What can psychedelia and Christianity learn from each other

Plus other links from around the web

Later today at 6.30pm UK time we’re holding another Psychedelic Safety Seminar (all previous seminars are available here). This one is on ‘What Can Psychedelics and Christianity Learn From Each Other’, and is co-hosted with the wonderful Liz Oldfield, author of Fully Alive and host of The Sacred Podcast. You can still get tickets here, or paid subscribers get a freebie (message me for the link).

Here are some brief initial thoughts on the topic, which we will explore in an open conversation with contributions from whoever attends .

From 2012 to 2017, I explored the topic of ecstatic experiences for my book The Art of Losing Control. I was interested in the different practices and cultures through which westerners find ecstatic experiences today, when they’re good for us and when not so good.

As part of that, I immersed myself in charismatic Christian culture, joined a church, and even became a Christian briefly (I tried to make it stick but couldn’t). I also learned about the psychedelic renaissance, and ended up trying psychedelics again for the first time in 20 years.

These might seem very different worlds – charismatic Christianity and New Age psychedelia – but I can see certain parallels.

They’re both subcultures where ecstatic experiences are welcome, validated and actively sought, within a mainstream secular culture where such experiences are marginalized and sometimes pathologized.

Both subcultures also emphasize charismatic gifts or spiritual powers – intuition, prophecy, signs and wonders, spiritual healing, even talking in tongues (or light language as its known in New Age culture).  Both have a tendency to reject mainstream culture (‘Escape the Matrix’), and both have a proneness to magical thinking and conspiracy theories.

What are the obvious differences?

You can compare traditional religions like Christianity to a stool with three legs – sacred texts, community, and religious experience. New Age / psychedelic culture is sometimes more like a one-legged stool, with the focus much more on personal religious experience. It is much less settled on sacred texts or community.

This makes New Age culture more creative in some ways – constantly throwing forth new ideas, new movements, new practices (from drinking your own urine to boofing the sun). But it also makes it more unsettled, arguably more individualistic, and perhaps more prone to grifters and charismatic influencers who rise out of the froth, attract a following for a while, and then sink back into the online cultic milieu.

Another big difference is the idea that drugs or sacred plants can be a means to religious experience.

Drugs are certainly a very reliable route to incredibly powerful altered states of consciousness. While the Christian may long for one knee-trembling Holy Spirit encounter in their lifetime, a psychonaut can reliably have a mystical or at least an ecstatic experience every month, or every week….

But is it always good for them? Well, no, not always. In fact, in a new survey by Kruger at al of 1211 psychonauts, roughly half reported sometimes experiencing adverse events during a psychedelic experience, such as feeling frightened, lonely, or feeling like they were going mad. Sometimes such adverse experiences lead to difficulties lasting days, weeks or years.

Do psychedelic experiences connect people to God? Sometimes, people say, yes, they feel their trip did bring them closer to the Divine in some form, or gave them a glimpse of a Higher Power or deeper reality. I have had more than one psychedelic experience which felt like a mystical experience.

But there’s something quite unpredictable about psychedelics – it’s like a rocket that shoots you into the Multiverse, and you’re never quite sure where you’re going to land – in heaven, in hell, in limbo, in some alternate reality of clowns or machine elves.

This unpredictability of westerners’ psychedelic experiences could be because we don’t  yet have settled maps, guides or theology for our experiences, so in effect you’re spinning the kaleidoscope of your mind and trying to make sense of the results.

What could psychedelic culture learn from Christianity? Well, it’s already learned the importance of ritual, of a set and setting to guide people’s ecstatic experiences. People often take psychedelics in a ritual or ceremonial setting these days, including in one of the 3000 or so new psychedelic churches that have appeared in the US in the last few years.

Some of these churches are Christian syncretistic, like the Santo Daime and UDV churches from Brazil, or the Native American Church in the US. In fact, psychonauts quite often tell me they encountered ‘Christ Consciousness’ or some aspect of Christian symbolism in their trips. But perhaps more common than that is a feeling of nature-connectedness and nature-worship.

