What happens when psychedelics make you see God (Sarah Scoles, Popular Science, Nov 09 2020)
“Following this toe-dip back into mysticism, the Johns Hopkins group continued to investigate the links among psychedelics, spiritual episodes, and quality of life.
In a follow-on from 2011, the majority of participants had complete mystical experiences, which produced “positive changes in attitudes, mood, and behavior” that stuck around long after the compounds were metabolized.
In a study the same year that looked into personality traits, people who had had a mystical experience scored much higher for openness after the trip than they had before. (…)
To gather a wide variety of accounts—from a larger number of mind-altered and sober subjects than they could accommodate in the lab—
Davis and his Johns Hopkins colleagues created an internet-based survey to find out about people’s “God encounter experiences.”
The survey asked individuals about their most memorable rendezvous with a supreme figure, either when sober or when they had taken a psychedelic.
More than 4,000 responded. They published the results in 2019.
The sober group was more likely than the other one to label the being God. The psychedelic users instead tended to call it Ultimate Reality.
But both sets generally agreed that whatever they’d encountered was “conscious, benevolent, intelligent, sacred, eternal, and all-knowing.”
And the majority said the experience left them with more purpose and meaning, greater satisfaction with their lives, and a decreased fear of death.
Perhaps the most striking result, though, involved people from both groups who hadn’t subscribed to the idea of a higher power to start with.
After their hangout with an omniscient entity, more than two-thirds became believers. (If you’ve ever tried to change an atheist’s mind, you know how big a feat that is.)
The shift means, essentially, that they thought the experience revealed something true about the world.
As the paper put it, “The majority of both groups endorsed that that which was encountered existed, at least in part, in some other reality and that it continued to exist after the encounter.”
One participant, a data architect in his 40s who wished to remain anonymous because his substance use occurred outside a clinical setting, has had plenty of mystical encounters, but he views these chemical creations as internal.
“Psychedelics allow you to explore your own mind,” he says.
For instance, when he met Jesus Christ while under the influence of ayahuasca, he believed he was simply meeting “the construct of Christ that exists in my own mind.”
Whether or not such occurrences reveal something about the actual nature of the universe doesn’t necessarily change the clinical outcomes.”
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