Medicine for our World

My last post was about legally becoming involved in Oregon’s new regulated marketplace for psilocybin treatment. Why would a minister want to become a psilocybin guild?

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

I wasn’t intrigued by drugs when I was a teenager. I did want to try alcohol, and I was curious about marijuana. But psychedelics were just scary. They were associated with hippy excess and carried a load of stories about the damage they could do. You could lose your mind and never be the same again. One often repeated story was that an ordinary young woman took LSD and jumped out the window to her death! Why take the chance?

That was probably the last time I thought about psychedelics until I started hearing these rumors about their mysterious effectiveness. When I heard Michael Pollan was writing a book about it, I was very interested. I was so interested that I bought the book straight from Amazon in hardcover. I never do that; I rarely buy books. I put them on hold at the library, and if they are popular, I wait a long time for them. (For a book like Polla,n’s I would probably be just getting it now!)  

So I was excited and wanted to be wowed. I started writing in the previous paragraph that I read Michael Pollan’s book, How to Change your Mind, and that is how I got interested in psychedelics. But that isn’t true; I was hooked before I read his book. One of the things about writing a blog is you get to review your own chronology and motivations. Sometimes simplifying the narrative is just a favor you do for the reader. Sometimes I smooth it out, so I look wise and ministerial. In this case, I think it is important that I write the truth. I was interested in psychedelics right from the start.

Why, I wonder? The first reports I heard about the psychedelic renaissance came from John Hopkins’ research. People who knew they were dying were given psilocybin to combat ‘existential dread.’ They were people who had a serious diagnosis and were afraid to die. They weren’t going to exist soon. For many of the participants, their fear went away after they took psilocybin. They felt at peace with their death. One of them was an atheist, and he felt comforted by God. He remained an atheist after his experience, but he also stayed comforted. “What a beautiful paradox,” I thought.

Then there was an article about the 1962 Good Friday experiment. 20 Harvard Divinity students took psychedelics in a double bind experiment to investigate whether a drug could give you a truly mystical experience. The answer was yes. However, what intrigued me more was how these, men who had a mystical experience in 1962, looked back on it. They characterized it as a highlight of their life. 

I am not a young person looking for a high, a kick, or an adventure. And yet, I would be very interested in a spiritual experience that could help me reconcile my life on this earth. We elders, growing up and aging in a material era, can get to the end feeling a bit weary. I am not depressed but alarmed and frightened for our world. I also want to be an atheist who has been comforted by God. 

Pollan’s book brought together everything about psychedelics, the new and the old. He told the above stories and many others. He also talked to experts about why psychedelics work. No one knows for sure. There is a theory about the brain on psychedelics that I find plausible. By this theory, psychedelics disrupt something called the default mode network in our brains. The default mode network isn’t a structure – it's what happens in our brains as we form habits and live our lives. Our brain creates pathways to our repetitive activities to the point where we hardly experience them anymore. An example of default mode behavior is when you try to stop at the store on the way home from work. You tend to forget and often end up at home. Your default mode network knows the way home, and you are in a light trance when you drop into it.

If true, the default mode network is another reason some people of a certain age seem quietly interested in a psychedelic experience. By the time you have hit late middle age, you have a very well-trained default mode network. It is difficult to avoid the darn scripts. They are running your life, getting you home on the regular route, and allowing you to clean the bathroom while you think about something else. A little shake-up would be rejuvenating. This is probably why many robust elders sidle up to me after they hear about my new vocation. ‘Let me know when you are taking customers,’ they say, ‘I might be interested.’

I recently tried psilocybin and had an enlightening experience. I didn’t talk to God, but I’d like to in the future. Of course, I like to ski, but I never became a ski instructor. I realize I could partake in soon-to-be-available, legal psilocybin without becoming a psilocybin guide. 

But instead, I am now learning to assist people on psilocybin journeys. I am doing this because I struggle with an existential fear that comes not from my own life ending but the possible end of this world. In my youth, I was comforted by the thought that the world would continue, especially its natural beauty and ecosystems when I died. Now our climate crisis is undeniable. I haven’t given up hope in the earth’s eventual recovery – but I am not sure anymore. 

Psilocybin ministry may help us heal the earth in two ways. People taking the medicine because of anxiety, addiction, or existential dread often have a larger recovery than their mental disease. Psilocybin’s healing is correlated with the amount of awe people feel during the experience; the more awe, the more healing. That hard-to-describe feeling that we are all one is permanently strengthened and becomes part of their consciousness going forward. Changing people's consciousness one person at a time isn’t very efficient, but it's a start! It is a needed consciousness for us to heal our climate.

Psilocybin could also be a real help to those who are working so hard to change our economic and energy systems. Be they working from the inside of those systems or as activists; it's hard and lonely work. Someone scared and disheartened about the future may need a peek at what is at stake in an awe-full way rather than from our current linear thinking. If it helps dying patients, perhaps it can help those who struggle with our present crisis. We will see. 

As a minister, I am prey to idealistic and altruistic motivations. Yes, and though I am not ‘a young person looking for a high, a kick or an adventure’ – I am an old person welcoming an adventure. I may have found one.