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Spiritual experiences are slippery little fellows; they generally do not occur when someone is lying in a brain scanner, being checked for a brain tumor. The only reliable way to study the neurology of spiritual experience is to actually trigger a mystical experience—that is, administer a drug to a subject, slip him into a brain scanner, and then witness the mystical experience as it unfolds. In this way, Vollenweider can scrutinize the physiology of the “God experience” as easily as other scientists can monitor sleep cycles or an epileptic seizure.

Vollenweider’s research has identified serotonin, and a particular serotonin receptor, as keys to mystical experience. When the psychedelic drug psilocybin enters the brain, he told me, it makes a beeline for the serotonin receptor 5-HT2A, the same one that Roland Griffiths had targeted.

“When we blocked that receptor, nobody has any [mystical] experience,” Vollenweider said. “It’s the starting point. It’s the major docking station.”

“So serotonin is the God chemical?” I asked.

“Yeah, one of them,” he said, laughing. He noted that other neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and glutamate, contribute to mystical experience and visions. But the serotonin receptor is a little like a bouncer at a party: if the psychedelic drug cannot get past that serotonin receptor, it cannot join the fun.

Once the drug passes the serotonin bouncer at the door, the party takes off, with brain chemicals interacting like dancers at a nightclub, bumping and grinding and creating a cascade of other reactions in the brain. Vollenweider has analyzed those chemical reactions and, in the process, he believes he may have located places described in the Bible and Paradise Lost: heaven and hell, and even the parts of the brain that spark the visions associated with those biblical “locations.”

In trying to map this mystical topography,Vollenweider picked up the mantle of Adolf Dittrich, a famous German psychologist. In the 1970s, Dittrich tested hundreds of subjects and found that people tended toward one of three states when their consciousness had been altered by drugs, meditation, fasting, hypnosis, or other techniques. They experienced heaven (“oceanic boundlessness”), hell (“anxious ego dissolution”), or mystical visions (“visionary restructuralization”). Vollenweider’s arrival at the Zurich Medical School in the 1990s marked a quantum leap in the research. He combined Dittrich’s theory with brain-scanning technology.

“I thought, Okay, if these dimensions really exist, there must be a common correlate of these dimensions,” he told me. “I began in 1994 and 1995, and I tried different inducers like amphetamines, ketamine, psilocybin, and MDMA.” (MDMA is the drug known popularly as Ecstasy.) Vollenweider asked volunteers to take these drugs and then lie in a brain scanner for a PET scan.

“And we found that different networks do correlate with different kinds of experience,” he said. In other words, one combination of brain activity induces hellish experiences, another confers bliss, and still another combination stirs up visions.

Heaven, Hell, and Chemicals in the Brain

Let’s look a little closer at these states. Moving from the abstract to the empirical, consider the case of Michael Hughes. Mike had applied to participate in the Johns Hopkins study, but he did not qualify because he had (lots of ) experience with psychedelics. Mike told me he had been profoundly changed by a spontaneous mystical experience as a teenager, and that had converted him into a perennial spiritual seeker.

Mike exuded that peculiar calm of so many others I have interviewed who have encountered the mystical. When Mike and I met in Baltimore on a sticky September day, he was sporting a faded blue polo shirt, blue jeans, and a big mop of brown hair with long, graying side-burns. Mike told me he had journeyed on a range of trips and would be my Virgil, guiding me through heaven, hell, and visions.

We’ll begin with hell.

The savage nightmare stemmed from a tiny mistake.