A dear, dear friend let me know
about this study that was happening
at Johns Hopkins and NYU,
looking for religious
professionals that would be
interested in being a part of this
study.
Scientists were curious
about whether psychedelics
could help a range
of different faith leaders become
more expansive
in their sense of
who and what the divine is.
My initial reaction was, what are
you talking about?
That just sounds off.
I had never even heard the word
psychedelics at that stage.
And so my friend very
patiently and very
enthusiastically engaged me in
conversations about psychedelics.
One of the most powerful things that
he could say to me is that I've
done this and I've benefited.
I was unwell for a really
long time.
This medicine has helped him
heal to this extent?
Okay, let's talk.
When she first heard about this
study, Sughra Ahmed was the
associate dean for religious life at
Stanford University.
She was a religious professional and
had been for many years.
She had a graduate degree in Islamic
studies and was the first woman
to chair the Islamic Society of
Britain back in the UK.
She led prayer, she preached,
and she gave advice.
And that translates essentially as
Ustadha. Ustadha is an Arabic
Urdu Farsi word
that means teacher.
So for me, being Ustadha was about
being able to lead not
just Muslim communities on campus
at Stanford, but also other
faith communities.
Sughra counseled students through
their big religious questions.
And after her friend mentioned
this study, she suddenly
found herself grappling with some
pretty big questions of her own.
What even is this? Is this something that is
legitimate for us?
Is this is something that could
hurt?
In the Quran and in other
texts, things like alcohol
are clearly forbidden.
And the spirit in this context is
that I don't want you to
be coming to worship or
prayer or be in conversation with me
with your mind veiled.
So you're not thinking clearly.
So how can you be in worship?
But did her Muslim faith also
forbid the use of psychedelics?
I'm somebody who believes in God.
I have always believed in God,
I've been raised in a Muslim
household, in a muslim community.
And, should she, a devoutly
religious woman who had never
touched an illegal drug in her life,
should she travel to Johns Hopkins
University to take psilocybin for
scientific research?
Welcome to season two of Altered
States.
Over the next 10 episodes, we're
going to explore two distinct camps
in the world of psychedelics.
On one side, there's the realm of
spiritualists, mystical experiences
and psychedelic churches.
And on the other side are
scientists, clinical trials,
animal studies, and
psychopharmacologists.
These two worlds are often far
apart, and even at odds.
But sometimes they're not.
Because when they get all tangled up
together, that's when things get
really interesting.
Think of this as the science versus
religion season.
But know that there's so much more
in between.
I'm Arielle Duhaime-Ross.
This is Altered States.
When I talked to somebody who's very
learned when it comes to Islam, or
somebody who I hold with great
respect, we had long conversations
about plant-based medicine and
psychedelics.
And through those conversations,
we talked about the fact that even
though things like alcohol are
clearly forbidden, psychedelics
unveil the mind.
And so it doesn't fall in the same
category.
And so I signed up, took a gazillion
psychometric tests to make sure that
I qualified.
And that led me into
Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and
on that sofa with a blindfold
across my eyes.
At around the same time that Sughra
was taking those tests,
journalist Michael Pollan heard
about this study from some of the
researchers involved.
The idea was to give a group
of religious leaders, rabbis,
priests, ministers, pastors,
monks, a high dose of
psilocybin to kind
of see what would happen.
And as soon as I heard about it, I
was like, this is something I want
to write about.
I mean, look, religion and
science have been oil and water
since the time of Galileo, right?
I mean people purporting to offer
a scientific version of reality
were burned at the stake by the
church.
But the psychedelic realm
is a place where the two get mixed
up in really interesting ways.
The study was published in May 2025.
Michael interviewed some of the
religious leaders and wrote about it
for the New Yorker.
This is the story of that
study and what happened to Sughra
and some of the other participants
in the years after they
tripped for the very first
time.
So Michael, welcome back.
Thank you for joining us on Altered
States.
Thank you, Arielle.
Very good to be back.
Okay, let's start from the
beginning. Can you tell me about
this study?
Basically, they were trying to use
science to study religion and
spirituality and this
phenomenon called the mystical
experience.
This is an experience, there's a
long literature recounting it.
It's a big part of the history of
religion.
And basically it involves
revelation, some sense of
contact with the divine,
a transcendence of self and
time and space,
and a sense of merging with
something larger than yourselves.
And this has been very much at the
center of psychedelic research since
the very beginning.
Roland Griffiths, who really
spearheaded the revival of
psychedelics research beginning
around 2000,
got into it because he had
a mystical experience that
he said was way, way, way beyond
the kind of materialist
understanding I could explain to my
scientist colleagues.
