What happens when clergy take psilocybin
101 comments
·June 16, 2025SlowTao
harry8
Cartoon about that which made me laugh.
https://www.altaonline.com/culture/cartoons/a42179654/weekly...
so hard to track these things down with google nowadays. Treats every word you add as an "or" like yahoo used to when google took their search market. The move from search engine to suggestion engine has been a disaster from my point of view. Hard to see how it would be more profitable.
edit: better link
fuzzfactor
That's about the time Catholics stopped having their Mass in Latin . . .
gchamonlive
I go to raves, I take very modest amounts of LSD (100 maybe 150 micrograms), and the whole experience turns into very spiritual session where I dance with my entire being and let myself disolve into the Great Void.
It has lasting effects that go way beyond the effects of the drug.
However I think it's complicated to derive generalisms like saying it's a drug for everyone and everybody should take it. It's definitely not for everybody.
I'm also not going to be a hypocrite and say that you shouldn't do it. What I'll go and say is that it's your journey to figure out what you are going to invite into your life. In any case, depending on what you believe, you aren't actually here to figure things out. You already did. You are here to remember.
In more secular terms, you are here to do the required work to understand yourself, your circumstances, stand on the shoulder of giants and study the great minds that came before you. That will give you the necessary foundational philosophy to withstand and understand these experiences, should you choose to go through them. This is the only way to acquire a foundational respect for these substances and these experiences.
Have I done this work? Have I achieved the required level of understanding to make heads and tails of these experiences? Not for a while at least. It was rough the first couple of times. Very violent and crude, like rushing naked through a sea of people while being completely sure that that night is the last night of your life (I wasn't actually naked, it just felt like that and that everyone was eventually going to merge with me and that I should feel ashamed of it).
But with time and with the necessary exposure to understand the basics of existencialism I think I managed to pin down a more gentle form of this experience that can help me remember how to lay myself bare to the goddess and just be there when I dance.
So I think I can extend this invitation to anyone that feels brave enough to lift the reins of existence and reality and expose yourself to the truth. That everything is a story about the end of the world. About the beginning. And about everything at once.
It's scary, it's blissful and it's totally worth it.
o1bf2k25n8g5
> ...you are here to do the required work to understand yourself, your circumstances, stand on the shoulder of giants and study the great minds that came before you.
Just to offer a counterpoint:
“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.” ― Kurt Vonnegut
The more I experience, the more I think maybe that's a pretty good point, too.
gchamonlive
It's like the nihilist denying any meaning to the world. It's because they choose to see it that way even if they aren't aware of it.
If you choose to fart around, whatever that means, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Since there's no salvation, farts are also meaningless, and at the same time totally meaningful given the circumstances.
thinkingtoilet
I would go as far as to say most people should have a psychedelic experience at least once in their life. There's nothing like it. It's one of the great pleasures of being alive.
gchamonlive
Totally. It's just that that realisation must come from within, because the experience changes the very perception of reality and the relationship between yourself and everything else. With the wrong circumstances what would otherwise be a blissful experience can turn into a nightmare and this gate is likely forever closed for this person. I'd never forgive myself if I had this happen to someone else because of ill advice given by me.
reactordev
And if that’s the case, do it in your early 20s in college or shortly after. Don’t do it in your 70s.
BLKNSLVR
Why not in your 70s? Purely due to being more physically fragile, or more spiritually "settled"?
Would it make a difference if it was a 70 year old who is still open minded and curious about life, the universe, and everything? (given that I'd guess that any 70+ year old willing to do LSD is likely to be as per this description).
