Shortcuts to God

Neuroscientists find God in mushrooms - 12 Jul 2006 - Technology & Science

Laurance writes:

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

Forty years after Timothy Leary, the apostle of drug-induced mysticism, urged his 1960s hippie followers to "tune in, turn on, and drop out", researchers at Johns Hopkins University in the US 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."

As a Catholic mystic, this irritates me - not just because mysticism is the fruit of hard work, and someone has found a shortcuit. I think to say this is not only to shortchange religion, but to fundamentally misunderstand what religion is about. Religion - even mystical religion - is not supposed to be getting "high on God." Mysticism, in my view, is about culturing a feeling of trust. Trust in the mystery that is beyond knowing. When Saint Faustina, the great Catholic mystic, had a vision of Jesus, she reported this as being the purpose of the visitation - and as a result,"Jesus I Trust in You" is the emblem of the Divine Mercy chaplet. When Abraham heard a voice calling "Abraham, Abraham!", his reaction was not to check his meds. It was trust - "Here I am."

Sometimes mysticism comes with experiences that may superficially resemble hallucinations, and may even result in neural activity that is patterned in the same way. But what is important, as St. Faustina testifies, is not the vision, because not everyone gets a vision. What is important is the trust.

Sometimes mysticism does not involve images or visions at all. Sometimes it does not even come with a warm fuzzy feeling of any kind. In fact, many a mystic is more like Jonah, taking shelter under a bush, only to have a worm eat it. Sometimes mystics dwell on the absence of any sense of God, like St. John of the Cross did, in the Spiritual Canticle:

Whither hast vanished
Beloved, and hast left me full of woe, And like the hart hast sped,
Wounding, ere thou didst go,
Thy love, who follow'd, crying high and low? ...
Oh that my griefs would end!

Come, grant me thy fruition full and free!
And henceforth do thou send
No messenger to me,
For none but thou my comforter can be. ...

My love is as the hills,
The lonely valleys clad with forest-trees,
The rushing, sounding rills,
Strange isles in distant seas,
Lover-like whisperings, murmurs of the breeze.
My love is hush-of-night...

So no, mysticism isn't magic mushrooms. Mysticism is nothing more than learning to trust what now we only see in a glass darkly...