Movement

Two Nice White (not that kind of) Christian Guys Walk Into a Psychedelic Movement

TGIF y’all! can we still say that when even Friday offers no promise that the firehose of evil nonsense will stop for a couple days so we can sleep in?

Well, I’m bringing you something completely different today. Maybe it’s the palate cleanser or the distraction you need. If not, here is an 8-week old black lab puppy that will someday be a service dog licking my husband’s face while he smiles in a way I haven’t seen since perhaps 2015:

Now for the real reason I’m in your inbox today…

I’m a member of Ligare, a Christian psychedelic society started by Episcopal priest Hunt Priest after his life was changed by participating in the 2015 Johns Hopkins psychedelic study for religious professionals.

Since its founding, Ligare has brought together all kinds of folks, from normie Christians who are psychedelically naive but curious and want to know more, to seasoned psychonauts from a very wide variety of Christian traditions who want to connect with others to discuss their experiences, understand how judicious use of psychedelics might enhance spiritual practice and intimacy with God, heal trauma, even help with deconstructing toxic theologies.

Let me be clear that Ligare in no way promotes or facilitates illegal drug use. Its primary purpose is to foster what I often call “Holy Spirit Traffic Direction,” putting people who might otherwise never encounter each other together for important collisions and healing, creative, transforming conversations.

I met Thomas and Sam in such a Ligare conversation. Their quite different life “sets and settings” made just such an interesting collision, and they kindly sat for an interview with me so we could explore together what psychedelics mean to them in the context of faith development, mental health, personal relationships and more.

It feels a little weird to be posting something that has nothing to do with the many-tentacled political mayhem and scattershot extreme suffering of the present moment, but two things about that: if we only talk about politics all the time, we will become shells of ourselves. Also: doing psychedelics as medicine might be an escape from the current pain, but journey work can also act as a portal to an expanded consciousness that actually helps us *engage* the current moment with more spiritual groundedness, creativity, compassion and calm.

More puppies, this time in a heart shape, in case psychedelics are not immediately available to help you get off the struggle bus. (check out my friend Jennifer’s amazing org Canine Companions to learn more!)

Ok, a bit about my psychedelically-inclined buddies. Thomas is a husband, father and a Quaker pastor. He’s a relative newcomer to psychedelics, having had his first experience (and a doozy!) just a couple of years ago after a pretty straight-edge life.

Sam (also a husband and father), on the other hand, started experimenting with psychedelics in high school. He had a number of very positive experiences, and one that was deeply distressing in which he felt that he was possessed by a demon. When he went off to college, he became involved in a Christian fundamentalist church that he calls a cult–and remained within it for 35 years, until he got out fairly recently. He credits re-introducing psychedelics to his system as an ally in his exit from that community and the rigid thinking that bound him.

They’re both deeply thoughtful, gentle men, who each have their own kind of edge. We talked for about an hour, but I’ve edited this manuscript down to some salient bits I think my mostly-psychedelically-naive audience might vibe with. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

Molly: Can you tell me a little bit about yourselves, about what you do for work, your religious, spiritual life context you're in a bit about your journey with psychedelics?

Thomas: [throughout my life] I’ve theoretically been interested in psychedelics, but at the same time I was like, “it’s illegal, and I don't know where to get it, and I'm already getting this stuff through prayer and meditation and worship, right? So I’m interested, but also–I don't know. And then a few years ago, I was hanging out with some friends of mine, and one of them brought some psilocybin mushrooms and said, you've got to try this. I was a little skeptical, because the friend who brought them is out of his mind, and he wanted me to take a very high dose.

But I had another friend who I did trust more, who was like, I'll be here and you'll be fine–try it out. So I did, and it was very much a religious experience in many ways, in terms of encountering Jesus and the prophets and wrestling with the devil and God.

That first experience made Thomas curious enough that he began to experiment with low, mid, and high doses of psilocybin at various intervals.

Molly: How do you know when it’s time again? What motivates you to have another trip?

Thomas: I get a certain level of fear before I trip no matter what, at any dose, because you don’t know what’s going to happen, and it is very much like opening yourself up to a lot of things. I know I'm ready when I'm interested again, and I'm in a good enough headspace. I don't want to be in a state of distress or in a bad environment.

Molly: You're a bivocational pastor and have a family – so you have to be sure your default mode network is going to come back online, right?