And he was one of the researchers
involved in this study.
Yes, he was the lead researcher
until his death in October 2023.
And one of the things that it's
important to know about this study
too is it's building on a history.
There was something called the Good
Friday Experiment done in 1962
at Marsh Chapel on
the BU campus in Boston,
where Walter Pahnkey, who was
a graduate student working with
Timothy Leary, had 20
divinity students all in a
Protestant denomination.
And he gave 10 of them
psilocybin and he gave ten of them
a placebo.
And they all sat in the basement
of Marsh Chapel listening to
a Good Friday sermon being piped
in from above.
So one of the producers on this show
actually obtained an audio recording
of the sermon that the study
participants listened to that day.
I haven't heard it yet, but I wanted
us to listen to it together.
This is Reverend Howard
Thurman.
There was
no glory on the hills
that day.
Only dark shame
and three
stark crosses
rearing
at the sky.
And then darkness fell.
I love it.
Very dramatic.
Very evocative.
It's got a little bit of
a, I don't know, like vampiric
kind of quality to it for me,
but yeah, that's wow.
Imagine listening to that while
tripping on psilocybin.
That would be very powerful.
But that study left a lot to
be desired in terms of controls.
Even though it had a placebo, they
were in this very religious setting.
And it was a little loosey goosey
like a lot of Timothy Leary
supervised experiments were in
that time.
But it's canonical within the world
of psychedelic research.
And eight out
of the 10 who had taken
psilocybin reported a powerful.
Religious experience and
one of the things this study at
Hopkins and NYU is was
an effort to improve on that, to
replicate it with more rigor.
It was going to be larger to
diversify the religious traditions
represented and get as wide
a representation as possible.
I think they were curious to find
out if religious leaders might have
any particular insight to
share on the mystical experience.
Whether a mystical experience
induced by psilocybin
was comparable to the sort of
mystical experience that
people in religion often have.
And perhaps would
they shed light on an idea
that's very common in the
psychedelic community but certainly
wasn't articulated by the
researchers.
That there is some sort of common
core to all religions,
a perennial philosophy, which
is a term that Aldous Huxley used.
He believed that at bottom you could
trace all religious traditions
to a mystical experience that had
similar qualities.
But yes, this was an effort to
use science to explore religion
and in a way use religion
to explore science.
In other words, use the insights of
these religious professionals
to learn something about
the psychedelic experience.
So it was deliciously messy
that way.
That's kind of what drew me
to writing about it.
And at its core, we're
talking about a study where you
have scientists who are asking
religious leaders to come in
and take psilocybin and
then tell them about their
experiences.
Yeah, basically they were prepared
by two guides.
The two guides sat with them during
their journeys, which lasted,
you know, four to six or
eight hours.
And then afterwards, they filled out
reams of questionnaires and
came back to get debriefed on what
they had experienced.
Okay, so what kind of religious
leaders were they able to recruit?
Well, they were going for as wide a
range as possible, but they didn't
succeed entirely in getting
everybody.
If you look at the demographics of
the group, you find that it's
heavily Christian, 76%.
Many different Christian
denominations, 17%
were Jewish.
They only had one Muslim and
one Buddhist.
There was no Hindu, for example.
So as hard as they tried
to make it broadly representative.
It definitely skewed very
Western and very white and
very male.
31% were female.
And the requirement was you had to
be psychedelically naive,
and you had have a congregation.
You had to a leader of some kind,
not just somebody who was devout.
They really wanted to look at people
who were leaders, because one of the
things they wanted to explore was
whether this experience would
help with burnout.
And burnout is a real problem,
I learned, among clergy of all
kinds. You're dealing with the dying
all the time.
You're in charge of this
institution.
You have declining attendance and
membership. You have financial
problems. It's all on you,
and you have to be available 24-7.
So they wanted people who were
dealing with that to see if the
experience might rekindle
their faith and
interest in their vocation.
So I interviewed at least a
dozen of the participants in the
study. And they were just the
easiest people to talk to.
But they had also had this
incredible experience that they were
very eager to talk about and had
not had an opportunity to do.
I talked to Zac Kemenetz,
a rabbi at Berkeley.
I had not previously used
psychedelics in the past.
I was high on God
and Jewish ritual and
spirituality all these years.
I talked to Hunt Priest, who is
an Episcopal priest.
I was reading a magazine called The
Christian Century.
I was just flipping through it.
And I saw an ad for the study at
Hopkins. And I immediately thought,
there's no way I'll get in,
because who wouldn't want to be in
this?
