Rarely has the new neuro-reductionism been so naked in its repackaging of human experience. Nowhere in the research or the journalism does anyone suggest that heavily depressed people feel better because ketamine sends them on a first-person voyage through profound, sometimes ecstatic, and certainly mind-bending modes of transpersonal consciousness whose subjective power might itself boot the mind out of its most mirthless ruts.

I suspect we will see more and more thinking individuals cross over from third-person descriptions to first-person encounters, especially if the therapeutic and cognitively enhancing character of these experiences holds true over time. In other words, despite and because of our neuroscientific bias, anomalous religious experiences are on track to become ever more recognised dimensions of human experience. They are rightfully taking their place as ‘poetic facts’ — experiential claims that the living of life itself makes on us, and whose very persistence constrains the totalising aspirations of purely meat-based science. One sign of this development is the fascinating scientific and philosophical discourse surrounding meditation and contemplative practices, some of which was sparked by the Dalai Lama’s sustained conversations with neuroscientists in recent decades. While some intriguing brain-based explanations for traditional Buddhist claims have been offered up, these explanations are ultimately less important than the zone opened up between neuroscience and traditional spiritual philosophy and practice. Meetings, conferences, texts, trials — these are the spaces where poetic facts collide with scientific ones. A similarly robust space of possibility and dialogue might lie ahead for psychedelics.

Once again, we have a reverberation with the 1960s, when many people first heard about mind-expanding chemicals through the trip manual The Psychedelic Experience (1963), written by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner. This book mapped the dynamics of psychedelic rapture onto the visionary descriptions of dying, death and afterlife travel offered up, once again, in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Whether you interpret the text as a crude misappropriation or as a savvy psycho-spiritual mash-up (I think it’s both), its continued resonance is a reminder that, even if psychedelic experience is nothing more than a neural construction (and what, according to neuroscience, isn’t?), it still invokes the existential and religious questions brought up by the implacable conundrum of our own necessary demise. Indeed, it is perhaps here that we most see their mettle.

Rarely has the new neuro-reductionism been so naked in its repackaging of human experience. Nowhere in the research or the journalism does anyone suggest that heavily depressed people feel better because ketamine sends them on a first-person voyage through profound, sometimes ecstatic, and certainly mind-bending modes of transpersonal consciousness whose subjective power might itself boot the mind out of its most mirthless ruts. By sweeping such sublimities under the rug of toxic ‘side effects’, the researchers and their partners in industry want to sidestep the remarkable paradox that psychedelic substances present to brain-based reductionists: psychedelics are material molecules that frequently occasion experiences that look and feel, for all the world, like the sort of mystical or religious raptures whose unfolding cognitive content calls into question strict materialism. In other words, reductionist researchers of powerful psychedelic effects must still squirm before God — or at least before the experiential states that recall the ecstatic reports of traditional religious mystics, or of shamans making pacts with non-human entities, or of meditators seeing into the knitted web of self and world.

In essence, Griffiths and his team had simply restaged one of the most famous psychedelic studies of the 1960s: the Good Friday (or Marsh Chapel) experiment. Led by a Harvard graduate student of theology named Walter Pahnke, with support from Timothy Leary, the Good Friday experiment showed that, over and against a placebo, psilocybin gave the bulk of divinity postgraduates something like a powerful religious opening. But how far does this ‘something like’ get us? Although the follow-ups that Griffiths performed seemed to support the spiritually efficacious power of psychedelics over time, does his study really tell us anything about the sacred? After all, while his volunteers were unfamiliar with tripping, all of them already possessed a religious or spiritual world-view. It was Leary’s old message of set and setting: drugs might simply reflect and amplify beliefs and patterns of meaning already woven into the user’s intentional ‘set’ and environmental ‘setting’. The drug itself, in such a view, has no privileged access to sacred reality. Rather, like a feedback loop, it merely catalyses stories and perceptions already ‘programmed’ in the human mind or its surrounding cultural environment.

