Fingerprints of God

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

  Having God on Tap

  It is one thing to pinpoint the chemical or chemical system that reveals “God.” Now some researchers, like Franz Vollenweider, are exploring how a chemical acts on the brain to foment spiritual experience. Vollenweider is a neuroscientist at the University of Zurich who has made his life’s work understanding the chemistry of emotion and, more recently, spiritual experience. Happily for the science of spirituality, he lives in Switzerland, which has long permitted research using psychedelic drugs. That means thatVollenweider has accomplished what American researchers could not: he has observed synthetically induced mystical experience in real time.

  Spiritual experiences are slippery little fellows; they generally do not occur when someone is lying in a brain scanner, being checked for a brain tumor. The only reliable way to study the neurology of spiritual experience is to actually trigger a mystical experience—that is, administer a drug to a subject, slip him into a brain scanner, and then witness the mystical experience as it unfolds. In this way, Vollenweider can scrutinize the physiology of the “God experience” as easily as other scientists can monitor sleep cycles or an epileptic seizure.

  Vollenweider’s research has identified serotonin, and a particular serotonin receptor, as keys to mystical experience. When the psychedelic drug psilocybin enters the brain, he told me, it makes a beeline for the serotonin receptor 5-HT2A, the same one that Roland Griffiths had targeted.

  “When we blocked that receptor, nobody has any [mystical] experience,” Vollenweider said. “It’s the starting point. It’s the major docking station.”

  “So serotonin is the God chemical?” I asked.

  “Yeah, one of them,” he said, laughing. He noted that other neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and glutamate, contribute to mystical experience and visions. But the serotonin receptor is a little like a bouncer at a party: if the psychedelic drug cannot get past that serotonin receptor, it cannot join the fun.

  Once the drug passes the serotonin bouncer at the door, the party takes off, with brain chemicals interacting like dancers at a nightclub, bumping and grinding and creating a cascade of other reactions in the brain. Vollenweider has analyzed those chemical reactions and, in the process, he believes he may have located places described in the Bible and Paradise Lost: heaven and hell, and even the parts of the brain that spark the visions associated with those biblical “locations.”

  In trying to map this mystical topography,Vollenweider picked up the mantle of Adolf Dittrich, a famous German psychologist. In the 1970s, Dittrich tested hundreds of subjects and found that people tended toward one of three states when their consciousness had been altered by drugs, meditation, fasting, hypnosis, or other techniques. They experienced heaven (“oceanic boundlessness”), hell (“anxious ego dissolution”), or mystical visions (“visionary restructuralization”). Vollenweider’s arrival at the Zurich Medical School in the 1990s marked a quantum leap in the research. He combined Dittrich’s theory with brain-scanning technology.

  “I thought, Okay, if these dimensions really exist, there must be a common correlate of these dimensions,” he told me. “I began in 1994 and 1995, and I tried different inducers like amphetamines, ketamine, psilocybin, and MDMA.” (MDMA is the drug known popularly as Ecstasy.) Vollenweider asked volunteers to take these drugs and then lie in a brain scanner for a PET scan.

  “And we found that different networks do correlate with different kinds of experience,” he said. In other words, one combination of brain activity induces hellish experiences, another confers bliss, and still another combination stirs up visions.

  Heaven, Hell, and Chemicals in the Brain

  Let’s look a little closer at these states. Moving from the abstract to the empirical, consider the case of Michael Hughes. Mike had applied to participate in the Johns Hopkins study, but he did not qualify because he had (lots of ) experience with psychedelics. Mike told me he had been profoundly changed by a spontaneous mystical experience as a teenager, and that had converted him into a perennial spiritual seeker.

  Mike exuded that peculiar calm of so many others I have interviewed who have encountered the mystical. When Mike and I met in Baltimore on a sticky September day, he was sporting a faded blue polo shirt, blue jeans, and a big mop of brown hair with long, graying side-burns. Mike told me he had journeyed on a range of trips and would be my Virgil, guiding me through heaven, hell, and visions.