And I talked to Sughra Ahmed,
who is a Muslim, the only Muslim in
the study.
The clinicians were actually ready
to close the study, thinking, well,
we're not really going to get
anybody different to the cohort that
we've already got. So we're going to
be able to keep the study open for
much longer.
And then along I came.
Did some of the participants tell
you why they
ultimately decided to say yes
to this?
Yeah, in some cases,
because they had never had a
mystical experience.
And they shared some of the
questions of the researchers as
to what they might learn about
God.
So I think they were kind of
spiritually hungry.
I had read
that mystical experiences
could potentially help people
feel better or be
closer to divinity.
And that was at that time kind
of exactly what I needed,
some spiritual resuscitation.
Then you had people who really did
feel burned out, people who felt
something was missing in their life
or in their work.
I was sort of in a place of I
felt stuck in my work in some ways.
I was busy in my church life.
And there was a lot of work to do
there. And I was tired.
I was dealing with some anxiety.
And some people were just curious.
I was convinced that this is
something that not only is
intriguing, but actually it's
really, really important to bring
this into the Muslim communities
that I connect with for my
people to be at the table.
And when I say my people, I mean
women, women of color, Muslim women.
It was important for me to
also ensure that when it
came to this kind of experiment
and it was going to be published
later, that I'm able to take some
of that back to my community
and say we were part of this.
Now, where do we go?
And the fact it was legal, by the
way, matters a lot to people.
I mean, for many people, the
opportunity to have a psychedelic
experience in the hands of
really skilled guides in
a university setting with
legal permission is quite an
opportunity.
Although it was illegal, it still
carried some reputational risks.
So some people wanted to remain
anonymous.
I was pretty concerned about
anonymity.
These people don't look like me.
They don't know what my people are
like. They don't know what our culture
is like. When they say anonymous,
what does it really mean?
Is it really anonymous?
Or is my data going to sit in a
box file on that dusty shelf over
there like all those other box
files?
I had all these things in my
imagination and the only way I was
going to get through them was by
asking questions.
Because you've got to remember, my
family don't I'm doing this.
My friends don't, I'm not doing
this, apart from the friend that
actually recommended the study to
me. I felt really vulnerable
and I felt like a bit of a maverick.
I knew I wanted to do this.
I knew it was important, but I was
also alone.
And then on top of that, there's
nobody in this team that I
can look at and think, okay, they
might understand what I might be
feeling right now.
They might understand the
enormity of what I'm undertaking
without even discussing it with
family and friends.
For someone like Sughra, there was
real risk here.
She wasn't sure how her community
would react.
So in advance of her session day,
she wanted to make sure she would
really be supported.
So I asked a gazillion questions
to the most senior scientists and
the people who are in charge of the
whole thing, all the way to the
people who are going to be sitting
with me when I would be
probably my most vulnerable
in life.
If you're recruiting for
a diverse range of people,
religious leaders no less, then
the set and setting that you have
built would have incorporated,
all of the possible religious
leaders that might have volunteered
that you'd be curious to sort of
have in your research, including
Muslims.
I didn't find that that was the
case.
It did give me reason to be nervous.
You know, I'm concerned.
You're asking me to go into
a place that I've never been before.
I don't know what's going to happen.
And at a very, very basic
level, I might use language that is
not English, right?
It might be Arabic, it might be
Urdu. It would be alien
to your ears, perhaps.
I had to say to them, so when I do
say words that you do not
understand, if you could just write
down some letters and I could
try and figure it out later.
And I had go into this thing
knowing that I had two gorgeous
human beings next to me.
But, they didn't really understand
where I was from.
They didn't really understand who I
was.
I wanted them to feel like I really
made a fuss.
As though I have said and done
everything that I possibly can
to fight for
people like me or
people who might not exactly be like
me, but are non-white middle-class
kind of folks so that
next time they wouldn't
just rinse and repeat.
So what happens next?
What happens next is they're handed
a little pill and they swallow
that and they lie down and put
on eye shades and wait
for their journey to begin.
I soon started to
feel kind of like a
opening fuzziness in
my forearms and
in my stomach.
I remember thinking, oh my God, this
is big.
I don't know what this is, but this
is big.
More after the break.
Welcome back, This Is Altered
States.
Before the break, Sughra Ahmed,
a devout Muslim leader, took a
risk and decided to take psilocybin
as part of a scientific study.
She was one of 29 religious leaders
who participated in this experiment,
many of whom spoke about their
experiences with the journalist
Michael Pollan.
So Michael, can you talk a little
bit more about what was so
interesting to you about this study
and its focus on religious leaders?
