Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [58]
Arjun Patel takes the latter view. Arjun’s appetite for the supernatural was whetted when he enjoyed a spontaneous mystical experience while meditating in his college dorm room. When he could not generate a repeat performance through meditation, he dabbled with mushrooms.
“Maybe if I hadn’t had a spontaneous mystical experience, I would have considered some of my psilocybin experiences to be mystical,” he told me. “But they’re really very different. With psilocybin you know you’ve taken something. There’s a physical, somatic component to it. I remember the first couple of times I tried it, I thought, ‘Wow, I’ve just eaten a poisonous mushroom and this is the side effect.’ ”
And yet, others who have experienced mysticism through chemistry swear it is as genuine as the natural kind. Mike Hughes insists that his mushroom trip in the Catholic church was just as mystical as the spontaneous experience that launched him on his spiritual journey several years earlier.
“The two experiences were of equal profundity,” Mike told me. “That’s another thing I’ve thought about these years when listening to the debate:‘Oh, a chemical cannot make you have an experience of God.’ I don’t believe that. And ultimately, I don’t really care if it is my brain chemistry doing this. They were equally profound. They both changed me dramatically. They’re just two different roads to the same place.”
I secretly hope Arjun Patel is correct. It peeves me to think that some people can ignite their faith life with a pill, probably because I lack the courage to do so. It irks me to contemplate all those hours of study and prayer, down on my knees straining to connect with God, when I could have swallowed a mushroom. But these irritations pale next to other puzzles: Does a chemical take one to a spiritual realm or to a subconscious one? Does it transport one to the light outside Plato’s cave or into the folds of one’s brain? And is “God” the creator of all life, or the creation of a chemical reaction?
Enter Aldous Huxley, who hatched what I consider the most helpful analogy for explaining spiritual perception. Best known for his novel Brave New World, Huxley was an early advocate of LSD—not for the thrills but for the insights it could bestow.
In The Doors of Perception, Huxley proposed that the brain is a “reducing valve.”8 He suggested that all around us is what he called “Mind at Large.” This Mind, Huxley ventured, comprises everything—all of reality, all ide as,all images, seen and unseen, in the universe. The closest analogy to Mind at Large would be the Internet. Each of us has access to that information, but an ordinary fellow, or even an extraordinary Einstein, could not possibly process the flood of information.
Therefore the brain acts as a “reducing valve.” It narrows the information to a “measly trickle,” only that information necessary for survival. And so we ignore thoughts of the cosmos to focus on the lion crouching behind the bush.We turn from the stirrings of transcendence to the e-mail on the screen.We nudge aside insights about the universe in favor of dinner. Most of us live our lives on that level of reality, satisfied we are missing nothing.
What drugs do, Huxley suggested, is temporarily open the valve, loosening the filter so that extraordinary perceptions are admitted.
“As Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen,” he wrote.“In some cases there may be extra-sensory perceptions. Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others again is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence.”9
And to others is revealed the face of God.
“It’s not the