  We’ll begin with hell.

  The savage nightmare stemmed from a tiny mistake. Mike was in his early thirties, staying with some friends in a cabin in West Virginia for the weekend. Mike measured out what he thought was a reasonable amount of dried, powdered mushrooms (psilocybin) for himself and his friends. He miscalculated.

  “About twenty minutes into the experience, my friends and I could barely communicate with each other,” he recalled. He looked stricken as he summoned the memory. “We were laughing, but the laughter was tinged with an ‘Oh, shit, we’ve really done it this time’ sense of foreboding.”

  Mike wandered off to another cabin on the property and crawled into bed. His body felt thick as an oak tree. He pulled the covers over his head, but could not bar the images from his imagination.

  “It was chaotic and phantasmagoric,” he recalled.“Suddenly, I felt as if something evil and malignant had entered my head—an entity of some sort. I had the sensation of tentacles moving around inside my skull. It was terrifying. I started praying the Lord’s Prayer, over and over, like a verbal talisman. Though I’m not religious, I thought maybe just praying, saying anything over and over, would get the thing out of my head. I felt the tentacles probing and moving around, slithering. It was utterly horrific. I wondered if the thing, whatever it was, was going to suck out my mind.”

  Just as suddenly, the tentacles withdrew. “I was rolling around in the bed, sweating, confused, and panicky, but glad I was still sane.”

  If Franz Vollenweider had been sitting by Mike’s side at that moment, he may have patted his hand and consoled him: Now, now, you’re just experiencing anxious ego dissolution, nothing to be afraid of. According to Vollenweider, bad trips arise from an overactive thalamus, the little gate that filters sensory information. Vollenweider speculates that during trips gone awry, the thalamus lets in too much sensory information, too many lights, too many voices, too many visions. In the nightclub analogy, there is no crowd control; a bunch of bad characters gets into the room, and that leads to sensory overload, anxiety, disordered thinking—Mike’s paranoia about the tentacles in his head threatening to suck out his mind. In fact, an overactive thalamus is associated with schizophrenia.

  Most of Mike’s experiences, however, took him to Vollenweider’s heaven. One journey makes his voice quaver with awe to this day. He was twenty-two years old on that early summer night at St. Mary’s College in southern Maryland. He and his friend, just finished with college exams, celebrated with some mushrooms. They wandered around the town for a few minutes, eventually finding the door to a historic Catholic church unlocked.

  “I had never really been in a church by myself at night and was surprised to see that the candles were lit. It was almost as if I had wandered into this magical place,” Mike recalled. “I sat down and I felt a really strong sense of sacredness. It felt like the accumulated energies and prayers of all the people who had been in this historic church for a hundred years had sort of congealed, that the atmosphere felt very thick with the presence of many, many people. I sat back and closed my eyes and I was overcome with this really profound sense of goodness and rightness and that everything that was, no matter how we felt—good or bad—was just as it was supposed to be,” he said.

  Hearing this, I nodded. I recalled Arjun Patel using the same words during his spontaneous mystical experience. There wasn’t any “me” anymore, he had told me. There was just total seamlessness. And did that feel good or bad? I had asked. It just felt like ... this is the way it’s supposed to be.

  Mike continued, snapping me ba
ck to the present.“And it was really overwhelming. Trying to describe a transcendent experience is difficult. There aren’t the proper words in our vocabulary to describe this immense sense of connection with Something. It felt like an intelligence to be sure, but it felt like a natural intelligence that imbues everything. It imbued the wood of the pews. It was emanating from the candle flames. It was the memories and the prayers of all the people that had ever been in this church. And it really felt like a microcosm of the universe itself. And at that point I really felt central and tied into all of existence.”