Yeah, there were a bunch of things.
There's a whole strain of thinking
in psychedelic research
that there is something special
and spiritual
about the experience.
And to have trained religious
leaders have that experience
that they would have some sort
of nuanced understanding of it
and particularly of the mystical
experience, which is such
a common thread through so much
of the history of religion.
One of the questions I was curious
about is would all
these different religious leaders,
the imagery of their trip,
would it be similar to one another
or really distinct?
Would it reflect their own faith and
the imagery that church or
denomination?
Or would it point to some common
core at the heart of
all religion?
And that's an idea, it's somewhat
controversial idea, but it's held by
many people.
And that the common core of all
religions is this thing called
the mystical experience.
How do the researchers go
about measuring a mystical
experience?
Well, with a questionnaire, of
course.
It's called the mystical experience
questionnaire.
And you fill it out and you answer,
"have you had an experience that has
these qualities?" And
first of all, it was Walter Pahnkey
in the Good Friday Experiment.
He wrote the first mystical
experience questionnaire, which
was an attempt to break down
the elements of that experience and
see how people measured their
experience.
He based it on William James,
who offered the first sort of quasi
scientific analysis of what it
consists of.
And it has such things like
reverence and awe,
a loss of a sense of time,
joy or wellbeing,
no space boundaries, spaces
transcended, a sense timelessness.
And I think very importantly,
a sense merging with
something larger than yourself.
It could be the universe, it could
be nature, and it could God.
And that unitive consciousness
as it's called is a real
hallmark of the mystical experience
and really accounts for
I think the divine encounters that
many of the people in the study
reported.
Got it, okay.
So that's what the researchers were
going for. They wanted to see if
these religious leaders would have
mystical experiences as judged
by their questionnaires and
whether they would judge them to be
authentic.
I think that was really key.
They thought that these people would
be in a position to help answer
a question that has kind of
bedeviled psychedelic research for a
couple of decades, which is,
is the mystical experience that
people report a mere drug
effect or is it the
real deal?
So they go into these specially
designed rooms and
Sughra, I recall, mentioned that she
prayed beforehand.
I took permission from the
team about offering
some prayers of my own.
It was incredibly important to
me that I was able to bow down
and prostrate to God and seek
guidance and seek comfort and
seek connection before
I took the medicine.
The medicine was offered to me in
what looked like a goblet
of times of old and
it was offered me with incredible
reverence and respect for the
medicine and for the moment,
which took me by surprise, actually,
that in a clinical trial, there was
this reverence for the human
condition and what the human being
is about to experience.
I ingested the medicine with
some water and then I felt like
it got stuck in my throat
and there's a psychological aspect
to that, right?
Like there's nervousness.
You know, I was with these strangers
and I'd ingested something that
was going to give me a really
powerful experience.
Going into this, I had no
aspirations to have an encounter
with the divine because in my
tradition, I feel like
you really need to polish the heart
and the soul to be able to start
even dreaming, hoping
of a dream, for
example, with the Prophet Muhammad,
peace be upon him, or any of the
prophets, peace upon them all.
But in my actual journey,
I felt I encountered the divine and
how I know that I encountered the
divine is very difficult to
explain. I just knew.
I simply knew.
And I trust that knowing.
First of all, everybody that I
spoke to, and I think the
vast majority of participants did
have a divine encounter.
And in all cases, God was
not a figure, not embodied
in any way, but it was a presence
that was vividly felt.
In the journey, I felt
the divine present
right behind me.
Like right behind my shoulder.
I know in the Quran, God,
Allah says that I
am closer to you than your jugular
vein.
That moment reminded me
of that verse.
And that verse is very, very dear to
me.
I felt like if I just sort of
leaned a little to the left
and maybe a little back, that I
could probably brush with it
in some way.
I was very calm.
It wasn't a stupendously
exceptional moment.
It just felt powerful
and calm all at
the same time.
It was beyond the way in which
we categorize things,
people, it was above
all of this language business that
we have between us.
You cannot reduce it to that.
There's often sort of a knee-jerk
reaction, I think, in faith
communities, that, "What?
You're gonna pop a pill and then
meet God?" And
I think that sounds glib because it
is glib, and I still very firmly
believe that.
So for me, that moment, that
presence of knowing that the divine
is right, right,
really, really really close, just
really close felt
like I had been given a
gift that I am
just in complete awe of.
By the time I sat down to write the
article, Sughra was willing to let
me use her name, but I interviewed
other people who weren't, and
one was an Eastern Orthodox
priest who, in the piece, I call
Father Gregory.
He was really
burnt out.
