Foreword

This excellent document was prepared at our request by Ms. Kathleen G. Hess. We provided the conceptual leads from illumination granted by God to miguel de Portugal and Ms. Hess did the rest.

Our purpose to have this document prepared and published worldwide was, and is, to alert those who need to be alerted about the multitude, and variety, of snares that are littering their way Home.

Drug induced mysticism IS NOT mysticism at all. To use a blunt, but very illustrative example: The desire to have, and the enjoyment of having, sexual interaction with someone DOES NOT mean that love is present.

There is no substitute for God, nor love, which, in itself, is a manifestation of God.

We thank Ms. Kathleen G. Hess for a job well done!


Introduction

LSD’s discovery by Dr. Albert Hofmann in 1938 set in motion two decades of scientific and corporate research on the drug’s usefulness to treat mental health disorders including schizophrenia, alcoholism and narcotic addiction and depression and anxiety in the terminally ill. (1) The Swiss laboratory from which the drug was synthesized provided LSD free to research scientists until 1966.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, both the CIA and the US Army conducted large-scale, secret experiments with the drug using human subjects to study its potential as a mind controlling agent and to facilitate interrogations.

At Harvard, Dr. Timothy Leary researched LSD as a tool to achieve spiritual enlightenment. Eventually, his pursuits became so controversial they led to his dismissal from the university and marginalizing of his research findings.

LSD’s high profile in the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960’s led to its US ban in 1967 and in other countries shortly thereafter. The consequent lack of legal availability of the drug effectively ended sanctioned academic research, and sent those wishing to continue this line of study underground. Some legal, academic research experiments on the effects and mechanisms of LSD continued, but rarely involved human subjects. (2)


Background

Nearly every early culture used certain naturally occurring compounds for medicinal and/or religious ritual purposes, for example peyote and psilocybin mushrooms by native North Americans, fermented beverages and cannabis by Europeans and the fly agaric mushroom by Asians. Today these psychoactive botanicals or natural compounded substances are still in use, for example ibogaine —a root, used by the Bitwi religious of Gabon and Cameroon in Africa and ayahuasca— a beverage brewed from an Amazon rain forest vine by indigenous peoples of South America.

These “medicines” are typically held in great reverence by their users. Mythological significance is imparted to discovery and history of their use. Often, the “recipe” or method of compounding the drug for ingestion is complex and strictly guarded and passed down through generations of medicine men or shamans.

Use may be steeped in ritual, for tribal initiation rites or festivals, and may be accompanied by ceremony, dance, song, music, chanting, or other activities that enhance or supplement the trance like altered state of consciousness. A period of fasting or practicing of other austerities may be fulfilled before partaking of the substance.

Current religions use such compounds as a sacrament in their worship ceremonies, including the Native American Church (psilocybin), Santo Daime (ayahuasca) and Bitwi (ibogaine).

Enlightenment or New Age (3) type experimentation occurs using these substances and manufactured hallucinogens today, presumably for consciousness expansion and to bring about meditative states. User intentions may vary, with a fine line separating those seeking genuine transcendence or religious experience from curiosity seekers or recreational users.

In an effort to legitimize their use for enlightenment purposes, a new term was coined in 1979 to replace psychedelic — the new term is entheogen (4). Literally it means “God-within” or “God-inspired”, or “that which generates God (or godly inspiration) within a person”. The meanings was formally defined by Ruck et al.:



Research Revisited

The most renowned research of hallucinogenic drugs and religious mysticism was conducted in the early 1960s by Walter Pahnke for his 1963 doctoral thesis in Religion and Society at Harvard. Twenty Christian theology students participated in an extended Good Friday religious service conducted at Marsh Chapel of Boston University, half of the participants were medicated with the hallucinogen psilocybin.

Tape recordings were produced of the experiment, and quantitative surveys as well as follow-up interviews were conducted immediately and over the course of six following months. The survey rated participants’ responses based on a 9 item mystical typology developed by Pahnke. The conditions describing mystical experience were structured by the investigator to capture “the universal phenomena of the mystical experience, whether considered ‘religious’ or not”. The events addressed included:


Pahnke’s psilocybin testers achieved much higher scores in each category versus the control subjects; however, they did not report consistently high scores for each phenomenon, suggesting a lack of “completeness” to their mystical state. Follow-up interviews left the experimenter with the impression,


The original research was reviewed some 25 years later. Rev. Mike Young, one of the student subjects, recalls,



New Research

A study recently published in Psychopharmacology represents the first new research on human subjects in over forty years which addresses relationships between psychedelic drugs and mystical or religious experiences. Roland Griffiths, a John Hopkins neuroscientist, and others conducted a double-blind controlled experiment with 36 adult participants to gauge mystical experiences achieved using psilocybin, the active ingredient in psilocybin mushrooms.

The experiment was remarkable mainly because it heralded a new generation of psychedelic research after four decades of stagnation; but also because its careful design and execution anticipated possible challenges in administering psilocybin.

The subjects were recruited for a “study of states of consciousness brought about by a naturally occurring psychoactive substance used sacramentally in some cultures”. 36 participants, who met medical and psychiatric health requirements and had no history of hallucinogenic drug use, were selected from 135 respondents. Participant average age was 46 years, they were well educated and all indicated participating, at least monthly, in religious or spiritual activities such as prayer, meditation, religious services, church choir or educational or discussion groups. They received no remuneration and their motivation for participation was described as “curiosity about the effects of psilocybin and the opportunity for extensive self reflection in the context of both the day long drug sessions and the meetings with the monitors that occurred between sessions”.

The volunteers completed a variety of questionnaires on the test day, a hallucinogen rating scale, an addiction research center inventory scale and a test to assess altered states of consciousness, modeled on both the Pahnke-Richards Mystical Experience Questionnaire (utilized in the Good Friday Experiment) and the Hood Mysticism Scale (which had not been previously utilized to evaluate drug experiences.) Responses to the Mysticism Scale and State of Conscious Test were “significantly higher” after psilocybin than after the control, with 22 of 36 volunteers achieving a complete mystical experience after psilocybin, while only 4 of 36 did so under control conditions.

Approximately 2 months after each session, the participants were tested for persisting positive changes in attitudes, mood or behavior and spirituality and answered three questions: How personally meaningful was the experience? Indicate the degree to which the experience was spiritually significant to you, and do you believe that the experience and your contemplation of that experience have led to change in your current sense of personal well being or life satisfaction?

These ratings were significantly higher after psilocybin than after the control.


Nonetheless, a full one third of the subjects characterized their experience of fear at some point during the psilocybin session as “strong” or “extreme”. Four of those said the entire session was dominated by anxiety or psychological struggle, and another four reported the same anxiety and struggle throughout a significant portion of their session. (12)(13)(14)

The researchers noted that the proportion of subjects who fulfilled Pahnke’s criteria for experiencing a complete mystical experience (61%) was higher than Pahnke reported for his Good Friday experiment, and that was probably due to differences in the experiment setting — private setting vs. group setting.

The researchers summarized,



Conclusion

Five guest reviewers were invited by Psychopharmacology to comment on the study and its findings. Each expressed optimism about the potential of psychedelic drug research and an almost palatable relief that, finally, the barrier to research on human subjects had been breached. (15)

These commentators may soon know whether their optimism is warranted, as a glance at the studies underway or in development reveals. Ecstasy, LSD, Ketamine are among the synthesized drugs being studied, as well as the naturally occurring ones such as peyote, ayahuasca and ibogaine. (16)









Published on January 23rd, 2008 - Mary’s Wedding