Av- Psychedelic Science was a Religious Experience
Sumiruna. The word was on my tongue as I boarded the plane to Psychedelic Science ‘23, MAPS’ largest gathering to date, held in Denver two weeks ago. The week before starting my journey, a friend had showed me his new card deck, inspired by the unpublished drawings and writings of visionary ayahuasca curandero and artist Pablo Amaringo. An admirer of Amaringo and newly appreciative of cartomancy for intention settings and integration, I pulled a card at random and beheld Sumiruna, the angel of spiritual awakening. You pick the card you need, right?
I did need this card, and I need it every day. My life is an attempt at slowly and clumsily integrating a major spiritual awakening when I was young, and learning about ascending and descending through the many levels of this path, mostly through trial and error. Having a spiritual emergency or going through ontological shock—or whatever we’re calling it now—is a lot, especially when the change it inspired was a sudden desire to become halakhically observant in a house where my culturally Jewish mother and non-Jewish stepfather could not understand or make much sense out of their son’s sudden and lasting identity shift. I held this precious gem inside me, my mystical core, attempting to integrate into more observant communities, but quickly learned that direct religious experience where God personally reached out and made contact with you was not a frequent topic of conversation in the places I found myself, which meant that the gift that got me there needed to recede into the background. Sumiruna in exile.
Working in the modest corner of the intersection between religion and psychedelics has allowed me to speak freely about this and other powerful experiences, and to make space for many others who have heard this call, one way or the other. To be invited to PS23 and speak on multiple occasions, and to hear many of my colleagues and friends share what they have come to understand, has been a homecoming I could had never expected. For the first time in my personal and professional lives, I finally had the opportunity to speak in public about religion as, what William James outlined, a live, genuine, and momentous choice for working with and integrating psychedelic experiences.
I arrived earlier than most to be part of a day-long workshop on psychedelic care for spiritual and religious care professionals, convened by the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality. Led by the Center’s co-founder and executive director, Dr. George Grant, and Dr. Roman Palitsky, director of research projects, spiritual caregivers, researchers, religious leaders and mental health practitioners were introduced to integrating a rigorous and empirical framework of care seekers’ spiritual, existential, religious, and theological (SERT) experiences in the course of psychedelic-assisted therapy into emerging research and practice. Based on a work published in a recent paper by the Emory team, this framework challenges and builds upon several embedded beliefs found in psychedelic research and therapeutic applications, a relatively young field which nevertheless assumes outdated or unexamined notions about a person’s inner experience as either a certainty or irrelevant. Palitsky et. al. argue for assessing the needs and prognoses of care seekers from a place of ontological and pluralistic humility to avoid the caregiver imposing their own external structures of meaning and belief upon them. In this model, largely drawing from the work of chaplains rather than therapists, culturally competent spiritual care is fundamental to improved outcomes and the ethics of care. While I deeply resonated with the work of Drs. Grant and Palitsky, and hope their approach to this field becomes part of the standard of practice, it makes me wonder how these plants and compounds were and are still used in traditional cultures for healing, reconciliation, and encountering and negotiating with the sacred. These medicines are rooted in myths, and the individual experience is often tied to and reabsorbed into the sacred narrative. When we work with them in individual therapeutic settings, detached from story and elder and collective, who is really able to hold the wisdom of interpretation?
There were so many highlights to the week, but the highest would have to be the first in-person Jewish Psychedelic Summit workshop. Back in 2021, during the height of the pandemic, Natalie Ginsberg, Madison Margolin, and I came together and put on a two-day online event. Leading visionaries, researchers, therapists, mystics, artists, and rabbis came and presented on a series of panels and broke out into meet-ups based on various affinities. While it was a major catalyzing moment for the emerging psychedelic Jewish community, we founders had not yet found the perfect opportunity to put on our next event until Psychedelic Science came into view. With the magical help of expert Open Space Technology facilitator Maya Rimer, we designed a more bottom-up experience, where participants, without any preparation time, would be invited to present on their own answer to the guiding question “What is Psychedelic Judaism?” Over 100 Jewish and Jewish-adjacent folks came together for prayer, song, ritual, somatic experience, text study, group conversations, and a celebration of our yearning for a Judaism that integrates the promise of psychedelic healing and personal growth in authentic, spiritually-rooted ways. The collective effervescence of “finding the others” was palpable from the beginning of the event, and the reality of Sumiruna was alive in that room. My personal journey into this mystery, this new turning of Jewish spirituality, is connected to so many of our siblings around the country and the world who are exploring their own edges and entry points. To be able to embrace each other, feel the vibration of the group during song—it felt like the first and last days of summer camp thrown together, with all of the creativity, messiness, and energy of an entire summer in the short span of nine hours. Whatever the next JPS event is, it will be bolder and better now that we have gotten down to the heart of the matter, together. As we convened and dispersed a micro-community into an event of thousands of people the next day, JPSers had found their tribe and could explore the next week holding onto and integrating their intimate experience within a massive sea of psychonauts.
Wednesday, the first official day of the conference, began a creative, dynamic tension between how I often think about the difference between the “spiritual” and the “religious” —the first being my own direct experience of reality, time, and the soul of the world, the second being the institutional, collective attempt at formalizing those experiences. The opening of Psychedelic Science as Tent Revival (expertly expressed by Jules Evans’ essay here) was a moment of elation with 15,000 of our closest coreligionists yearning for collective affirmation that our faith in some aspect of psychedelic use is true — yet for me, undermined by the presence of voices that represent the real and potential harms of this field. Yet, the Sumiruna of it all—how do I hold the fullness of this experience as a divine reality, desiring compassion and justice, healing and the cessation of suffering, the ideal and the real, the ecstasy and the laundry. I am learning about myself that my spirit dwells at a not entirely comfortable juncture of my people’s experiences with divinity.