He was real frustrated
with church politics and the
bureaucracy, and
this made him really angry.
And he said he'd become this very
bitter person that people avoided
in his church.
And he had taken a vow of celibacy
also and was struggling
with that.
And he just described himself as
in this spiraling down
of anger and bitterness and
pornography, he said.
He imagined himself laid
out in Christ's tomb
on this stone
slab, covered in
rose petals.
And he was dying, but
he felt that there
was love in him that was gonna
survive his death.
And this love kind of
manifested itself as this
transcendent force.
And he said at one point, he was
making love to love.
And he said that this was a very
uncomfortable moment for a celibate
priest, because there clearly was
an erotic dimension.
And he was so
enthralled by this experience that
even though he had to pee, he
would not get up and just kind
of released his bladder.
And he described this moment
as the beginning of the
decalicing of his heart.
And in a way, it was like
the cliche psychedelic
experience, which is, you know,
that, "love is all there is,
and love is the most important
thing." He doesn't know this
is a trope of psychedelic
experience, and it meant the world
to him.
I was so disarmed when this person
I had never met told
me this story.
And you could see this was not
somebody with a callous on his
heart.
And for Zach Kamenetz, the rabbi
from Berkeley who had just had a
baby, the journey provided
an incredible amount of insight.
No matter what I saw, whether it
was going down a
deep, dark tunnel,
which felt like timeless and
spaceless and ageless,
or seeing my
newborn daughter,
my wife and myself as
animated woodland creatures,
happy and joyous together,
there was some wisdom that was
embedded in each of these moments.
It felt like for the very
first time, after
the miscarriages and after
the three IVF
rounds and finally good
embryos and finally
our first child being born,
the opportunity to just say
thank you in my own
words, full of emotion,
full of gratitude, full
of the grief and the pain
of all of the moments that
went from learning that
there was a fetus that was no
longer growing in my wife's body
to this beautiful
baby having been born.
Thank you.
Thank you for it all.
So when we talk about the mystical
experience, I know some people
describe it as a divine encounter
or as quote unquote seeing
God, but what is it that
these leaders actually say they
experienced?
Well, none of them saw God as this
embodied form or the guy
in the clouds with a beard, but they
felt a very powerful presence
or a sense of an imminence
or a suffusion of their
own bodies with this divine
presence.
But one of the things I found
particularly interesting that came
up in several of my interviews was
the God of people's
experience was a feminine presence.
And this is men as well as women and
this kind of blew people's minds.
One described a complete
deconstruction of patriarchal
religion in his experience.
Another, a woman said that God was
like a Jewish mother and
she was a Baptist and she kind
of blown away by that.
So there were some commonalities
across faiths in their experience
of God.
That's so interesting.
So how many dosing sessions did
these participants take part in?
Well, they were offered two, but not
everybody wanted the second dose
or could do the second dos.
So out of the 29, five declined
the second does.
And in some cases, such as
Rabbi Zach's, the second experience
was profoundly different than the
first.
I went in for
the second dosing
with the increased dose
of psilocybin,
assuming naively that
more psilocybin would mean
more of what I experienced
the first time.
And very quickly,
after I had swallowed the
pill, I knew
that something was immediately
different.
It really took a very long time
to come on as where the first
time it was immediate.
And so I started to wonder
like, what's going on?
Is there something wrong?
Is there's something different?
Maybe it's not gonna work this time,
ha ha ha.
And basically for the next
six hours, I
felt like I was in a
deep dark hole.
There was no light, there
was no color.
There was no relationships or
no visions to be had,
but either cosmic boredom or
what I might now call residing
in the shadow of faith,
not faith itself, but in its shadow
where I encountered
emptiness,
where there was nothing,
what felt like nothing happening,
literally nothing was
happening.
I was encountering the
nothing of reality,
the absence, capital A.
And that was
very confusing to me.
I had not experienced
divinity as capital
N nothing before.
And at the
end of that experience,
I felt like I
had done something wrong.
And I had never encountered
as a religious person a spiritual
paradox, but
here I was. I was holding
both the fullness of compassion
and the bleakness of
boundaries.
And so put all together and over
many years,
I'm embracing two
polarities of a
spiritual life.
So these people clearly had profound
experiences, in some cases,
really strange experiences.
And they had a lot of time to make
sense of those experiences on their
own, right? Because from what I
understand, the study took a long
time to publish.
Do we know why it took so long?
Well, things got a little
complicated and controversial,
particularly with regard to the
story of Hunt Priest.
In that first session, I most
definitely experienced the divine
presence.
It was just a powerful
electrical current moving
through my body.
