My Blog and Welcome to It: God and Mushrooms
Welcome to my Life Before Life blog. I plan for this to be a forum that allows me to think about (and, of course, spout off about) topics generally related to my work with children who claim to remember previous lives. These include survival after death, parapsychology, and spirituality. It will be more informal than my journal articles and even my book, and I hope it’s at least as interesting and widely read as blogs in which people write about their various daily activities such as taking their cat to the vet.
This week, I’ve been thinking about a study that was in the news: Researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that giving psilocybin (as in psilocybin mushrooms) to volunteers produced mystical experiences, some of which were meaningful to the subjects at least two months after they occurred. (And I thought my research was out there.) The study was published online in the journal Psychopharmacology. It included the usual double-blind controlled conditions (with methylphenidate, or Ritalin, being used as a control), and when the volunteers were questioned two months after their experiences, over half of the psilocybin group rated them as among the top five most personally meaningful experiences of their lives. Many of them reported experiencing “a sense of unity without content (pure consciousness) and/or unity of all things.” (The news wasn’t all good. Some volunteers experienced temporary fear and even paranoia, so the authors point out the importance of a structured, supportive environment. Even so, I doubt they’ll have trouble finding volunteers for future studies.)
This study was similar to the so-called Good Friday Experiment in the 60s, in which theological seminary students were given psilocybin or a control during a religious service (which must have been quite an interesting religious service), and those getting the psilocybin reported positive changes in attitude and behavior at 6 months follow-up and even after 25 years.
These studies suggest at least three possibilities:
1. Psilocybin and substances like it are aptly named hallucinogens because they produce hallucinations that mimic meaningful spiritual experiences;
2. Psilocybin and the like are “spirit-facilitators,” as some call them, because they open the doorway to genuine mystical experiences; or
3. Mystical experiences, whether drug-induced or not, are simply creations of the brains of the people having them.
In the past, I’ve generally assumed the first possibility was true—that hallucinogens cause meaningless hallucinations—but I’ve begun to doubt that in the past few years. (I never gave reincarnation any thought either, but that’s another story.) Since I’ve never taken hallucinogens, I’m speaking without any first-hand knowledge, as I would guess the skeptics who dismiss the idea that spiritual experiences could be genuine are. Which brings to mind a paper I recently learned about. Dr. Karl Jansen studied ketamine, a hallucinogenic anesthetic that can produce phenomena similar to near-death experiences (NDEs). This led him to write an article in the Journal of Near-Death Studies called “The Ketamine Model of the Near-Death Experience: A Central Role for the N-Methyl-D-Aspartate Receptor”, arguing for a neurochemical explanation of near-death experiences. The journal devoted an entire issue to the article, commentaries about it, and Dr. Jansen’s response to the commentaries. All this took a while to compile, and in the end, Dr. Jansen added a postscript to his response in which he said that he was no longer as opposed to spiritual explanations of NDEs as his article would suggest. In fact, he said, “I now believe that there most definitely is a soul that is independent of experience.…Ketamine is a door to a place we cannot normally get to; it is definitely not evidence that such a place does not exist.” What presumably changed his mind was having an NDE himself after writing the first article, as he has subsequently acknowledged having had several NDEs.
Psilocybin and ketamine may be doors to the same place that mystical experiences such as NDEs provide a glimpse of, which at least offers the comforting possibility that dying may not be the only way to visit there. I’m not advocating that people do psilocybin mushrooms—as I said, I’ve never done them—but I do wonder sometimes what the world would be like if more people had, not just spiritual beliefs, but spiritual experiences as well.
This week, I’ve been thinking about a study that was in the news: Researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that giving psilocybin (as in psilocybin mushrooms) to volunteers produced mystical experiences, some of which were meaningful to the subjects at least two months after they occurred. (And I thought my research was out there.) The study was published online in the journal Psychopharmacology. It included the usual double-blind controlled conditions (with methylphenidate, or Ritalin, being used as a control), and when the volunteers were questioned two months after their experiences, over half of the psilocybin group rated them as among the top five most personally meaningful experiences of their lives. Many of them reported experiencing “a sense of unity without content (pure consciousness) and/or unity of all things.” (The news wasn’t all good. Some volunteers experienced temporary fear and even paranoia, so the authors point out the importance of a structured, supportive environment. Even so, I doubt they’ll have trouble finding volunteers for future studies.)
This study was similar to the so-called Good Friday Experiment in the 60s, in which theological seminary students were given psilocybin or a control during a religious service (which must have been quite an interesting religious service), and those getting the psilocybin reported positive changes in attitude and behavior at 6 months follow-up and even after 25 years.
These studies suggest at least three possibilities:
1. Psilocybin and substances like it are aptly named hallucinogens because they produce hallucinations that mimic meaningful spiritual experiences;
2. Psilocybin and the like are “spirit-facilitators,” as some call them, because they open the doorway to genuine mystical experiences; or
3. Mystical experiences, whether drug-induced or not, are simply creations of the brains of the people having them.
In the past, I’ve generally assumed the first possibility was true—that hallucinogens cause meaningless hallucinations—but I’ve begun to doubt that in the past few years. (I never gave reincarnation any thought either, but that’s another story.) Since I’ve never taken hallucinogens, I’m speaking without any first-hand knowledge, as I would guess the skeptics who dismiss the idea that spiritual experiences could be genuine are. Which brings to mind a paper I recently learned about. Dr. Karl Jansen studied ketamine, a hallucinogenic anesthetic that can produce phenomena similar to near-death experiences (NDEs). This led him to write an article in the Journal of Near-Death Studies called “The Ketamine Model of the Near-Death Experience: A Central Role for the N-Methyl-D-Aspartate Receptor”, arguing for a neurochemical explanation of near-death experiences. The journal devoted an entire issue to the article, commentaries about it, and Dr. Jansen’s response to the commentaries. All this took a while to compile, and in the end, Dr. Jansen added a postscript to his response in which he said that he was no longer as opposed to spiritual explanations of NDEs as his article would suggest. In fact, he said, “I now believe that there most definitely is a soul that is independent of experience.…Ketamine is a door to a place we cannot normally get to; it is definitely not evidence that such a place does not exist.” What presumably changed his mind was having an NDE himself after writing the first article, as he has subsequently acknowledged having had several NDEs.
Psilocybin and ketamine may be doors to the same place that mystical experiences such as NDEs provide a glimpse of, which at least offers the comforting possibility that dying may not be the only way to visit there. I’m not advocating that people do psilocybin mushrooms—as I said, I’ve never done them—but I do wonder sometimes what the world would be like if more people had, not just spiritual beliefs, but spiritual experiences as well.
posted by Jim B. Tucker | 12:35 PM
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