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doesn’t have much real stuff—real sights or sounds—to work with. That could be because the thalamus, the gateway that lets in sensory information, shuts down. Or it could be because you are closing your eyes and withdrawing into your own little world. “What the brain is actually processing,” Nichols posits, “is not sensory information, but is related to subconscious things: your dreams, desires, fears, anxieties, memories. You’re still conscious, and your brain has to process something, so it processes all your intuitions and feelings and imagination and fantasies. Now you’re into this realm where I would say the mystical experience occurs.” In other words, the brain is creating its own reality—its own heaven and hell—because it does not have external sensory information to work from.

7 Other researchers, who have different theories about the chemical process of spiritual experience, point out that the dosage used in Vollenweider’s subjects was only enough to disrupt the senses, not plunge a person into a full-blown hallucinogenic experience. The dosages of psilocybin in the Good Friday experiment and in Roland Griffiths’s study at Johns Hopkins were much higher.

8 Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (New York: Perennial Classics, 2004; originally published 1954), p. 23.

9 Ibid., p. 26.

10 E. C. Kast and V. J. Collins, “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide as an Analgesic Agent,” Anesthesia & Analgesia 43 (1964): 285-91.

11 See D. E. Nichols, “Commentary on: ‘Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance by Griffiths et al.,’ ” Journal of Psychopharmacology 187 (2006): 284-86.

12 Stanislav Grof, The Ultimate Journey: Consciousness and the Mystery of Death (Ben Lomond, Calif.: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 2006). One patient was Jesse, an unmarried thirty-two-year-old man with tumorous masses on his face and neck. A strict Catholic, Jesse had been divorced for years and was terrified of dying; he felt certain he was headed for hell or for a void of nothingness. Grof administered 90 milligrams of DMT, and after a traumatic start to his trip, Jesse saw a gigantic ball of fire. “He experienced a Last Judgment scene where God [Jehovah] was weighing his good and evil deeds,” Grof reported later. “The positive aspects of his life were found to outweigh his sins and transgressions. Jesse felt as if a prison had opened up and he had been set free. At this point he heard sounds of celestial music and angelic singing, and he began to understand the meaning of his experience. A profound message came to him through some supernatural, nonverbal channels and permeated his whole being: ‘When you die, your body will be destroyed, but you will be saved; your soul will be with you all the time. You will come back to earth, you will be living again, but you do not know what you will be on the next earth.’ ” Grof reported that Jesse emerged from the experience believing in reincarnation; and with no “end” in sight, his anxiety and depression lifted. He died five days later. Grof wrote, “It almost seemed as if he were hurrying to get a new body on the ‘next earth.’ ”

Another patient, Ted, was a twenty-six-year-old African-American man with a wife and three children, who was suffering from inoperable colon cancer. Ted received 300 micrograms of LSD—a hefty dose—on three separate occasions. During the first, the Vietnam vet had visions of war scenes and children dying of epidemic diseases, followed by an ecstatic assurance that no one actually dies. His pain levels dropped so dramatically after the session that he soon took on a volunteer job. Grof reported that in the second session, Ted experienced his own death, “during which God appeared to him as a brilliant source of light. This was a very beautiful and comforting episode, as God told him there was nothing to fear and assured him that everything would be all right.” For me, the most arresting incident occurred later, when surgeons were making a last, desperate attempt to save Ted’s life.