Mystics Under the Microscope

Until 2006, John Hayes, a psychologist and self-described Zen-Catholic, had never taken a hallucinogenic drug. In the 1960s, Hayes was a Franciscan friar watching with curiosity while the counter-culture used psychedelics with impunity. Through his own meditation and religious practice, Hayes believes he has had sensations that he would label mystical. But these mystical states—which he described to me as “moments of unitive experience” —were significant enough that when he heard about a surprising research project at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine he was more than intrigued. Doctors at JHU were investigating the effects of psilocybin—the active ingredient in the more common variety of hallucinogenic mushroom—and looking for volunteers.

After some considerable thought, he signed up. For three sessions Hayes is certain he received a placebo. Then, in the fourth session, something happened that had never happened before in all his years of prayer and meditation.

“It was like ‘All right, what’s the big deal?’ Then ba-boom!” he says. “There was a sense of moving in some sort of astral space with stars whizzing by me. It was like getting the big picture.” -Read More-

Unity

I have been working hard to maintain some kind of balance. I have been calling myself a rationalist and a mystic, a skeptic and a believer. I have held fast to the idea that the religious imagination is irrational, but that one can have a spiritual attention that does not need to be governed by any rational faculty to still be a valuable part of our lives.

I have argued, often vehemently, that things like Intelligent Design do more to damage the religious life than the scientific one. The need by some to square spiritual beliefs with scientific truths is faulty and damages our ability to integrate mythological stories, rituals, and religious experiences We turn mythology into history and it stops being eternal. We live for our immortality rather than be as immortal in the mortal realms of our experience. By this I mean, fail to see all life as holy, as part of an eternal unity, focusing rather on the hope of eternity.

But then I read David Bohm, and I understand how rational and spiritual modes of thought can be intergrated. It doesn't have to do with proofs or making those truths of the natural world we understand through science have religious meaning, and it certainly doesn't have to do with taking our religious stories and showing how they are literally true in the same way. It has to do with recognition of unity, of a greater universal principal through which our lives are activated and all things arise. Here is David Bohm: