Quest Magazine

God on Psychedelics: Tripping across the Rubble of Old-Time Religion

Don Lattin, Hannacroix, N.Y.: Apocryphile Press, 2023. 172 pp., paper, $18.                       

Over a century ago, in lectures that prompted his landmark The Varieties of Religious Experience, Williams James said out loud what many of his contemporaries were already thinking: the “Yes function” in human experience—a near, if not fully, mystical mode of consciousness—could be stimulated by psychotropic substances without supernatural aid—for him, substances such as nitrous oxide and ether.

Sixty-something years later, MIT professor and world religion adventurer Huston Smith embarked upon his own version of the transcendental Yes with a psychoactive option unavailable on the Harvard philosopher’s late Victorian menu. Half a day with LSD in Timothy Leary’s Cambridge, Massachusetts living room, Smith said, accomplished what a decade of zazen could only presage. Today, after another sixty-something years, a new phase in America’s chemical quest to trigger James’s Yes is opening—this time with less elitism, greater scientific integrity, and wider institutional support. According to Don Lattin, we are in a psychedelic renaissance.

Lattin, a confessed “skeptical universalist,” is well versed in the full range of responses in the course of Americans’ attempts to settle accounts with ultimate reality. A veteran religion journalist based in the San Francisco area, he has reported on the rise and fall of innumerable movements and messiahs, particularly those gaining and losing traction in the second half of the twentieth century. His mastery of the art of the interview has attuned him especially to the minds of his generation (best and otherwise), a whole class of citizens whose parents grew up in what was quaintly called the Aspirin Age.

Lattin’s previous publications, such as Shopping for Faith, Following Our Bliss, Jesus Freaks, Distilled Spirits, and Changing Our Minds, offer empathetic chronicles of a society of perpetual seekers obsessed with faith, appalled by faith, tempted by gods that fail, and, as Aldous Huxley indelicately put it, too often dying for their drink and their dope. Lattin’s acclaimed book The Harvard Psychedelic Club narrates the now mythic saga of Leary, Smith, Ram Dass, and others in the midcentury intellectual aristocracy who followed in James’s footsteps and inaugurated the first psychedelic age. God on Psychedelics brings the story into the twenty-first century.

An informal literature review reveals a host of recently released self-help manuals, user guides, “bibles,” and adult coloring books—the vast majority with mushroom-themed cover art—designed to familiarize psychedelic novices with the dynamics and dimensions of the new renaissance. Books addressing the spiritually inclined tend to focus on the alternative altars of non-Western, earth-based, perennial, and harmonial traditions far from the American mainstream. What distinguishes Lattin’s work is his interest in psychonauts and their allies active in the mainstream itself, or what is left of it. Concurrent with the psychedelic Second Great Awakening is the dramatic decline of the institutionally rich but now member-poor once highly influential mainline religions.

Lattin’s primary informants include clergy and other religious professionals from the center and left wing of America’s rapidly shrinking religious establishment. A handful participated in the 2017 study of hallucinogenic drugs and mystical experience organized by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and NYU Langone Health—the research initiative that sparked a host of “Religious Leaders Get High on Magic Mushrooms” headlines.

Testimonies from Lutheran pastor James Lindberg, Harvard chaplain Rita Powell, Jewish rabbi Art Green, interfaith chaplain Tony Hoeber, and Episcopal priests Roger Joslin and Hunt Priest, founder of the Christian psychedelic society Ligare, transmit fascinating views from the front lines of the newest new age. Lattin even devotes a chapter to the spiritual journey of his publisher, United Church of Christ minister John Mabry.

Each story communicates a complex blend of yesses and noes regarding the promise of psychedelics for religious belief and practice. Liberative discoveries of mystical rapture mingle with disconcerting doubts about vocational relevance. Chapters on the emergence of entheogenic-plants-based churches and the role of psychedelics in recovery suggest possible shapes for postmainline U.S. religion.

Ultimately what holds this loose collection of vignettes together is Lattin’s respect for other people’s experiences and his generous sharing of insights from his own pursuit of the Jamesian Yes. The prose is light, and so is the willingness to commit to interpretive judgment.

The book’s subtitle warns of clichés ahead. “Tripping” has outlived its usefulness, and “rubble” hardly describes the clout retained in the nation’s premier divinity schools, which have produced some of its most impressive architecture and cultural treasures like Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer.

Sadly, the “God” colorfully advertised on the cover rarely shows up in the text. Lattin’s instincts are sociological and psychological, not theological. Still, the conclusion is clear: what fuels a renaissance is also a sacrament for a requiem.

Peter A. Huff, author or editor of seven books, teaches U.S. religious history at Benedictine University. His article
“The Current State of Unbelief” appeared in Quest, spring 2022.               

