Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [48]
“You seem to be saying,” I said carefully,“that there’s nature, nurture, and then something ...”
“Mystical?” Cloninger laughed as he finished my sentence. “There is. And it’s real.We really do have a soul. And we really can listen to it. And it’s good and it’s intelligent and it’s what makes life worthwhile.”
To those inclined toward God, this makes perfect sense, while others may scratch their heads in puzzlement. As for me, I see this as an invitation to unravel the mystery of soul and body and their relationship to each other. It is a laughably ambitious task, and to even begin, we have to drill down further into the science.We must wade through the synapses and lobes and chemicals in the brain, the stuff of neurology that is so intricately tuned that it takes my breath away in wonder.
Let’s turn, now, to God as chemist. The brain is a cauldron of chemicals that color how we feel and think. Mania and depression, fear and love, all of our moods trace back to chemical reactions. Why not transcendence as well? And if there is a chemistry to spiritual experience, does that imply the hand of a Chemist? These puzzles led me to the ancient practices of Navajos and to the rebellious days of the 1960s. They zeroed in on a particular neurotransmitter that holds a key to spiritual experience. They took me to a type of spirituality that is both instant and measurable synthetic spirituality.
CHAPTER 6
Isn’t God a Trip?
THOSE WHO SAY LIFE IS SHORT have never attended a peyote ceremony.
This thought occurred to me just after midnight on July 23, 2006. Thirty-one of us formed a circle around a fire in an enormous tipi we had erected on top of a mountain near Lukachukai, Arizona. Thunder and lightning ripped through the sky, and heavy rain lapped under the edges of the tent, soaking our cushions and turning the dirt floor into a muddy paste. My companions sat cross-legged on the floor, motionless, gazing at the flames with sleepy eyes dilated by the mescaline from the sacred herb peyote. Three strapping young men with long black hair moved around the circle, pounding on a water drum and singing an urgent chant, which sounded to my untrained ears like, Doo doo doo doo DOO DOO doo doo doo doo DOO DOO. I understood nothing, since they sang in the Navajo language, Diné, but I felt the power of the chant like ropes wrapped tight around my body. I could not move, only breathe.
But I wanted to move. I was desperate to move. I had been sitting for three and a half hours on a thin, wet cushion. The only relief came in shifting from cross-legged to a kneeling position, and then for but a moment. Unlike my happy and stationary co-participants, I was not in fact stoned. I was an “observer”—an observer of one of the only forms of drug-induced spirituality sanctioned by U.S. law. Psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin (mushrooms), and mescaline had been outlawed by the “war on drugs” in 1971, ending most of the emerging research on the states these drugs seemed to uncork. Only peyote and ayahuasca used in Native American religious ceremonies are permitted, which is how I found myself sitting in a tipi, bobbing my head to Navajo chants with a silly grin, wet and sore and as close as I could legally come to observing mystical states created by Schedule I drugs.
Well, almost as close. I could have ingested enough peyote to reach an altered state myself. But I had opted out. Okay. I took a little. The law permitted Native Americans to ingest peyote for religious purposes only, and there appeared to be no loophole for NPR. More important, I thought the peyote might actually interfere with my work, since violent vomiting is common for the uninitiated. I then reminded myself that I had a stepdaughter, and tripping on sacred mushrooms might not be the best message