Legitimately interested in your answer / reasoning (mainly because my plan was to experience a number of different drugs once the rest of my life, that could have been put at risk by drugs, is kinda setup and done well enough).
gchamonlive
That is assuming everyone is ready to do it at the age of 20. If you are only ready to take them at 70s, why not do it? At that age you have other things to worry about anyway.
swayvil
It is a fine cure for arrogance too.
illiac786
Would you say the following are (individually taken) red flags for trying it: * being terrified of letting loose (even with something common in the local culture, for example alcohol) * having zero belief in the mysticism
SlowTao
Some of the best writing on the uses of LSD come from Alan watts. In his early life he said "it was impossible to bottle mysticism" and yet on dropping acid the first time felt like "they have completely bottled mysticism!".
But then he noticed that the results really depend on who is taking it and what their world view is. If you do not have any inclination towards that mystic space, you will not get the ego death. It is as Eckhart Tolle said "just your senses turned up to 11", that is if there is nothing else you can get out of it.
As Douglas Rushkoff said "If you give tech bros a hit of psychedelics, all you get is tech bros on psychedelics." There is no higher sense achieved.
josephg
> "If you give tech bros a hit of psychedelics, all you get is tech bros on psychedelics."
This is an amazing line. I must admit: the first time I tried LSD I had some code open on my laptop. Before the trip I was curious what programming on LSD would be like, so at some point dutifully I sat down in front of my editor. I was immediately utterly transfixed by the colours of the text cursor as it pulsed. Then I lost myself watching hover states as I moved the mouse around. Needless to say, I didn’t get any programming done.
I remember thinking how strange and hilarious it was that, while sober, I care at all about programming. It all seemed so hollow.
A lot more happened on the trip - the whole thing was incredibly profound and insightful. But all these years later, I still have a crystal clear image of that pulsing cursor etched in my memory.
gchamonlive
It's because meaning isn't essential to the universe, but derived from human experience. The universe needs us just as much as we need the universe. Actually this separation is an artifact of reductionism we have to let go.
In any case, this is why I think philosophy is the required work to be done so that we can invite spiritualism and mysticism into our lives and potentially experience them with these reality altering drugs.
throwaway7783
Nothing is essential to the universe, the universe does not need us. We need it exactly as it is today, and that is it. Everything else is stuff we made up to understand the universe weakly, or to cope with life. This is not nihilism, but meaning to life is meaningful only in the context of humans and has nothing to do with universe needing us.
bowsamic
The truth is fully accessible through reason, you don’t need to take drugs to know things
bongodongobob
Nah, if you think you want to do it, do it, and I think a lot of people would benefit from a little peer pressure of having a half dose. It's all social stigma, all of the fear is from bullshit stories of turning into a glass of orange juice: that shit doesn't happen. Take a half hit of acid and you'll wish you took more. Every person I've I introduced it to has agreed. It's not that big of a deal. You aren't going to wreck your brain. It's not something that will ALTER YOUR LIFE PERMANENTLY!!! It's a drug and you'll be fuckin fine.
It very much IS set and setting and the powers that be really want to fuck up the set. Try it. You won't regret it.
gchamonlive
My point is, even though there is no unsafe dose of LSD, bad trips are real and can totally lock yourself out of it psychologically.
My advice has to be very careful in order not to incentivise unprepared people who would otherwise have a great trip. We have to be responsible, even if it'll only gonna negatively affect a very small percentage of them. Applied philosophy of care 100%
Other than that, I totally agree.
bongodongobob
I think the bad trips are good though, it's almost the point. Why are you feeling bad? It's usually because you're in a physical or mental place you don't want to be, yet, when sober, you think it is where you should be. The incongruity of the situation is the lesson and the point.
When I was in college, I tracked down some mushrooms, bought em, and ran away on my own to trip out. I found myself on a bench, next to a river surrounded by trash in a mixed industrial area. I saw cig butts and empty beer cans on the ground. Looked at my ripped jeans and thought "Am I trash? Why am I here?" It was a shitty feeling and I got really down. I realized that getting fucked up for its own sake was stupid, and it's about sharing time with others that's actually important, no matter what drug you're on. I started crying and felt horrible, but the next day, I had a new sense of worth and a new frame of reference for the world that has persisted for 20+ years. I'll always remember that shitty trip on that shitty bench.
brcmthrowaway
[flagged]
010101010101
Why?
gchamonlive
For some people there is only the serious life for the serious man. Everyone else are just manchildren.
