Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [50]
“For a Christian, it might be like addressing Jesus,” I offered, trying to translate into a metaphor I could understand.“It’s like an intermediary between you and God.”
“Right,” he agreed.“And just like Jesus Christ was sent to save mankind, to provide us a means to salvation, this sacred herb has got the same philosophy. We believe that the Creator put it on this earth for us to utilize and provide salvation, and provide us a life that we could be satisfied with. And,” he added quickly, “I’ve never taken it for the fun of it.”
“The word peyotl,” John Halpern explained to me a few minutes later, “means ‘heart of God.’ And these people believe it is a blessing of God to all native people, for their healing, for their strength.”
Halpern and I were seated on a log a few hours before the ceremony, basking in the mountain sun. At thirty-seven, he was balding, enthusiastic, a study in kinetic energy, and very smart: Halpern was the associate director of substance abuse research at Harvard’s McLean Hospital. Years earlier, he began studying why members of the Native American Church, who ingest peyote as religious ritual, enjoy vanishingly low rates of alcoholism compared with other Native Americans.1 From there it was a short hop to fascination with all things Indian, including attending several peyote ceremonies. It was John who had wangled me an invitation to the ceremony, and for that I was grateful.
“They refer to peyote as medicine,” Halpern continued, “but it would be with a capital M rather than a small m.We’re talking about a spiritual Medicine.”
Yes, but it’s also a psychedelic drug, I pointed out.
He nodded. Peyote contains mescaline. It is a “phenethylamine hallucinogen” that has stimulant-like properties. Translation: it acts like speed and dramatically alters your state of consciousness, and if the dosage is high enough, you will experience visions like those described by William Blake and Saint Teresa of Ávila. That would be 350 to 400 milligrams for an adult, though how that translates into teaspoons from a coffee can, I could not guess.
Halpern explained that like more commonly known hallucinogens, such as psilocybin, LSD, and DMT, peyote targets the serotonin system in the brain, which is the system that regulates mood and emotion, among other things. Also like other psychedelics—and unlike, say, alcohol—peyote is believed to make people hyperperceptive, because it stimulates the brain cells and increases blood flow to the frontal lobes, or the “executive” part of the brain.
Then I voiced the question that haunts me: Does peyote swing open the door to a different layer of consciousness, where “God” can be known, or does it merely spark chemical reactions?
“There is this claim that the use of hallucinogens will increase magical thinking so you think there are more connections than reality would show,” Halpern conceded. “And it’s so nice to believe that science can explain everything. But do we really have to understand the machinations, the steps in which a person ends up communing with God? Is that going to serve a useful purpose to operationalize a human experience? To what end?”
I could almost hear his loyalties ripping down the middle as he gave his impassioned speech. John Halpern the Harvard doctor knew that the whole purpose of science is to “operationalize” human experience, to dissect it in order to understand it. And yet, he clung to the mystical. “We are spiritual beings,” he said, “and to deny it does not make it go away.”
Soon, I would see all these faces of peyote: the chemical and the god, the sacrament and the medicine—but a medicine with strings attached, one that required confession before it made you whole.