Thomas: I mean, honestly, I don't miss my default mode network that much when I'm lacking it. I wouldn't mind being a little bit less defaulty at this point in my life. I didn’t do psychedelics until midlife, and I have no regrets that I didn't do psychedelics earlier, because I don't think I needed them. But things started calcifying, and I started to become stuck in some certain ways. Using mushrooms has been really positive in helping me get unstuck and recapturing some of the flexibility and excitement that I had in my teens and 20s.

It's called a “trip” because there are a lots of different parts to it, and it feels almost like you're walking through different rooms. But on bigger trips there’s always a room I walk into where I am a child again. I'm curious about everything, and everything's interesting. It’s really valuable in midlife to access childlike thinking, not metaphorically, but actually.

Molly: Not regression, but beginner’s mind. A childlike sense of wonder. Like when Jesus took a child to him and said “unless you become like little children you will never enter the Kindom of Heaven.” Thanks Thomas. How about you, Sam?

Sam describes growing up in an atheistic household, but finding himself curious about spiritual realms. In high school he started reading Ram Dass and Carlos Castaneda, and experimenting with psychedelics.

Sam: There were some scary trips. Some trips where I'm sure the psychedelics were laced with other stuff, and they were unpleasant. The main thing that came out of those experiences was that I came away convinced that there was a spiritual realm, a realm beyond what I already believed.

Sam had picked up some bits about Christianity from marinating in the dominant culture, and had a trip, ironically while hiking on a mountain in the Bay Area ironically called Mt. Diablo, where he thought demons were speaking to him.

Sam: That was really frightening. I thought that I was possessed, and could feel it speaking through me to my friend. I said scary things, and my friend ran off, and I was just in the hills by myself.

Molly: I hope you had plenty of water!

Sam: I went off to college a year early, and came across fundamentalist Christianity. It just fit hand in glove with everything that was going on with me. I was a very immature person, and [therefore] very vulnerable [to being recruited]. I had had these psychedelic experiences that convinced me the spiritual world was real. It all fit together–I went all in. It really wasn't just fundamentalism. It was a cult that I stayed in that for 35 years.

Molly: Were you, by chance, having HPPD (Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder, when unpleasant side effects from a challenging trip persist after the drug has left your biological body) from your scary trip on Mt. Diablo--and did that attract you to fundamentalism, which might have given you a way to understand the demon possession?

Sam: No, it really was the emotional stuff I was going through: shame and grief and and guilt and other stuff in my life.

Fast forward 35 years. Sam’s relationship with his church and its theology was changing. Cannabis was now legal, and he wondered if it could help him connect with God.

Sam: Cannabis started to open up my heart. Smoking would make me anxious, but then I would pray, and I had a couple of experiences where I felt like Jesus communicated with me, saying “You're okay, you know–you can let go of the guilt.”

Sam’s mom asked him what he wanted for Christmas, and he mentioned Michael Pollan’s book about the renewing psychedelic movement, How to Change Your Mind, so she bought it for him.

Sam: I started reading, and I read more broadly from there, and got excited about psychedelics. I though, “There was this doorway that I experienced years ago, and maybe it can help me reconnect with the truth–because I know this fundamentalism stuff is not the truth, but there's Something. How do I connect with it?”

Molly: What was shaking you loose from fundamentalism at that point?

Sam: Oh, a long thread of realizing that the idea that the biblical text is directly inspired is just not tenable, that the idea of God punishing people in Hell is just not tenable with anything that I could call justice or love, and then just seeing the Church just be the Church, and everything happening socially, the Church not even standing up and saying, “Hey, this, this MAGA stuff is crazy.” What they were trying to do around race and women’s roles was just so lame.

I think a big factor is that in 2016 my dad ended his own life as he was degrading [from old age]. It probably had a snapping effect for me. He'd remained an atheist his whole life, and we weren't estranged by any stretch, but there was always a little bit of a distance between us because of [my religious affiliation], and him being disappointed that I'd done this with my life, and now I was disappointed that I had done this with my life.

On Sam’s journey to self-healing, he read a lot, and began aiding the rewiring of his brain with ketamine-assisted therapy. He then expanded to include psilocybin and MDMA. His wife also began to journey. He eventually joined Ligare, which connected him with people he felt he could trust as he continued to deconstruct 35 years of fundamentalism.

Then a year or so ago, when he was going through a stressful time personally and professionally, he got involved with a clinician he calls a “mad scientist psychiatrist.”

