c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) A recent Johns Hopkins University study finds that powerful mystical experiences can be occasioned (one of my mentors, writer Aldous Huxley, told me never to say “caused,” always say “occasioned”) by certain psychoactive substances.

In a living-room-like laboratory, volunteers received psilocybin, a chemical found in “sacred mushrooms.” Each also received a comparison substance in a separate session, without anyone knowing which was which.

With psilocybin, subjects reported a wide range of effects, including feelings of grief, fear, joy, transcendence, or unity of all things. No one in the study was harmed. In fact, most participants ranked their eight-hour session among the five most spiritually significant experiences of their lifetimes; one-third ranked it as the single most spiritually significant.

This report may puzzle many church- or temple-going believers. But I, as an active church-going Christian, welcome it. It throws an important shaft of light on what may be the most important strand in human history _ religion.

Religions all began with an implosion of the divine into history comparable to the physicists’ Big Bang. Those implosions created more than religions; they created civilizations, all of which have a religious center. And like the physicists’ Big Bang, everything that follows derives from those implosions.

Now, since God is infinite, the human mind must be expanded if it is to receive the sizeable chunks of the infinite that are in divine implosions. Enter the Johns Hopkins study.

The idea that physical substances can occasion such expansions should not come as a surprise to believers, for all of the religions assume that the divine works through matter.

In Christianity, for example, the Word became flesh. In a familiar assertion by the Church Fathers, God became man that man might become God.

The world-class mycologist Gordon Wasson showed that the sacred Soma plant, whose juice occasioned the powerful epiphanies from which Hinduism derived, was a psychoactive mushroom.

In the leading Greek mystery religion, whose sacred site was Eleusis, initiations climaxed in the drinking of kykeon, a psychoactive draft. It is virtually certain that Socrates and Plato were initiates of that religion; in the 2,000 years it lasted, no one divulged its secrets.

Closer to us in time and space, the sacrament of the Native American Church, which they refer to as holy medicine, is the psychoactive cactus peyote.

Of course, revelations can come through other means _ fasting, prayer, meditation and the like. But it was an entheogenic (roughly, “spirit-enabling”) substance that allowed the Hopkins study to shed light on the altered states from which religion springs.

It should never be forgotten, however, that the ultimate object of religions is not altered states of consciousness, but altered traits of character _ greater kindness and generosity. The Hopkins team caught glimpses of increases in these traits among participants two months after their psilocybin sessions. I hope the team’s next project will be to explore this issue further.

(Huston Smith, one of the nation’s foremost religion scholars, is the author of 14 books, including “The World’s Religions” and “Why Religion Matters.” He lives in Berkeley, Calif.)

KRE/RB END SMITH