And they are right. Give these drugs to these people, they will turn into manchildren because it's their reality, and it's true for them.
bravesoul2
> Almost a decade ago, a Baptist Biblical scholar, a Catholic priest, several rabbis, an Islamic leader, a Zen Buddhist roshi, and more than a dozen other religious leaders walked into a lab—and took high doses of magic mushrooms.
Wild. Maybe what the world needs.
jjulius
>Maybe what the world needs.
One line that's been recurring between my wife and I for the past half-decade or so is that the whole planet needs a good hotboxing.
robocat
That's the scattergun controlled approach of seeing like a state - give everyone medication even though it's only some that need it.
There's a small percentage ruining it for most: a few defectors when most are cooperators.
How do we identify the defectors?
What do you do if you identify defectors?
pasquinelli
you're being too fixated on individuals. everyone's doing the same thing: avoiding pain, uncertainty, and the limitation of their future choices; seeking pleasure, security, and to increase their future choices. the very few people who aren't doing that don't matter: history unfolds because people do what makes sense for them, not because some don't.
Spivak
It's maybe inefficient to hotbox everyone but I think I would rather that than give my government the green light to define and identify defectors.
If humanity has proven one thing over and over and over again to itself it's that we're terrible at witch hunts.
shiroiuma
>There's a small percentage ruining it for most: a few defectors when most are cooperators.
>What do you do if you identify defectors?
Simple: you put them in charge of the government. That's what we do now, after all.
null
ElijahLynn
Exactly.
BitwiseFool
Quite frankly, that quote sounds like the premise of some new Netflix original series.
quantified
Pretty much nothing of substance in the writeup. All about studying and flaws.
jbm
Yeah I was honestly taken aback with how devoid of content this was. No personal stories or research.
The New Yorker version looks more interesting.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/05/26/this-is-your-p...
electroglyph
heh, didn't expect this line:
Finding willing rabbis, however, was easy—the challenge was finding ones who were “psychedelically naïve.”
cluckindan
There are videos of such religious devotees riding around cities in a van, blasting psychedelic trance, and stopping at lights to dance around the intersection, offering acid to onlookers.
nikcub
this should probably be OP - much better original story, not a reblog, and it's written by Michael Pollan.
anigbrowl
Yeah, total clickbait
elevaet
I had to scroll up and down for a while, looking for the rest of the article. There wasn't any.
bookofjoe
Here you go: https://archive.ph/2Za2J
RobRivera
Yea I was wondering if there was some UI issue on mobile bc I kept scrolling down expecting more.
I stopped and read the whole thing to be disappointed.
A blurb about [thing i am interested in].
I now feel like yelling at some clouds.
quantified
I feel badly that I didn't warn you sufficiently.
nathan_compton
I don't know if my brain is just wired up differently, but I've taken both LSD and Psilocybin many times and I did not find the experiences spiritual at all. I don't even know what people are talking about when they talk about spiritual experiences.
JesseMReeves
I recently talked about LSD to a spiritual person (the western esotericism kind).
He accidentally took a very high dose in his 20s and also read a bunch of books on the subject for a while, by Leary and so on. He equated it to a trip to the mirror maze, but nothing more. He doesn’t find it worth it and warns against it since for some people it lingers for too long. He is puzzled about people calling the experience „spiritual“ too.
t-3
Agreed. I really enjoy both acid and shrooms, but beyond appreciating the fractal beauty of trees and the patterns in carpets a bit more I wouldn't describe them as anything life-changing, let alone some kind of spiritual awakening. MDMA is similarly hyped up, but no, I never felt "connected to the mass of humanity" or whatever people talk about, I just got high and danced while gritting my teeth and rubbing on my head.
crtified
Decades ago I had the same type of what are people talking about?!, it's certainly not happening to me! surprise, regarding MDMA and the supposed wonders of dancing the night away. I felt the effects of the substance, but to me, nightclub dancing on MDMA still felt about as awkwardly-conscious, performative and unnecessary as it did without!
