Pastors on Psychedelics: The Return to Mystical Spirituality?

In 2015, researchers at John Hopkins University and NYU specifically wanted to invite religious leaders with an interest in further exploring and developing their spiritual lives to ingest mushrooms. The result was that many of the participants became evangelists for psychedelics for spiritual purposes. Ironically, one of the participants was an Episcopal Church minister named Hunt Priest.So, Priest joined about 30 other religious leaders from Christian churches, including a Catholic priest, as well as an Islamic leader, a few rabbis, a biblical scholar and a Buddhist roshi. While the study lacked some of the usual scientific rigor, like certain controls and a sample size typical of scientific studies, it nevertheless provided some interesting insights that can help shine new light on the current movement to make possession and use of psychedelics legal in various states.The insight I found most intriguing was the confirmation by these traditionally-oriented religious leaders of mystical spiritual visions and revelations associated with their psychedelic experience. There’s something else going on at the same time that makes all this even stranger. New discoveries and ideas about human consciousness and the brain  are appearing everywhere, along with news of a startup that is working on how to design a new class of psychedelics that could induce epiphanies, mystical experiences and revelations.Could this signal a return to spiritual mysticism through science, technology and innovation—another turn in a never-ending spiral, bringing us to a very different level, perhaps opening to a higher consciousness? Observers of the vibrant fractals in higher states of consciousness through the door of psychedelics can recognize them as self-same patterns that repeat…and scale to infinity—the essential characteristics of a fractal. Some call them portals to different realities or dimensions. It remains to be seen whether we will have the courage, the faith, and the spiritual guidance to step through them and see for ourselves what lies beyond.