Mysticism and the Scholarship of Psychedelics

Drawing upon the philosophical perspectives of William James and Henri Bergson, this paper explores the genesis and dynamics of the visionary/mystical experiences that can be catalyzed by psychedelic substances.  The paper explores how the "filter" theory of consciousness offered by Bergson postulates that the main function of the brain is to protect us from being overwhelmed  by the torrent of information that pours into us from the cosmos. In this way, psychedelics can be seen as a way to “change the channel” of the “television” of the brain so that it can receive information from alternate, typically hidden, dimensions of reality. Similarly, James's theory of how “normal” conscious experience is an intricate interweaving of two qualitatively different strata of knowledge, i.e., “knowledge-by-acquaintance” and “knowledge-about,” is extended to psychedelic visionary experiences to suggest that these experiences are also a pre-conscious fusion of sense-like immediacy and cultural categories of understanding.

I am a professor of Religious Studies at an R1 public university. But I also am training to become a licensed facilitator for the Oregon Psilocybin Services program. As part of my training, I did a facilitation practicum at a medical clinic that offers ketamine-assisted psychotherapy.

Whereas much of my psychedelic facilitation training argues that psychedelics transport people to a Jungian transpersonalist realm where they have healing mystical encounters with divine beings and/or ultimate reality, my ketamine journey revealed two, quite different insights about entheogens and Religious Studies. First, psychedelics taken in therapeutic contexts could help scholars uncover the deepest subconscious narratives that shape the interpretive impulses that frame their scholarship. Second, the interpersonal “container” of therapeutic psychedelics expanded my definition of “the sacred” by giving me an experience of sacrality as human relationships of deep trust and mutual care.

This paper examines the life and legacy of R. Gordon Wasson, arguably the most important figure in the explosion of interest in psychedelic mushrooms during the late twentieth century. A banker by trade, Wasson achieved huge international fame in the 1950s when he began to explore the use of Psilocybe mushrooms in the religious practices of Mexico. He soon expanded his exploration of psychedelic fungi into a kind of global mushroom mysticism that he believed could be found everywhere from Siberia to Greece and India, perhaps revealing the origins of religion itself. Yet Wasson’s research was also deeply problematic; he deceived the Mazatec curandera who showed him the ritual use of mushrooms; and his work on Vedic and other materials is extremely flawed. To conclude, I discuss the ambivalent legacy of Wasson’s work in the twenty-first century, both in the study of mysticism and in the medical and pharmaceutical industries.

In this paper, I examine the reciprocal relationship between scholarship about religion and discourses and practices related to the “First” and “Second Wave” psychedelic movements. Following the work of Agehananda Bharati, I argue that the “First Wave” psychedelic movement was instrumental in the success of Religious Studies in the 1970s and 1980s, facilitating interest in a range of issues around religious experience and its interpretation. I postulate two key spheres of influence: scholars whose experiences of psychedelics were formative in their study of religion versus others not associated with psychedelic use but have had a major impact on thinking within psychedelic communities. To illustrate this, I draw on my experience as a participant-observer in one of the first state-approved Psilocybin Facilitator training programs in Oregon, providing examples of how scholarship on religion informs psychedelic discourse and practice and the implications of it for the future of the academic study of religion.