Sam: I went on a pretty heavy load of ketamine. And I think it it unwired some stuff from my brain that I wanted unwired. I wanted to unwire all the fundamentalism, right? I wanted to get it out. And I think it did flush a bunch of it out. And then I essentially had a kind of extended panic attack or nervous breakdown of some kind a couple months later. I'm still kind of recovering from that, honestly.

Molly: Have you found the support you need to recover?

Sam: Yes, I have a lot of avenues of support. I have not done a big journey since then. I've done a couple of MDMA sessions to try to integrate, you know, to try and get back in touch, but I've not done any psychedelics. I don't feel like I'm stabilized yet.

Molly: Thank you for your honesty.

So now I'd love to have more of a conversation of you two talking to each other and me about how psychedelics has shaped or changed your theology, your spirituality, your spiritual practice; how you think about pain and suffering, who God is, where God is, afterlife, demons, angels. Let's go for it, because you're coming from really different perspectives, but landing in not dissimilar spaces.

Thomas: I've probably done 5 or so really big trips at this point. On my second trip, one of my objectives was to have an encounter with death. I was literally walking around the desert saying, “I come in the name of Jesus Christ! I'm here to talk to you, Death.” I black out for a second, and when I come to my hand is on this bush, and I'm seeing it dying and then coming back to life and then dying again. I'm holding the bush, and it feels like I'm holding Death's hand. And I feel very strongly that I’m OK.

[Psychedelic phenomena are] all sort of ephemera, in a way, like “Ooh, I had a neat experience.” But the point is that there really are spiritual realities that are intelligent; there's a sentience, and there have also been times when it's been difficult for me to figure out, “should I trust this thing I'm interacting with?”

Molly: A question. Why say “I come in the name of Christ”? Is that shamanic? Liturgical? Claiming Christ’s protection?

Thomas: Especially on higher doses, Jesus is the one who makes this safe for me. Because we are engaging in a spiritual realm that is dangerous. And so it's very important to me to be clinging to Christ while I do it. Not metaphorically, but literally. I need Jesus to anchor me in this and to protect me.

One of the big takeaways for me from that trip was that Death and I can be friends. In the end, death comes under Jesus's authority. And if I'm under Jesus's authority, and Death is under Jesus' authority, that makes us co-workers.

Molly: How about you, Sam?

Sam: It's difficult to parse where psychedelics and the change in my theology happened, the cause/effect, because it was all happening at the same time. I was still in the mindset of believing in Jesus as the Savior when one time I was having conversation with Him on psilocybin and I encountered God as a female. Fully feminine. She and I talked about how I'd gotten caught up in fundamentalism. And She was this great geometric design in the sky, a sky that had no horizons on anywhere. I think my theology was already starting to change there, away from the the father figure, male, masculinized stuff that's come down to us through the Abrahamic traditions.

I wasn't expecting the experience, but I was like: okay!

Molly: …which kind of makes it more credible, right? You didn’t set an intention to get in touch with the Divine Feminine. It just happened to you.

Sam: yeah, yeah…I really don't know what to think now, and it makes me very insecure. I feel uncomfortable in the world. I know the theology I had is a construct that I cannot parlay with anymore. It is too masculine, too war-oriented. And I struggle greatly with pain and suffering, who God is, where God is, the theodicy problem that has always been an issue for me.

Why, why does God allow evil? I know the arguments for free will, but I still feel just horrible about that stuff being in the world, and it's hard to find meaning for me in it. The old theology was more comfortable: God is infinitely good, and all of this evil stuff squares, right? He's gonna destroy it at some point and there will be a final victory. Now, none of that's really working for me, and I don't like the universe I find myself in.

Molly: You said you're uncomfortable right now. And I was gonna say, are you comfortable being uncomfortable? But I think you just answered the question. You're not. There's nothing that really makes sense or gives you a place to land, a soft place or even a hard place to land. You know, sometimes even a hard place to land can be good.

Sam: I was talking with a young woman from a similar background who had also left it and she said, “I'll say this: I was happier as an evangelical fundamentalist. This is much harder.”

Thomas: The broader psychedelic community has an implicit theology, and it's some mishmash of paganism, Buddhism and Hinduism, but it's there. I come to psychedelics with an explicit theology, and for me anchoring myself in Jesus is really important. I think it's really dangerous to jump into psychedelics, especially at higher doses, and not not know what you believe and who you are. There's value in deconstruction, but there has to be something to deconstruct, right? I think it’s profoundly dangerous if you're coming into this with no foundation, because it is by definition a very confusing space, but much more so if you had no clarity to begin with.

