Mysticism in the Lab

St. Paul was converted while riding on the road to Damascus by a sudden vision of the Risen Christ, who ap peared to him in the form of a blinding light that struck him to the ground.

Teresa of Avila, the 16th century saint, had poetic visions of "pure water running over crystal, the sun reflecting it and striking through it." Simone Weil, the lonely Jewish girl who turned into a Christian mystic, tells how the recitation of lines by George Herbert, such as, "Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back," acted on her intuitive unconscious like prayer. "Then it hap pened," she recalled. "Christ himself came down, and he took me."

"Deep Within Myself." Most experiences of mystical consciousness have come only after hard work -- spartan prayers, meditation, fasting, mortification of the flesh. Now it is possible, through the use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs, to induce something like mystical consciousness in a controlled laboratory environment. Such experimentation should be pushed forward, contend Psychiatrist Walter Pahnke, who holds a Harvard theology degree, and his associate William Richards, who has a degree in the psychology of religion from Andover-Newton Theo logical School. They publish their findings in the current Journal of Religion and Health.

On Good Friday, 1962, Pahnke made his first experiment in drug-induced mysticism in a private chapel at Boston University. Religious services were held for 20 volunteers, all of them divinity students, half of whom were given psilocybin, while the rest took a non-psychedelic substance administered as a sort of placebo to test the relative strength of the drug-induced experience. All students who had taken the drug experienced a mystical consciousness that resembled those described by saints and ascetics. A subject who had participated in another experiment said he saw "white light of absolute purity. I had the feeling of going deep within myself, to the self stripped bare of all pretense and falseness."

The Chemistry of Visions. Physicians have long suspected that even the visions of religious mystics were the result of some change in body chemistry brought on by self-hypnosis, pain, breath control, or intense hunger. Pahnke and Richards suggest that drug-induced mystical experiences may have a profound therapeutic effect on the subjects. Those who experience such releasing of their intuitive unconscious claim "increased personality integration, greater sensitivity to the authentic problems of other persons, responsible independence of social pressure." They sense "deeper purposes in life, lose their anxiety of death and guilt."

Pahnke and Richards admit that some religious leaders disapprove of entering the "holy ground of the unconscious" with the use of psychedelic drugs, "protesting against the exploration of 'inner space' as they have campaigned against the exploration of outer space." Nonetheless, they conclude that the answer is not suppression of drug-assisted mysticism but "informed education and an expanded program of research."

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