It started in my spine,
moved up my spine and got lodged
around my Adam's apple.
And there was a moment that I
thought my Adam Apple is gonna
explode or whatever this was gonna
come out my ears or my mouth or
my eye sockets.
And I remember thinking, oh my God,
this is big.
I don't know what this is, but this
is big.
At one point, he remembered,
although it turns out it didn't
really happen, that Bill Richards,
who was his guide, did a kind of
laying on of hands and put his hands
on his head.
And the other guide held his feet
and he just felt this current
passing through him.
After the electrical current moved
through my body and I was
touched and it went out the top of
my head, I began to
make sounds that weren't exactly
words.
They were sounds that seemed to
mean something.
And I remember thinking in the
moment, is that what's talked about
in scripture, of speaking in
tongues?
It was something about this throat
blockage being unblocked
with this energetic force that
was moving through my body.
And then like singing,
like words that were not words,
like some sort of holy language
that I didn't need to know about.
There may have been some moaning.
There was also a erotic kind
of sexual energy in all of it.
It wasn't like having sex, but it
felt charged erotically.
But after this happened, he felt a
new lightness and freedom and
that he'd broken through this
block that he had and that
this was an incredibly powerful
experience for him.
I've interpreted it in a couple of
ways. One is in a really
Christian way that that energy
moving through me is the Holy
Spirit, that the Holy spirit
manifests as energy.
The next day, I remembered the verse
from scripture that the body is a
temple of the Holy Spirt.
And from that moment on, I thought
that's exactly right.
Our bodies are where the Spirit
lives in us.
It's where God lives.
And one of the ways that I
understood that block in my throat
was because as a priest
and a preacher, my voice
is really important.
And I felt like often
my voice was squelched.
It was blocked because I had not
been able to say things I
wanted to say or needed to say as a
clergy person and preacher.
The other thing is in
my tradition, if we're praying with
somebody, especially if they're sick
or struggling, I often put my
hands on their head.
And because of that experience of
being touched and that so much
dramatically increasing the
experience, I began to see
and know that I was doing something
more than just touching people,
that it had deep spiritual
power and significance.
You know, the mixing of science and
religion is just kind of explosive
and makes people very uncomfortable.
Scientists think it's kind of
woo-woo and not serious.
And religious people think it's, you
know, we're talking about sacred
experience that's being measured
and administered and
chemically occasioned.
Is that a cheapening of the
spiritual experience?
I'm sure there are people who feel
that, that this is a synthetic
version of what
is really profound and sacred and
shouldn't be messed with.
But there are also people who
fear or believe
that there is a
hidden goal to
this study that isn't being
disclosed and that is to inject
psychedelics into religion.
And some people feel they wanna
defend religion from that and
that this is a
heretical move.
I don't think that this was the goal
of any of the researchers.
I talked to them about it
and they specifically disclaimed it.
But with regard to Hunt's
experience, the fact that he
spoke publicly about
his session, which he did several
times and he described this laying
on of hands, a man
who had worked for him as an
intern felt that
there had been a boundary violation
and that this was a case
of therapist abuse basically.
And that led to
an IRB investigation,
Institutional Review Board.
This is the organization at
any university that
ensures the safety and
wellbeing of experimental subjects,
whether they're humans or animals or
whatever.
Right, they approve the methods of
a study beforehand and also
keep track.
Exactly, you have to submit
your protocol, exactly what you're
gonna do to the IRB and they comment
on it. And they've determined that
in fact, Bill Richards hadn't
touched Hunt Priest on the head.
He had touched him on the shoulder,
which was consented to.
And the reason was they had videos.
And so that charge
melted away.
But there were other charges too.
Two of the funders got involved in
the research.
One became the person who was
conducting these in-depth
interviews.
Another served as a guide
or a second guide in several
sessions.
This hadn't been disclosed
to the IRB in the original
filing.
Yeah, that's to be clear, that's a
highly unusual thing to
have happen in a scientific study,
right?
Yeah, as far as I know.
I mean, I don't think it's
forbidden, but it's unusual
and certainly should be disclosed.
And in fact, the IRB in
its conclusion cleared the
study for publication, but said they
had to disclose this.
Some experts have voiced concerns
that the researchers in this study
might have primed the participants
to have a spiritual experience.
What do you make of that?
The priming issue I think is real.
You know, they are asked in
one of the questionnaires about
their sacred experience.
So there's an assumption that they
had one. And this is a study about
exploring and developing your
spiritual life.
So they're basically saying, you're
gonna have a spiritual experience.