some recent ayahuasca research by neuroscientists working in South America so exciting. Though a powerful hallucinogen, ayahuasca is not illegal in Brazil, where the tea is used by urban professionals as well as by traditional and Mestizo populations, and has been integrated to some degree into national identity. As such, the state has also begun sponsoring a number of ayahuasca studies, the latest of which was published in the November 2011 issue of the journal Human Brain Mapping. A team of researchers in the city of Natal used functional MRI to track how the brains of experienced ayahuasca drinkers behaved during the extraordinary visionary displays occasioned by the brew. By asking participants to imagine internal scenes, and correlating the imaging data with visual tests and psychological measures, the team was able to trace the shifting dance between different brain regions associated with memory, projective imagination, vision, and intentional imagery, and to offer tentative explanations for the intense vividness of the visions.

After abandoning the study, Strassman published some of his findings in the usual journals. But he also decided to write a mass-market book called DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2001), which included many of the mind-blowing first-person accounts of his subjects, along with a number of Strassman’s own more imaginative ruminations. For instance, Strassman speculated that DMT, traces of which are found endogenously (within the body’s cells), is produced in the pineal gland upon the onset of death, and thus might explain the phenomenon of near-death experiences. Beyond his curious support for a long-mocked argument of Descartes, who had located the soul in the pineal gland, Strassman also invoked the crown chakra of Hindu Tantra, though he noted that the pineal gland becomes visible after 49 days of fetal development — the same period of time that The Tibetan Book of the Dead claims is required for the outgoing soul-force to reincarnate.

Like many of the death-prep meditations practised in Tibetan Buddhism and other initiatory traditions, psychedelics — provided, again, within an appropriate set and setting — can serve as flight simulators hurtling us through the shadow of death, test runs of the inevitable fear and phantasmagoria, as well as avenues towards acceptance and integral insight. Having died, even in hallucination, one can no longer quite live the same way.

We are what we eat, but what we eat is also a reflection of who (we think) we are. In other words, the stories we tell about the things we take into our bodies reflect the stories we tell about our more mysterious selves. [...] This mirroring effect between substance and self is particularly powerful when the things in question are psychoactive drugs — those natural and synthetic materials that directly and sometimes dramatically affect the lived texture of human consciousness. So what do you think: is alcohol a social lubricant, a temptation, a poison, a medium of culture, a tool of self-medication, or the blood of Christ? All of these views are ‘social stories’ that derive their consistency from the shifting locations wherein human beings find themselves. We reimagine what we ingest from where we stand, and where we stand is a moving target — or better said, a dance.

The most active alkaloid in ayahuasca is DMT, the tryptamine whose study initiated the current wave of psychedelic research and also occasioned some of the more intriguing juxtapositions of religion and science in the recent literature. In the early 1990s, the American psychiatrist Rick Strassman began doling out hundreds of injections of the powerful, short-acting tryptamine to seasoned volunteers at the University of New Mexico. Strassman’s study was designed to collect psychophysiological data, but his project was inextricably woven into broader religious and spiritual concerns on a number of fronts. Many of the volunteers experienced astounding and often terrifying encounters with alien or divine beings. These quasi-shamanic episodes disturbed Strassman and many of his subjects, and Strassman worried that the scientific mindset and clinical setting of the study (as opposed to more traditional or spiritual contexts) might be a leading factor in lending them a negative edge. These arguably 'religious' concerns contributed to his decision to discontinue the study in 1995.

By sweeping such sublimities under the rug of toxic ‘side effects’, the researchers and their partners in industry want to sidestep the remarkable paradox that psychedelic substances present to brain-based reductionists: psychedelics are material molecules that frequently occasion experiences that look and feel, for all the world, like the sort of mystical or religious raptures whose unfolding cognitive content calls into question strict materialism. In other words, reductionist researchers of powerful psychedelic effects must still squirm before God — or at least before the experiential states that recall the ecstatic reports of traditional religious mystics, or of shamans making pacts with non-human entities, or of meditators seeing into the knitted web of self and world.