Psychedelics and mysticism: medicine studies encounters with God in therapy

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Millions of Americans now use psychedelics, as mounting evidence suggests that substances like psilocybin, ketamine and ayahuasca may help alleviate depression and other mental health conditions. “Psychedelic medicine” is becoming increasingly mainstream, with pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly recently agreeing to acquire one such drug developer for up to $3.8 billion.

But when you speak to someone who took psychedelics with therapeutic intentions, they don’t just say they feel better. They talk about transcendence: strange visions, encounters with ancestors, perhaps even meeting God. This is new territory for mainstream Western psychiatry and culture. A psychedelic isn’t just medicine, yet taking one isn’t just “tripping.” So what is it?

Notre Dame medical anthropologist Aidan Seale-Feldman studies such questions. She’s spent the past couple years interviewing people who took psychedelics for improved mental health in settings ranging from underground churches to clinical trials, and, in many cases, emerged with a reshaped worldview.

The Well spoke with Seale-Feldman about the possibilities and risks of psychedelic medicine, the rise of what she calls “secular mysticism,” and what these experiences reveal about the search for meaning today.

The Well: How did you become interested in medical anthropology?

Seale-Feldman: I’m from a family of psychoanalysts and I was always interested in psychology, but when I took a college course in medical anthropology, I felt it offered a more truthful way of exploring the psyche and mental health. How is our way of understanding, say, depression, actually a product of historical and cultural context? After studying the expansion of psychiatry in Nepal — a place with a rich tradition of shamanic healing — I got interested in psychedelic medicine. In the U.S., the growing critique of conventional psychiatry and the introduction of this new way of thinking is fascinating.

In clinical research, patients often describe psychedelic experiences as deeply meaningful. What’s the difference between a hallucination and a revelation?

Many of the people I work with would strongly disagree with the use of the word “hallucination.” For example, I interviewed someone who participated in a psilocybin clinical trial and experienced being inside the body of her young child who struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety. She felt her child’s big emotions in a way she’d never had access to.

Was it a hallucination? That term isn’t useful. Clinical facilitators are trained to ask the patient to define what the experience might mean in their lives. The participant I just mentioned said it helped her have profound empathy for her child and be a better parent.

What kinds of experiences and insights did participants describe in your interviews?

One man I met had stage IV cancer; he was working through his fear of death. He took psilocybin and had an experience in which he died three times. In the third death he saw himself as he is now, frail and thin from the cancer treatment, an old man. He cried and cried because he didn’t want to leave his wife alone, but then something shifted. He realized his wife would be okay, that she is strong. Later, he was looking out his window at a beautiful flower and realized that life is impermanent: Just as a beautiful flower blossoms and then dies, so will he. He had been studying Buddhism, and was able to give his experience Buddhist meaning and significance. He said his journey helped him get closer to accepting death.

Another man had suffered from major depressive disorder for decades. He’d tried all the pharmacological options and, as a last effort, decided to try ketamine at a medical clinic. He found himself floating down a river and watching the stars. Then he realized that he was the river, flowing out and feeding life. He had revelations about his role in his family as the breadwinner and realized that he was the one who was nurturing, while his wife provided structure and discipline. When he became a river, he no longer identified with depression. He called it a spiritual awakening, and it completely transformed his life.

In what way?

He quit his job, sold his possessions, fell in love and moved across the country with his girlfriend. He started exploring other “shamanic plants,” as he called them, and said they’ve enabled him to connect to God and experience transcendence for the first time. This was an awakening for him because, as he put it, he was raised in a “spiritual desert.”

Even if he no longer identified with depression, aren’t such drastic life changes concerning?

There’s a lot of ambiguity. I’ve presented this case a number of times and we’ve had interesting discussions: Was that a spiritual emergency? Was it a manic flight? What did his family think?

Another man I interviewed described an ayahuasca experience where a close friend who had just died of cancer came into his body. The friend was saying, “Walk here, jump there,” and then she showed him all these secrets of the universe. For him, that led to a spiritual awakening. Then his girlfriend left him because she was really freaked out.

In a recent paper , you observed that we may be witnessing something new: “secular mysticism.” What does that mean?

Secularity is a very powerful and pervasive worldview, where scientific and materialist explanations are valued over those offered by religion. But the kinds of experiences people have with psychedelic substances aren’t easily contained by a materialist worldview. “Secular mysticism” is the term I use to describe the various ways people struggle to integrate spiritual experiences into secular lives and spaces.

There’s a lot of struggle in these stories. Healing, revelation, hope — but also significant upheaval.

Yes. I recently hosted a conference called “Entheogens and Re-Enchantment in a Secular Age,” a part of my John Templeton Foundation project . “Entheogens” is a term for psychedelics that emphasizes their spiritual and God-revealing aspects. I invited anthropologists, historians, theologians, religious studies scholars, psychiatrists, and practitioners from the psychedelic world. Over dinner we had a very interesting conversation about the intersection of madness and religious revelation. The blurring of the boundaries is what I’m interested in: Is it an awakening or is it a breakdown? Despite our desire to associate spirituality with the good, as [philosopher] Charles Taylor has noted , the enchanted world is also a terrifying place.

Do you think the growing popularity of psychedelics reflects a broader religious awakening in our culture — or could it help spark one?

I think in the U.S. we’re seeing what we might call a “spiritual turn.” Everyone across every kind of psychedelic church I was working in described themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” They didn’t want dogma; they wanted a direct experience of the divine through “sacraments” or “plant spirits.” They’d talk about the neuroscience of psychedelics and the plants’ chemical makeup, so they held onto their materialism while also allowing for the possibility of this kind of spiritual, more-than-human element. When asked to describe their transcendent experiences, they’d say things like: “I don’t have a framework for God,” or “I don’t even know if I should call it divine, because I don’t know what the divine is.” Or: “What’s mystical? I don’t have that language.” That’s how far removed these experiences are from people’s lives.

Do these experiences need a framework?

I don’t want to say dogma is good, but being in a tradition paves the way, right? Here’s what you can do with this experience. Here’s how you can discern, should you quit your job and give away all your possessions, or maybe not? In my data, for people who lack a pre-existing framework through which to relate to a more-than-human domain , psychedelic medicine can be destabilizing, upending one’s understanding of the self and the world. Having a guide to help you discern when to listen to a revelation or when to ignore it could help reduce the risk of “spiritual emergency,” a phenomenon in which self-transformation leads to a crisis, breakdown or psychotic state.

But ultimately, despite these many efforts, I don’t think it is possible to fully control the wildness, unpredictability, and mysterious workings of psychedelic substances, and this will be something we have to grapple with as a society as they become incorporated into psychiatry.

This article was developed in partnership with the John Templeton Foundation.

The most transformative discoveries often begin by questioning the boundaries of what we think we know. The John Templeton Foundation’s Future of Intelligence venture supports research and dialogue that challenge what was once taken for granted: What is intelligence, and what might our conventional definitions miss in the worlds of plants, the cosmos, and AI? Learn more, apply for a grant, and sign up for the newsletter here .

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