious person because of it. But it did give him profound experiences of awe, experiences that changed the way he saw himself and the world.

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Pollan points out something that everyone I know who has done psychedelics have said to me: You are in most cases lucid. Are these experiences less authentic when induced by a chemical, as opposed to by intense prayer, meditation, fasting, and the like? Not from a neurological point of view. It turns out that under observation with fMRI machines, the brains of experienced meditators and the brains of people on psilocybin look at lot alike.

To put it more crudely, the money a man puts in the bank after 30 years of hard work is no more or no less valuable than the money put in the bank by a man who won the lottery. But then, the man who acquired that money through hard work will regard it differently. This may be why the psychedelic experience is wasted on many people. Nevertheless, reading Pollan makes me far less inclined to dismiss the value of hallucinogenic experiences because they were acquired cheaply. What is more material than a chemical? One could reasonably conclude from the action of psychedelics that the gods are nothing more than chemically induced figments of the hominid imagination.

Questions?

Even the most secular among them come away from their journeys convinced there exists something that transcends a material understanding of reality: What to my spiritually impoverished mind seemed to constitute a good case for the disenchantment of the world become in the minds of the more psychedelically experienced irrefutable proof of its fundamental enchantment. The same phenomenon that pointed to a materialist explanation for spiritual and religious belief gave people an experience so powerful it convinced them of the existence of a nonmaterial reality — the very basis of religious belief.

This is heavy stuff. Eastern Orthodox Christianity teaches that the cosmos is panentheistic.

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What does that mean? While pantheism asserts that God and the universe are coextensive, panentheism claims that God is greater than the universe and that the universe is contained within God. The Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches have a doctrine called panentheism to describe the relationship between the Uncreated God, who is omnipotent, eternal, and constant and His creation that bears surface similarities with the panentheism described above but maintains a critical distinction.

Instead, the teaching of both these Churches is that God is not merely necessary to have created the universe, but that His active presence is necessary in some way for every bit of creation, from smallest to greatest, to continue to exist at all. His love of creation is such that he will not withdraw His presence, which would be the ultimate form of slaughter, not merely imposing death but ending existence, altogether. By this token, the entirety of creation is sanctified, and thus no part of creation can be considered innately evil.

This does not deny the existence of evil in a fallen universe, only that it is not an innate property of creation. This Orthodox Christian panentheism is distinct from a fundamentalist panentheism in that it maintains an ontological gulf or distance between the created and the Uncreated. In my own mystical experience, which occurred many years before I became Orthodox, I felt the presence of the divine filling all things, and that all things are connected.

This, by the way, is classical mysticism, not just Christian mysticism.

He writes that people who are trying to recall the things they experienced on psychedelics end up saying things that are totally banal, e. The mystical journey seems to offer a graduate education in the obvious. Yet people come out of the experience understanding these platitudes in a new way; what was merely known is now felt, takes on the authority of a deeply rooted conviction. And, more often than not, that conviction concerns the supreme importance of love. For me, my encounter with the Gothic cathedral in Chartres, while not precisely mystical, provoked an awareness of the transcendent realm immanent in those stones and stained glass.

The model suggests that our perceptions of the world offer us not a literal transcription of reality but rather a seamless illusion woven from both the data of our senses and the models in our memories. Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent, and yet it is less a window on reality than the product of our imaginations — a kind of controlled hallucination. Huston Smith on this point: Or else it remains just a drug experience.

Which is why so many people who dropped acid or did mushrooms at Grateful Dead concerts did not become spiritual. My own father was at the center of a poltergeist situation after his father died, and accepted it as real … but it changed nothing in his life, even though the clear lesson of it was about the power of forgiveness.

Even I could tell that there was nothing on that white, sandy beach no more than one hundred yards away. Maybe there had been something there that I missed seeing, but they insisted that what they were seeing, Xigagai, was still there. What had I just witnessed? Over the more than two decades since that summer morning, I have tried to come to grips with the significance of how two cultures, my European-based culture and the Pirahas culture, could see reality so differently.

I could never have proved to the Pirahas that the beach was empty. Nor could they have convinced me that there was anything, much less a spirit, on it. As a scientist, objectivity is one of my most deeply held values. But as I learned from the Pirahas, our expectations, our culture, and our experiences can render even perceptions of the environment nearly incommensurable cross-culturally. Everett is an atheist and a scientist, but he cannot deny the power of what happened to him that day by the river.

It indicates that our ability to see what is actually there depends on our subjectivity. Either the Piraha were hallucinating, or Everett and his daughter were. Even in the case of the minerals, modern physics forget psychedelics! Quantum mechanics holds that matter may not be as innocent of mind as the materialist would have us believe. For example, a subatomic particle can exist simultaneously in multiple locations, is pure possibility, until it is measured — that is, perceived by a mind.

Only then and not a moment sooner does it drop into reality as we know it: The implication here is that matter might not exists as such in the absence of a perceiving subject. Needless to say, this raises tricky questions for a materialist understanding of consciousness. The ground underfoot may be much less solid than we think.