I suspect it's similar with the spiritual stuff, in principle. That is, if you're typically not a personality who tends towards that stuff - spiritual connections and revelations and such - then perhaps no substance will necessary make you so.
comrade1234
Same. The hallucinations are fun and the laughter and joy but at the same time I can tell, even though I'm tripping, that it's just my brain mixing up its wiring and nothing to do with god.
esseph
I know people personally that psilocybin, LSD, and other substances do nothing for. All of them also have existing mental health disorders (extreme generalized anxiety, depression, bipolar, etc.).
tlavoie
That could be an interaction with the meds they take for those conditions, couldn't it? I seem to recall that SSRIs in particular could mitigate the effects of the hallucinogen.
kbenson
Nothing as in there is no outside noticeable change in behavior and they report no change in speaking, or nothing as it relates to the topic of this thread, in that they have no profound or spiritual experiences?
esseph
They might get a slight body high even on what would otherwise be considered heroic doses for their weight.
Things like lemon-tek to make the psilocybin more bioavailable were also not impactful to them, while being apparently extremely impactful for others.
jdenning
Many psych meds diminish/block psychedelic effects.
sev
Dosage might play a factor, I presume.
DontchaKnowit
Lsd did it for me. Psilocybin was not spiritual at all.
For me the "spiritual exlerience" was just a profound sense of gratefulness. And then the idea that god and objective truth are one and the same. Whatever that means
denkmoon
are you otherwise spiritual? I think that might be a prerequisite. Outside of spirituality did you have any experiences that were "profound" or "thought provoking"?
konfusinomicon
it is there. in a former life ive only felt it under the spell of either of those substances mixed with others popular with today's party goers, but it is. very fleeting and hard to describe but I have the sparse memories of the feelings during the experiences and once you get there you will know and definitely remember
testemailfordg2
Better to stay sane...Have seen a lot of these kinds of articles, surely funding comes from somewhere...
Animats
So where's the follow up in which others evaluate the participants? The results all seem self-reported. But did the participants improve in some measurable way as seen from the outside? Without outside evaluation, it's just people who took drugs reporting they mostly liked the results.
xwowsersx
Promising title, but the article felt hollow... all surface, no depth. Skimmed anecdotes without probing them, offered no real insight or new perspective, and left me with absolutely nothing I couldn't have guessed from the headline alone :(
Projectiboga
It was done at Harvard Divinity School in 1962
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_Chapel_Experiment
The Marsh Chapel Experiment, also called the "Good Friday Experiment", was an experiment conducted on Good Friday, April 20, 1962 at Boston University's Marsh Chapel. Walter N. Pahnke, a graduate student in theology at Harvard Divinity School, designed the experiment under the supervision of Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and the Harvard Psilocybin Project.[1] Pahnke's experiment investigated whether psilocybin would act as a reliable entheogen in religiously predisposed subjects.[2]
summer_glue
There's not much information in this article.
kazinator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people
What are the odds that peddlers of religion would turn to promoting chemical drugs on the side ...
cluckindan
There’s that word again: ”drugs” - you just know anyone using that word in earnest is suffering from a narrow and naïve world view imposed upon them by generations of propaganda.
There is a huge experiential chasm between opiates and psychedelics. These two groups of substances have nothing to do with each other.
kazinator
Religion is not literally opium; Marx was speaking/writing figuratively. He just referred to a popular recreational of his time.
Ram Dass said that back in the 1960's when they were doing study of LSD they would try to randomize/double blind these tests but it was very funny to see. There were one where they had clergy involved and it basically went, one person would be like "I think it is doing something" and another would be wandering around going "I SEE GOD! I SEE GOD!". It was obvious who had what.