Science and Philosophy in the Indian Buddhist Classics, Volume 3: Philosophical Schools

Edited by Thubten Jinpa, Somerville, Mass.: Wisdom, 2022. 516 pp., hardcover, $29.95.

This work is the third in a series inaugurated by the Dalai Lama called Science and Philosophy in the Buddhist Classics. The first two volumes were entitled The Physical World and The Mind and focused on the nature of reality. The third and fourth volumes are devoted to philosophy.

The current volume presents treatises on both non-Buddhist (Sankhya, Vaisesika, Nyaya, Mimamsa, Vedanta, and Lokayata) and Buddhist (Vaibhasika, Sautrantika, Cittamatra, and Madhyamaka) schools. This provides the reader an authentic resource for delving into both major traditions and addressing such questions as, What are the basic components of the world we experience? What is the nature of their ultimate reality? And how can we come to experience that for ourselves?

Based on classical Indian sources, this volume describes the specific views of each school and the arguments behind them. Differing from traditional presentations, which include refutations of opposing views, this book omits the refutations, simply providing a detailed survey of each school independent of Buddhist critique.

This book provides a perspective on how much the two schools share. Yes, the Buddhist schools part company with the Hindus on two principal points—the authority of the Vedas and the question of the existence of a permanent self (atman)—but the similarities are also striking.

Having stayed in a Hindu monastery for six years, I was drawn to read the section on the Vedanta, the best-known of the Hindu schools in the Western world, which asserts that nondual consciousness is alone real. Vedanta bases its tenets on the meaning of the Upanishads (the final part of the Vedas) as opposed, for example, to the Mimamsa, which emphasizes the meanings of mantra set forth in the Vedas. This section also points out that the Vedanta was influenced a great deal by earlier schools such as the Sankhya. But I was surprised to read that “contributions of Vedanta to Indian Philosophy in the strict sense, especially in the domains of epistemology and logic, have been less significant than those of other schools.”

We learn that Buddha taught addressing the needs and capacities of his disciples: “To disciples interested in the practice of freedom from attachment, he primarily taught practices free from attachment; this is the scriptural collection of the sravakas. To disciples interested in the vast, he taught such things as the ten levels (bhumi) and the six perfections (paramita); this is the scriptural collection of the perfections or of the bodhisattvas. To those disciples especially interested in the profound, he primarily taught practices of desire; this is the scriptural collection of the Secret Vajra Vehicle.” Of the four Buddhist schools, Vaibhasika and Sautrantika teach the principles of the lower vehicle, and the Madhyamaka and Cittamatra propound the higher vehicle.

It is impossible to do justice to these discussions by trying to summarize them. The depth of teachings within each school presented in this volume is astonishing. This is not a volume to read through and be done; it is a work to cherish and preserve in our hearts. I stood up and bowed deeply after reading some sections. I am sure that readers would feel the same.

Dhananjay Joshi

The reviewer, a professor of statistics, has studied Hindu, Zen, and vipassana meditation for forty years. He reviews regularly for Quest.

Quantum Spirituality: Science, Gnostic Mysticism, and Connecting with Source Consciousness

Peter Canova, Rochester, Vt.: Bear & Company, 2023; 244 pp., paper, $20.

Theosophists who have studied The Secret Doctrine will recognize much of what Peter Canova writes in Quantum Spirituality, a very readable exploration synthesizing science, Gnosticism, Jewish mysticism, and spirituality. Canova admits to having “devoured every book” he could find on “spirituality and psychic phenomena.” He includes quantum physics in the mix. If you’ve not studied much quantum physics, don’t worry: Canova gives you a lesson on “quantum physics in a nutshell,” and he does it very well. So don’t let those two words scare you.

Canova tells us that the “Gnostic view of Creation began with the primary male-female Source or God.” He recounts the Gnostic myth of Sophia, beginning with the Aeons, “mind-generated thought-forms or ideals from the mind of God, aka “archetypes” or a “blueprint of a basic pattern, way of thinking or being.”

The Gnostics believed that achieving gnosis, or inner knowledge, was far more important than outer knowledge; for them, “knowing thyself” is the key to the spiritual path. Canova gives us a taste of the Gnostic Gospels, including The Secret Teachings of Jesus (a modern translation of The Gospel of Thomas) and The Gospel of Mary, a text that has been mostly dismissed by mainstream Christianity for its depiction of Mary Magdalene as a disciple of Jesus who teaches the other disciples.

According to Canova, humankind experienced the fall described by the Gnostics as “the creation of this psychic dimension of subtle matter, called dark matter today,” which is where science comes into the picture. Spirit descended through “chaos,” which we might also call the void. It is not really empty but is filled with “proto-matter” or potentiality, which, according to quantum physicists, contains undifferentiated matter.