  Here is the “oceanic boundlessness” of Franz Vollenweider’s heaven—the serenity, the unity with all things, past, present, and future. Here is the deep meditation of a Buddhist monk, the joyful vision of a Catholic mystic. In this state, you are flooded with happiness and peace.You feel no boundaries and are at one with the universe. When Vollenweider scanned people’s brains, he found they experienced heaven when the chemicals stimulated the front of the brain. The frontal lobes keep you alert and processing information. At the same time, Vollenweider found that during good drug trips, the parietal lobes, which help you perceive personal boundaries (where your body ends and the rest of the world begins), were also stimulated.5 Meanwhile, the amygdala—the part of the brain that processes emotions, anger, and fear—is dozing. The result is a mellow, blissful party.

  As Mike narrated his story, I realized his “heaven” was woven together with visions, or, as Vollenweider would have it, “visionary re structuralizations.”

  “The candles were extra-radiant,” Mike continued. “The colors were very rich. The shadows were very dense. These sorts of substances do bring out elements of our perception that we don’t normally access. Some people would say it’s a hallucination, whereas I don’t believe that. I tend to agree with Aldous Huxley that our perception is actually widened, and not just altered or twisted. It was also very tactile in the way my body felt opened up as if every pore was expanded, and it’s hard to say whether the experience was more physical or mental or emotional, because it was so profoundly all of those at one time.”6

  If the Swiss neuroscientist had been watching Mike’s brain in the scanner, he might explain that visions (or “visionary restructuraliza tions”) refer to altered perception—hearing voices, seeing colors more brightly, even hallucinating.7 Visions materialize, Vollenweider speculates, when the drug stimulates the striatum. That is a part of the brain that processes sights, sounds, tastes, touch; stimulating this area makes those senses richer, more acute, more colorful—but not so much that it terrifies. Ordinary things seem remarkable. Oh, wow, look at that doorknob.

  Dave Nichols, a pharmacologist at Purdue University, speculated that Mike’s brain was experiencing a torrent of events as he gazed at the candles. The part of the brain that detects colors was stimulated, and the frontal cortex, which makes sense of the world, was in overdrive, over-processing the colors and making them appear richer. At the same time, Nichols believed, a part of the brain called the locus coeruleus was firing out signals in bursts. This part of the brain is nicknamed the “novelty detector”—because it tells you, “Oh! Someone just walked into the room! Pay attention.”

  “Say someone takes psilocybin and they look at a flower, and they say, ‘Oh my God, this is really beautiful,’ ” Nichols explained. On the one hand, the signals in your brain that say “red rose” are now being processed in overdrive, so the red looks much brighter and more saturated. At the same time, he said, the novelty detector is going overboard.

  “The normal connotation placed on the flower is, ‘Well, that’s a flower, and I’ve seen a million of them in my life and it’s just a flower.’ But now you’ve shut off some of the processing that would come through and tell you that. And you’re also having this novelty detector saying, ‘Wow, this is a really interesting flower. Look at all those veins and petals.’ ”

  The Brain as Spiritual Filter

  As I worked through the chemistry of psychedelic experiences, one question nagged at me: Is a chemically induced experience a real spiritual experience?

  Honestly, I haven’t the foggiest idea whether drugs trigger a genuine encounter with “God” or another reality. Nor does anyone else, incidentally, since that would require knowing whether or not another reality exists. It is possible that drugs are the bullet train to God. It is equally possible that this sort of spirituality is nothing but a figment of a chemically addled brain, a synthetic light show, a cheap imitation of the deep-seated spirituality gleaned from prayer, or meditation, or life events that lead to epiphanies.

  Arjun Patel takes the latter view. Arjun’s appetite for the supernatural was whetted when he enjoyed a spontaneous mystical experience while meditating in his college dorm room. When he could not generate a repeat performance through meditation, he dabbled with mushrooms.

  “Maybe if I hadn’t had a spontaneous mystical experience, I would have considered some of my psilocybin experiences to be mystical,” he told me. “But they’re really very different. With psilocybin you know you’ve taken something. There’s a physical, somatic component to it. I remember the first couple of times I tried it, I thought, ‘Wow, I’ve just eaten a poisonous mushroom and this is the side effect.’ ”

  And yet, others who have experienced mysticism through chemistry swear it is as genuine as the natural kind. Mike Hughes insists that his mushroom trip in the Catholic church was just as mystical as the spontaneous experience that launched him on his spiritual journey several years earlier.