As the big show came to a close, the divine call for justice continued to flow from a session I attended on conservation of peyote in the Americas, with members of the Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative, moderated by the wonderful Miriam Volat. It was an honor to hear reflections about and castigations against the psychedelic field from both Steven Benally (Dine’) and Sandor Iron Rope (Lakota), leaders in both the Native American Church and IPCI. At one point, Mr. Iron Rope reflected on the use of the term “reciprocity,” a word intended in the psychedelic world to gesture toward appreciating, honoring, and repaying indigenous people for their stewardship of psychedelic medicines and wisdom, said “That’s what reciprocity means to you (non-natives). What reciprocity means to me is that you owe us everything and we owe you nothing.” In just a sentence, I felt the fulfillment of what Heschel described as one of the sole functions of the biblical prophet: “The preoccupation with justice, the passion with which the prophets condemn injustice, is rooted in their sympathy with divine pathos. The chief characteristic of prophetic thought is the primacy of God’s involvement in history. History is the domain with which the prophets’ minds are occupied. They are moved by a responsibility for society, by a sensitivity to what the moment demands.” (The Prophets, p. 218-219) If God is to be seen and felt in this movement, for Jews, for anyone, justice must be at its very core.
Sumiruna! I am ascending and descending! In just a moment, standing in the great corridor, I suddenly see face after face of collaborators, admirers, admirees, old and new friends, faces on Instagram and Zoom boxes, the years of email exchanges and names on Excel sheets. They are manifesting and passing through, hugs and handshakes, tears, laughs, side-eyes, and promises to catch up later! I have never had a near-death experience, but it must feel something like this—every moment in one moment, waves of energetic transfer between us all, over and over. Sumiruna, I think I need something to eat.
(In the evening, I attended the dinner honoring the life and work of Dr. Roland Griffiths. There is too much to say about this, too much feeling, and so I will decline even trying to summarize what this was like for me.)
On Thursday, I was joined together with my other tribe, religious leaders from many traditions, eager yet cautious to understand and integrate psychedelic work into their theologies, ministries, and communities of practice. To start the day, I attended the very first public presentation by the Johns Hopkins/NYU study on the effects of psilocybin-facilitated experiences on religious leaders, presented by Tony Bossis of NYU, Roland Griffiths of Hopkins, and Cody Swift of the Riverstyx Foundation. This study, hailed by Rick Doblin as the most important study to be done with regards to religious experience and psychedelics, has (still) not been published, but some preliminary findings presented to the packed room provided enough titillation to give way to excited applause, and for good reason. Six takeaways from Cody Swift’s presentation on the phenomenology of participants experience were:
Participants reported experiences that they interpreted were resonant with their theological beliefs, but often extended beyond those understandings.
Participants interpreted their psilocybin experiences as providing a reference point for understanding theological beliefs.
Participants reported these understandings as both more personal yet more mysterious. They indicated the experience fostered a sense of humility.
The reported a greater sense of trust in God/Divinity, flexibility, and freedom from striving in their work.
Increased conviction and personal fulfillment in the practice of their tradition.
Increased openness to other religious pathways.
Before I could hear the end and the Q&A (which I hear was a bit spicy), I was running off to my panel to present psychedelic perspectives from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with old and new friends to another packed room. Moderated by Don Lattin, Kamal Abu-Shamsieh, Jaime Clark-Soles and I shared teachings and cultural sensitivities from our respective traditions, everything from questions about mysticism and authority, harm reduction, and sacred technologies for navigating psychedelic states. This served as an amazing opening for the day as scholars, practitioners, and faith leaders from Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism continued these investigations in well-attended and deeply engaging panels. While there is continued talk about the demise of traditional religious belonging and belief, it was both surprising and stunning to witness the excitement of seekers and dwellers hoping to re-enchant these traditions with some secret fire that (only?) psychedelics can help bring to these systems. Perhaps these substances can give us just enough of a peek behind the curtain of our own minds to know that our faith and service and toil is truly part of the great dance. And if so, what accountability structures must be built first so the excesses of psychedelic culture and the potential for coercion, abuse, and neglect of religious dogmas, leadership, and institutions are not welcomed through the tent flap? Sumiruna, are we ascending or descending now?
With the festivities of Psychedelic Science wrapping up by Friday, the Jews were just getting started. Thanks to my co-organizers Mo Septimus, Natalie Ginsberg, Jessica Sirena from One Table, and our many generous hosts, we gathered over 100 Jews and friends to the perfectly appointed Clubhouse Studios for a Shabbat davening and feast that could only happen after the world’s largest psychedelic gathering in the world. The reverence and celebration of the evening was beyond compare, and there were glimmers, glimpses, of what a fully realized psychedelic Jewish community could be: intentional, existentially and somatically engaged, radically pluralistic and inclusive, delicious and beautiful, seeking and dwelling, as the Zohar states, “in the corridors and chambers, one inside the other, [that] the earth which is living have under its wings.”
Sumiruna, guide me from hall to hall and face to face to follow the scent of the One Above, Beyond, and Within All.