I think the two most important things psychedelic culture could learn from Christian culture, at the moment, is the importance of discrimination, and the importance of a strong ethical container for ecstatic experiences.

By discrimination, I mean training yourself to read visionary experience like a text, and ask – what is this experience saying to me, is it a metaphor or the literal truth, is it reliable or just noise? What ethical guidance, if any, can I draw from this experience?

We can be quite ecstatically naïve in western culture, and tend to interpret a visionary experience as the literal truth – in fact, charismatic Christianity could be just as prone to this as New Age psychedelia, so both could do with learning from older traditions of contemplative Christianity where there were established practices of discrimination.

And then there’s the ethics part of it. In Christianity and other established religions, strong ethics – right behaviour – are a crucial foundation for ecstatic experiences. The experience itself is not the goal. The goal is to become a better person, and ecstatic experiences are a nice occasional bonus along the way. Does the altered state turn into altered traits, ie becoming a better, kinder person?

In the words of St Paul, though I may speak with the tongues of angels, if I have not love, I am become like a sounding brass

The biggest risk I see with New Age psychedelia is the experience becomes the goal, and becomes fetishized and idolized.

Are psychedelic experiences a good foundation for the creation of a stable ethical culture? That’s a big question that psychedelic churches have to try and figure out. The jury is still out.

Clearly, the occasional psychedelic experience can offer people a ‘holiday from the self’, a brief window from their habitual conditioning, and that can open them back up to wonder, joy and a sense of the numinous.

But regular use? Weekly, monthly? That could be too much shaking up and not enough settled habituation and enculturation. There’s a risk of spending too much time in the Numinous and ending up a space cadet. Or drifting into ‘antinomianism’ as Christians called certain ecstatic movements that were so filled with the Holy Spirit they thought they could do no wrong (the word literally means ‘anti-law’).

Are psychedelics the future of religion? I am sceptical. My suspicion is they’re too unsettled and unpredictable. And the examples of settled psychedelic religions that we have – Amazon shamanism, or Aztec culture – are quite bloody (I know, so was Christianity). The Native American Church is a more laudable example, in my opinion.

What can Christianity learn from psychedelic culture? Perhaps it could ask what attracts young people to this subculture – the playfulness, the acceptance of alternative sexualities, the connectedness to nature, and the desire for a close and unmediated relationship to the Divine.

Here’s a final question to ponder – why do psychedelics seem to be more popular with American Jews than American Christians? I have no hard data that they are, but, anecdotally, I know countless American Jewish psychonauts and only a very few Christian psychonauts. Why is that?

I guess American Judaism is in general more liberal than Christianity. And perhaps Christianity is more worried about demons.

Christianity has a very strict theology of spirits and entities – according to St John, if a spirit doesn’t acknowledge Jesus, it’s not from God, it’s ‘the AntiChrist’.

Judaism hardly mentions demons and is much less hung up about their possible existence or threat to the faithful. Does that make modern Jews more relaxed about exploring the Multiverse and whatever entities they might meet along the way?

Counter-argument - Zac Kamenetz of Shofa tells me Judaism actually does mention shedim quite a lot, although modern liberal forms of Judaism don’t.

Anyway, come along later today and share your own opinions and experiences. Tickets here, and all paid subscribers get a free ticket – send me a message and I’ll send you the link. The video of this event is now available in the video archive for all paid subscribers.

In other news:

One worrying result from the Kruger at al survey I mentioned earlier of 1221 psychonauts is that 8% reported that they or someone they know was the victim of inappropriate sexual contact by a psychedelic sitter, guide, or practitioner. It reinforces the finding from the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug agency’s survey of 2306 psychonauts, in which 13.3% said they’d had someone force sexual advances on them while they were under the influence.

To be clear, one could see similar and probably higher rates with alcohol, but it’s still something to be concerned about.

More links after the paywall, including how both DMT and transcranial stimulation can apparently boost the effects of meditation, a new psychedelic registry in Australia, and a video about recovering from post-psychedelic derealization.