Canova contends that consciousness is fundamental to the creation of matter. In fact, reality depends on the consciousness of the observer, as we see in Erwin Schrödinger’s observer effect. Canova cites philosophy professor Philip Goff and Tim Hunt, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who view consciousness as a “fundamental feature of all physical matter down to every single particle in existence,” Canova says.

“Panpsychism theorists, like Goff, insist that it is a materialist theory despite superficial appearances. It explains consciousness as an aggregation of lesser forms of consciousness building to more complex forms of consciousness . . . in terms of its intrinsic nature [matter] is a form of consciousness.’”

Elaborating on this theme, Hunt speaks of consciousness existing among many smaller constituents and evolving with each conscious entity into “larger and more complex forms.” I am reminded of the evolution of consciousness mentioned in The Secret Doctrine: from minerals to plants, animals, and humans, each a conscious entity. As for where this consciousness originates, Canova quotes Hunt as saying, “It’s just always been there.” 

Canova finally expresses what his book is all about: “The primacy of consciousness and the dependence of reality on the observer is the only view wherein the pieces of disciplines such as science, psychology and spiritual wisdom fit together so well.”

Shakespeare once wrote that “all the world’s a stage,” and we are merely actors. Canova tells us that all the world is a film strip, “a universe ‘papered’ . . . by two-dimensional sheets of the information-packed Planck Lengths.” In other words, the world is a movie of frames in a film strip put in motion by light and energy.

So could it be that God starts the projector and just watches the movie? Canova explores that in his section “Who’s Running the Projector?” in which he writes, “God (Consciousness) is the light source projecting the archetypal thought images that form the various information grids to impart specific directions to our phenomenal world.”

In closing, Canova introduces us to the “Third Way,” a path that questions our conventional knowledge about religion and the world around us. He reminds us that the Ancient Wisdom teaches us that “we all have divine potential within us, since we are all projections of the Divine Unity (Source). We are all capable of changing, of healing, of helping others, and all these things are miracles.”

Canova recommends that we spend a portion of each day in study, prayer, meditation, and contemplation. If we don’t, he says, “we will keep stumbling along in ignorance.”

Clare Goldsberry

Clare Goldsberry’s latest book, The Illusion of Life and Death, was reviewed in Quest, spring 2022.

The Eloquence of Silence: Surprising Wisdom in Tales of Emptiness

Thomas Moore, ovato, Calif.: New World Library, 2023. 185 pp., paper, $19.

Thomas Moore, best known for his celebrated book The Care of the Soul, is a Catholic monk turned psychotherapist. He has written extensively over the past three decades on the intersection of spirituality and psychology and how each provides a lens into a greater understanding of the self. Many of his works use stories from various traditions to highlight his points, and The Eloquence of Silence is no different.

In this slim book, Moore focuses on the bright side of emptiness. In a technology-driven society, where attention spans have shrunk to subatomic size and any lull in the constant input of information and entertainment defies the norm, Moore makes a case for embracing silence as a balm and teacher.

Moore’s writing is simple, but his words are chosen with care. Drawing from a wide range of spiritual traditions, philosophical insights, and personal anecdotes, Moore explains the need for regular pauses in our lives to recenter ourselves. We have been trained to view an empty vessel as something that needs filling—by turning on a podcast while out for a walk or by responding to work-related text messages while dining with a friend—but in so doing, we lose sight of the essential things all around us.

Moore conveys abstract ideas in a clear and accessible manner. A genuine authenticity in his language encourages readers to embark on their own introspective journeys and discover the profound depths that silence holds. His imagery is vivid and evocative, and his artful language creates a mood of quiet that befits the subject.

Readers are likely to be familiar with the tradition of emptiness in Buddhism, and of course Moore’s background as a brother in the Servants of the Holy Paraclete gives him great insight into the Roman Catholic contemplative tradition. But The Eloquence of Silence draws on other traditions as well. Several of the introductory stories to his brief chapters are tales of Nasrudin, a figure of Muslim folklore known as a trickster.

This is a hopeful book. Moore sees silence as more than a respite from the challenges of a busy life: his emptiness is also a source of strength and clarity. The collected stories and Moore’s insightful analysis encourage readers to embrace silence to navigate the complexities of the modern world and find solace amidst the chaos.

The Eloquence of Silence is a call to find a place for stillness every day, and the book’s format aids in that aim. While it can be read in one sitting, reading a bit at a time may be more effective, allowing space for consideration in between. Each chapter is very short; there are over three dozen stories in less than 200 pages. The Eloquence of Silence is best viewed as a contemplative text, ideal for placing on one’s desk or nightstand to read one tale at a time.

Peter Orvetti

Peter Orvetti is a writer and former divinity student residing in Washington, D.C.