So, you know, priming is a real
issue in psychedelic research
and expectancy effects.
Although it is true, you cannot
reliably predict the kind of
experience people will have.
And people surprise you all the
time.
The fact is that, you know,
everything from the Buddha statue in
the treatment room to the
music that's being played to
the kinds of questions you're
asked. I mean, if you are having
a series of questionnaires before
and after, and then your second trip
before andafter, and
every time you're asked, have you
had a mystical experience?
You're putting the idea in people's
head that you probably should have
one.
And so it's a kind of
vulnerability of this research that
in many ways,
people are primed for a certain kind
of experience. It doesn't guarantee
they'll have it, but it
sort of loads the dice in that
direction.
Okay, so setting that aside,
what did the researchers find once
they did their analysis?
What were the main conclusions of
the study?
Well, it was very interesting.
First, with regard to the mystical
experience, they screened
immediately and then six months
later.
88% of the participants
met the criteria for having
had a mystical experience.
And then they found at six months
that compared with the control
group, participants who had received
psilocybin reported significantly
greater positive changes in
their religious practices, attitudes
about their religion, and
effectiveness as religious leaders.
As well as in their non-religious
attitudes, moods and behaviors.
So a very strong improvement
in their practice of
their vocation.
And they went back 16 months later
and participants rated at least
one of their psilocybin experiences
to be among the top five
most spiritually significant
experiences of their lifetime
and most psychologically insightful
experiences of their life time.
That's kind of incredible.
And 42% rated one
of their psilocybin experiences
to be the single most
profound experience of their lives.
Wow.
One of the findings I found
particularly interesting is that
most, something like 71%,
reported positive changes in
their appreciation of religious
traditions other than their own.
Now, although there were no serious
adverse events reported, 46%
of the participants.
Said that their psilocybin
experience was among the top
five most psychologically
challenging of their lives.
So it wasn't always easy for these
people, but it was nevertheless
profound.
Okay, and what about the big
questions of the study?
Did they think this was real and
not some illusion or a
by-product of their brain chemistry,
making them think that they were
having a mystical experience?
Most of them regarded
their experience as authentic
and that it was the real deal.
And there was nobody I talked to
who had any doubt about that.
Even the ones who had negative
experiences didn't doubt their
authenticity.
So I think that was a significant
finding, but I think it's
important to stress this is a small
group, it's self-selected
in a way.
There are many religious
figures who would never do this.
This is a group of people who
perhaps had a spiritual hunger
or were struggling in their work
and open to the possibility
that they will end up questioning
their faith.
Whenever you take a psychedelic at
these kind of doses, you are
throwing the dice.
And people could have come out of
this doubting the existence of God,
doubting the legitimacy of their
faith, so they're risk takers
also. So we should be very
careful in drawing big conclusions
from this particular cohort.
What happened with the participants
after they completed the trial?
Did any of them experience a
substantial change?
Yeah, some people, their whole
life course changed.
A couple of them spoke publicly
about it.
Others though, like Sughra, kept it
to herself.
After taking the medicine, I made a
decision not to talk about my
experiences with anybody.
I certainly didn't want to talk
publicly about it.
It was very personal, very intimate.
I don't think my family would
understand my experience even
if I had shared with them.
To try and understand that you pop
something that is the equivalent of
a mushroom into your mouth and you
have hallucinogenic experiences and
that actually Sughra believes that
those are real and that they
are true and now wants to live her
life by them.
I mean, that's beyond any
lay person who has had no exposure
to the world of psychedelics.
And I don't think it's very fair to
expect any kind of understanding
from people until they
have been exposed to this work
themselves.
Several of the participants came
out of the experience believing
that psychedelics should be part
of their faith and gave up what they
were doing to start psychedelic
organizations.
That's kind of extraordinary.
Zak Kemenets ended up forming
a group called Shefa which
is about bringing psychedelic
experience into Judaism
in various ways.
I estimate around a
million Jewish adults in
the United States using psychedelics
currently.
They want to reengage with
the content of their tradition and
sometimes for the first time, they
want to be able to
pick up a prayer book.
They want be able just pray
in their own language.
And I haven't ever
encountered any other
catalyst for that
kind of deep yearning, that
deep desire than psychedelics.
And Hunt Priest who after his
experience became so convinced
that the Episcopal Church
could make good use
of psychedelic experience in
religious retreats.
He started an organization called
Ligare and in fact left
his job, his post, at
that time he was a priest, to do
this full time.
I do see a future where psychedelics
are part of Christian practice
because they actually are now.
I talk to a lot of Christians that
are using psychedelics and they can
coexist because they do.