Molly: Even with a guide, do you think it’s unsafe?

Thomas: I don't know what guides do, and I want to be more educated about this, because I'm suspicious of guides. Psychedelics are a space that make you profoundly suggestible. And so for anyone to guide me: that's a very special relationship. You can literally brainwash me, absolutely.

Molly: And that’s why guide is not really the right word–perhaps companion.

Thomas: Yeah–most of my very high dose trips have been with a group, and there is mutual support happening there that's positive. I will say one really cool thing about group guidance: I wouldn't want to push this metaphor too far, because it's not the same thing, but it's sort of like church. We’re all having our own individual experiences, right? But we're having it in the container of a group experience.

There's one guy in my group who is finding God. He has been an atheist, and if you're familiar with the Enneagram, he's absolutely a 7, just extremely “Everything's beautiful, I just love everything.” And I'm over here in Serious Land, right? But with a very developed theology.

And something has happened over a few years of of being together in this: he has started to find God, and I've started to find the kind of joy he has. Something's happening in the room: convergent growth.

Molly: One thing I keep circling back to in my own experiences here: there’s a lot of hard data that demonstrates how efficacious psychedelics can be for a variety of mental health conditions, and I’ve had a lot of people report to me really beautiful stories of personal spiritual growth. But I sometimes wonder if there’s also a whole lot of just doing drugs for the sake of peak experiences, without a verifiable downstream good. I keep coming back to the phrase that Jesus said “the tree will be known by its fruit.” How do you respond to that?

Sam: One of the things I've run into is the metanarrative [in psychedelic communities] that human beings are going through an evolution in their consciousness, and psychedelics are a key. I have run into what looks and feels and smells a little bit like fundamentalism in a way. I'm dubious about that. I do think there is power for these drugs to heal people. [I also see] the the danger of it being cultlike. We saw people in the 60s and 70s who took it in that direction, and some of them in really serious, gnarly ways. Could it go in that direction, as people want to develop community around this stuff? Absolutely.

Sam described an experience of a guide who was very skilled but a bit too directive and confident in her assertions of truth in a way that ignited his suspicions. He says he doubts that psychedelics always produce the fruits of the spirit–love, joy, peace, patience, kindness–but they do seem to consistently produce, in all people, an experience of God, and unitive consciousness–deep connection to God and one another.

Molly: how about you, Thomas?

Thomas: [On one psilocybin journey], and bear with me because this sounds blasphemous, I felt like God was me and I was God and, and I was Christ, but I was also David. And David is the Shadow King, right? There’s all this pathology with David, but it’s layered. I'm interpreting this christologically. Jesus said, “I'm the vine. You're the branches. Abide in me. Become like me. I belong to God, and you belong to me, therefore you belong to God. If you become like me, you become like God.”

You can't get more theologically conservative than the Eastern Orthodox church. And Eastern Orthodoxy talks about theosis and divinization, becoming like God. That’s what I experienced. But I can totally understand how someone without the fruit of thousands of years of theological reflection might say, “Wow, I'm God, yeah! All God!”

Molly: –and then jump off the roof–

Thomas: Right? I can totally see how they would come to that conclusion. I am very fortunate to be standing on the shoulders of giants and thousands of years of wrestling and theological reflection to have access to these concepts that help me make sense of the experience.

Molly: And keep you from getting too arrogant as a result of this Gnosis, this new wisdom/old wisdom that you embody more than intellectually.

Thomas: I was told in seminary that the sign of a true mystical experience is that it makes you humble. It’s a false mystical experience that makes you a megalomaniac.

It's tricky. Because growth is hard. And as a fallen human being who is still very much not where I need to be, I say, well, Thomas, why are you still such a jerk?

Psychedelics are a non-specific amplifier, and so the result is not necessarily going to be good, right? So much depends on what you do with it, the choices you make at certain points. Psilocybin can absolutely take me to megalomania, you know what I mean? [But my experiences] have also been giving me a lot of access to my emotions, not just anger. I’ve been been crying a lot more–not devastated crying, just being moved. Hopefully you get what you specifically, personally need from this stuff. And everyone doesn’t necessarily get the same thing. But for me, a really positive thing is it's helping me to be more in touch with those tender emotions and gentleness.

Molly: Thank you both so much insight for this conversation and to be in community with y'all! See you soon.