Magic mushrooms can induce mystical effects, study finds

By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor, the Independent,UK

Published: 11 July 2006

A universal mystical experience with life-changing effects can be produced by the hallucinogen contained in magic mushrooms, scientists claim today.

Forty years after Timothy Leary, the apostle of drug-induced mysticism, urged his hippie followers to "tune in, turn on, and drop out", researchers at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland, have for the first time demonstrated that mystical experiences can be produced safely in the laboratory. They say that there is no difference between drug-induced mystical experiences and the spontaneous religious ones that believers have reported for centuries. They are "descriptively identical".

***

I know this is so from personal experience. A woman who was my best friend in high school became a Pentecostal after we graduated. A couple of years ago I went to visit her. I described my spiritual experiences and she told me how it felt to get the "Holy Ghost". We both could totally identify with what the other was saying.

After I told her that my spiritual experiences were facilitated by the Blessed Herb, however, she ceased contact with me. I'm sure she believes me to be under demonic influence.

The article goes on to say:
The study is one of the first in the new discipline of "neurotheology" - the neurology of religious experience. The researchers, who report their findings in the online journal Psychopharmacology, say that their aim is to explore the possible benefits drugs like psilocybin can bring.