Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [52]
Two months after the peyote ceremony in Lukachukai, I called Mary Ann from my office in Washington. I was curious to know if her shingles had really disappeared, as she joyously proclaimed in the middle of the ceremony, or if the “healing” wore off with the peyote.
“Oh! That night, the pain stopped and never came back,” Mary Ann sang happily.
“You’re kidding.What happened?”
“While I was fixing the Medicine [the peyote] before the ceremony,” she said, “I talked to the Medicine. And I said, ‘I want You to help me.You know all the suffering I’m going through, and I want to get well with You. I want to put my faith in You, and trust You. Help me. Doctor me. Fix me up.’ That’s what I was saying to the Medicine while I was fixing it. So it did. It sure did.”
“Remember how you talked about the man you hit,” I said, recalling that Mary Ann had been raised Catholic. “Was that a confession?”
“Yup. You can’t hide anything from peyote.You have to tell it, this is what the sickness is all about. This is where the sickness comes from. So the main thing about the shingles was the fear. The person that I ran over. It wasn’t my fault. Someone else ran over this person. I didn’t see it and I came up the hill and I couldn’t put on the brakes so fast or stop. I got so scared, and I never went back.”
“So the peyote cleansed you when you spoke to it?”
“Uh-huh. So when I prayed with the spiritual food, the person [who had been run over] came in front of me, sat in front of me. And I told him, ‘I don’t know who you are. I know you have a mom and dad. And I know you have grandparents. And I know I ran over you. But it wasn’t my fault. You have to forgive me, it wasn’t my fault. And because of that, I’m sick. I want to get well. I want you to forgive me.’ So the spirit just left me. He came in front of me, and he left me. And that’s when my pain stopped. He forgave me.”
She giggled girlishly. “I can’t believe I’m alive again! I’m so happy. The pain never came back at all. It was a miracle.”
We hung up then, and I considered the possible explanations. The first, preferred by hard-core materialists, is that peyote has antiviral properties that can cure the shingles. Many doctors and psychologists would no doubt opt for the second choice: that Mary Ann’s pain was in part psychosomatic, and once the fear and stress had dissipated, so did the pain. But spiritual believers hold firmly to the mystical explanation: Mary Ann had enjoyed a genuine spiritual healing, empowered by confession and forgiveness, by the supernatural character of peyote, and by prayer. Of course, she could simply be lying, but that seemed the least plausible of all the explanations.
Peyote has been intertwined with the divine for centuries among native people in North and South America. But only in the past two decades have scientists possessed the technology to peer into the brain and witness the effect of the sacred herb. Now, in the twenty-first century, drugs allow neurologists to watch the mystical experience unfold in real time. They can view the hand of God, or God’s chemical proxy, as it courses through the brain, stimulating some parts, damping down others, to transport the subject to heaven or hell. It is like having God on tap.
For nearly four decades, this synthetic God lay just beyond their grasp. The war on drugs outlawed both recreational use and scientific research on the effect of psychedelics in the 1970s. It would take thirty-five years for the government to relax its grip on this scientific research. But happily, in 2006, more than 2,000 miles away from that tipi in Lukachukai, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University had just published a study on the chemistry of mysticism.
God’s Chemical of Choice
Roland Griffiths led me through the institutional halls of Johns Hopkins University Medical Center, turned the knob on a nondescript door, and ushered me into his mushroom