Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [53]
Griffiths motioned me toward a deep chair. He moved toward a white sofa, where he folded his thin legs into the lotus position. He was the chief investigator in a Johns Hopkins study on psilocybin and spiritual experience.2 He was older than I anticipated, entirely gray-haired and drawn. A self-confessed “gym rat,” he was strikingly slim in the style of people too busy to eat.
This breakthrough project, Griffiths confessed, sprang from a metaphysical question that dogged him for years.
“I started meditating ten years ago, and it opened up a window to the spiritual world,” he began tentatively, gauging my reaction.
I nodded.
“It was astonishing. I felt as though I had connected to another reality. Somehow, we are pre-wired to have that experience—penetrate that reality. But why? Evolutionary biology? Or is there some sort of mysterious pointer? If we’re wired that way, I want to know who did the wiring!”
I gazed at him, reflecting that most of the scientists I met who researched spirituality had experienced something mystical themselves. Personal, urgent curiosity—What happened to me?—drove them to the kind of alternative research that was at best a detour from the mainstream and at worst a risk to their careers. I sympathized completely. That curiosity drove me as well.
Griffiths continued. “And I thought, here I am a full professor at Johns Hopkins, flying around the world presenting papers on drugs, when there are huge, much more compelling questions to explore. What is the nature of consciousness? And finally, we got some modest funding to study spirituality and what happens to the brain in an altered state of consciousness. We’re just beginning, but it’s been the most exciting research of my career.”
With that buildup, you might think Roland Griffiths had extracted the God serum, a distinctive juice that ignites the brain into orgasmic mystical experience. In fact, his findings were somewhat more modest. This is the headline: Psychedelics can spark mystical experience. More precisely, twenty-two of the thirty-six volunteers (more than 60 percent) reported full-blown mystical experiences. They described feelings, visions, and insights that appeared to be similar if not identical to those experienced by mystics down through the centuries.3 And, like other “natural” mystics I had encountered, Griffiths’s subjects saw their worldview, their relationships, and their priorities rearranged by the experience, which they considered as meaningful as, say, giving birth to their first child.
Hardly the discovery of the double helix, surely, but allow me to inject a little perspective here. Science usually measures its progress in millimeters, not miles. In the world of neuroscience, which has endured a deep freeze on studying psychedelics, the fact that the government gave Griffiths permission to administer psychedelic drugs to volunteers at all was a watershed. The camel’s nose was in the tent, and soon more researchers would follow with similar studies.
As neuroscientist Solomon Snyder, the lean, stately chairman of the neuroscience department at Johns Hopkins University, put it: “It’s not what the dog says that’s important. It’s the fact that a dog can talk at all.”
But for me, what the dog said deserves attention in itself, because the dog is talking about serotonin. Remember, we are looking for a “God chemical” that opens a person’s mind to another dimension of reality. And psilocybin—the psychedelic given to Griffiths’s volunteers and to my happy compatriots