  “The two experiences were of equal profundity,” Mike told me. “That’s another thing I’ve thought about these years when listening to the debate:‘Oh, a chemical cannot make you have an experience of God.’ I don’t believe that. And ultimately, I don’t really care if it is my brain chemistry doing this. They were equally profound. They both changed me dramatically. They’re just two different roads to the same place.”

  I secretly hope Arjun Patel is correct. It peeves me to think that some people can ignite their faith life with a pill, probably because I lack the courage to do so. It irks me to contemplate all those hours of study and prayer, down on my knees straining to connect with God, when I could have swallowed a mushroom. But these irritations pale next to other puzzles: Does a chemical take one to a spiritual realm or to a subconscious one? Does it transport one to the light outside Plato’s cave or into the folds of one’s brain? And is “God” the creator of all life, or the creation of a chemical reaction?

  Enter Aldous Huxley, who hatched what I consider the most helpful analogy for explaining spiritual perception. Best known for his novel Brave New World, Huxley was an early advocate of LSD—not for the thrills but for the insights it could bestow.

  In The Doors of Perception, Huxley proposed that the brain is a “reducing valve.”8 He suggested that all around us is what he called “Mind at Large.” This Mind, Huxley ventured, comprises everything—all of reality, all ide as,all images, seen and unseen, in the universe. The closest analogy to Mind at Large would be the Internet. Each of us has access to that information, but an ordinary fellow, or even an extraordinary Einstein, could not possibly process the flood of information.

  Therefore the brain acts as a “reducing valve.” It narrows the information to a “measly trickle,” only that information necessary for survival. And so we ignore thoughts of the cosmos to focus on the lion crouching behind the bush.We turn from the stirrings of transcendence to the e-mail on the screen.We nudge aside insights about the universe in favor of dinner. Most of us live our lives on that level of reality, satisfied we are missing nothing.

  What drugs do, Huxley suggested, is temporarily open the valve, loosening the filter so that extraordinary perceptions are admitted.

  “As Mind at Large seeps past the no longer watertight valve, all kinds of biologically useless things start to happen,” he wrote.“In some cases there may be extra-sensory perceptions. Other persons discover a world of visionary beauty. To others agai
n is revealed the glory, the infinite value and meaningfulness of naked existence.”9

  And to others is revealed the face of God.

  “It’s not the drug that causes these experiences,” explained Bill Richards, a psychologist and co-researcher in the recent Johns Hopkins study involving psilocybin.“You don’t take psilocybin to get rid of your neuroses or to experience a transcendental experience. Rather, what psilocybin does is unlock a door. It gives access to many different states of consciousness, some of which are trivial, some of which are profound, some of which are crazy, and some of which are beautiful and creative.”

  Richards would guide me to another insight. It was a signpost that would point me back to Christian Science, the religion I had dismissed a decade earlier. Sometimes, a brush with “God” or another dimension of consciousness transforms a person physically. It is as if the mere possibility of a hidden reality realigns a person’s body.

  Researchers started to chase down this mysterious connection between psychedelic experience and healing a half-century ago. They envisioned a revolution in the treatment of autism, depression, terminal illness, and alcoholism. Many of the early studies were haphazard, bearing a sort of gee-whiz quality. They also yielded stunning anecdotal results. But before researchers could compile convincing evidence, the golden age of psychedelics came to an end.

  Cancer in the Age of Psychedelics

  By the 1970s, the U.S. government was fed up with the sixties drug culture and Timothy Leary’s call to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Favoring a butcher’s knife where a scalpel would have done nicely, it shut down the sale of all psychedelic drugs, not only for recreational purposes but for research as well. A rich area of psychopharmacology thus became off-limits, but not before a cohort of rock-star researchers at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and other research institutions conducted a raft of studies on the effect of psychedelics on a range of mental diseases and phobias.