And I know it's not a mainstream
view and it's certainly still
fringe, but it's happening already.
This is not about evangelism or
conversion.
It better not be, that's a misuse of
this.
And I'm sure that'll be tried to by
Christians but I think we should
offer these as a way to help people
find their spiritual path.
In the time since we interviewed
Hunt, the Bishop of the Diocese of
Georgia revoked his ordained
ministry, due in part to
his work with psychedelics.
Hunt is no longer an Episcopal
priest.
While we were reporting on this
study, we reached out to more than
a dozen religious organizations to
inquire about their stance on the
use of psychedelics, most
did not respond.
But several did.
One spokesperson from the Rabbinical
Assembly said that it is permissible
for adults to consume mind-altering
substances, under the supervision
of a trusted medical professional.
And officially, the Episcopal Church
has no position on the use of
psychedelics.
And then, Sughra formed her
own organization.
I run a collective called
Ruhani.
Eventually, in January 2023,
I remember talking to somebody and
saying, I just can't bury this
anymore.
I just, can't do that to myself,
it's hurting.
And so later on that year, I was
asked to speak about Islam, Muslim
cultures and psychedelics at
a conference, Psychedelic Science.
I ended up talking to person after
person after person, I think it was
like two hours or something and
found myself giving
my email address and my phone number
to lots of strangers
who were expressing to me that
I also have taken the medicine.
I also am Muslim.
I also choose not to share this
with my family or my friends.
And I'm also struggling.
I don't know where to go.
I don't know what to do.
I don't feel safe having
these conversations openly.
And so I decided there
and then that we would start a
digital container.
Where anybody who wanted to from
these communities could come along
and we would have conversations
every month online.
I don't know of another cohort
of people who've been in psychedelic
study who have actually devoted
their lives toward advancing
the cause of psychedelics in
their world.
At Ruhani, we are able to
help both Muslim communities but
also the wider world understand the
relationship between Islam and
psychedelics.
Psychedelics are not new in Muslim
cultures.
And a lot of people will just be
completely shocked to hear that.
We are not pioneers.
There have been people before us,
long before us saints especially in
the Sufi traditions that have
ingested things and have had
mind altering experiences.
In a way, they've had a conversion
experience and what
they've been converted to are
psychedelics.
But they haven't left their faith.
In fact, their faith has been
renewed but they feel that
in the case of Sugahra, Muslims and
in the cases of Hunt Priest,
Episcopalians, and in the case of
Zak, Jews, could
benefit by including
psychedelic experience.
When we think about psychedelics
and religion coming together,
I think for a lot of people there is
going to be an inherent fear and I
understand it, of course I do.
Or a knee-jerk reaction that says,
well, this is not your fast track
way to God.
Like if you want to encounter the
divine, if you want to get closer to
the divine if you want to engage in
your spirituality or your theology
in that way, it takes rigorous
hard work over a prolonged period of
time. Our saints didn't just pop
a pill. This is the work
of lifetimes
and we know that from the stories
of the greats who have gone before
us. This isn't something to fear.
It's not going anywhere.
If anything, we're going to be
consuming more and more of it as
generations go on.
So how do we learn
about it, respect
it and then share that with other
people? That's the answer.
Instead of the usual,
we're gonna medicalize this, we've
got to find a therapeutic target.
This is a kind of very exciting
science where we're delving into
big questions of metaphysics
and using psychedelics and
science to do it.
Do we know if there will be more
studies like this?
Yes, the next study I
hear is gonna be at Johns Hopkins
where they wanna give a high dose
of psilocybin to
atheist philosophers and
see what happens.
Science generally looks down on
narrative and what philosophers
call phenomenology, the experience
of humans.
I think that the stories of these
individuals have enormous value and
needs to be part of science.
The medicine took me away
very gently into
another world, another space where I
was able to, what I understand is
encounter my true self,
understand my actual values, go
through the things that really
matter to me and gain
a crystal-like sharp focus
on what those things are.
And today in all the stresses and
strains of the world and with
all that happens in life.
When I can go back to that
experience, when I can remind myself
about what is important,
it comes from my two
sessions.
As I feel like the plant continues
to unfold and continues
to talk to me.
The transformative power of
psychedelics is quite remarkable,
doesn't always happen.
I think that the setting and the
priming and all that are very
important.
But this is yet another group
that I interviewed who told stories
of personal transformation that were
poignant and powerful.
And when you think about it,
remarkable.
I mean, it's a mushroom.
Altered States is a production of
the UC Berkeley Center for the
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Most well-known psychedelics remain
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encourage the use of psychedelics or
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