Psychedelics and mystical experiences.

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Psychedelics and Mystical Experiences
Review of Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experience
By William A. Richards
New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016. 269 pp. ISBN 978-0-231-17406-0
$29.95
Reviewed by Michael J. Winkelman
Contact: michaeljwinkelman@gmail.com
Abstract
Reviews the book, Sacred knowledge: Psychedelics and religious experiences, by
William A. Richards. Richards’s career of clinical research with psychedelics and
professional formation in theology, comparative religion and the psychology of religion
bring integrative perspectives to understanding psychedelic experiences. Clinical
accounts, scientific research and his personal experiences with psychedelics enable
Richards to address issues of core importance in religious studies, medicine and society
in general. Clinical studies with psychedelics provide findings that contribute to
assessment of issues in religious studies, providing evidence that supports a perennialist
view of mystical experiences as inherent to human nature. Double blind studies establish
the intrinsic ability of psychedelics to produce mystical experiences, as well as behavioral
changes in the participants’ lives. Similarities in mystical and psychedelic experiences
across people and cultures point to their transcendental nature and basis in human
biology. Richards weaves together various strands of evidence to educate professionals
of many disciplines and the general public about the range of promising uses of
psychedelics. Although psychedelic ingestion does not always produce mystical
experiences, when they fail to do so, they generally engage the user with personal
experiences related to childhood trauma or unresolved emotions, especially fears, grief,
anger and guilt. This reveals another power potential of these substances to provide relief
for conditions often found intractable by modern medicine. Sacred Knowledge provides a
call to recognize the biases that have affected our societal evaluations of psychedelics and
how current scientific research demands reconsideration of the significance of these
powerful entheogens and their implications for understanding spiritual experiences and
human nature.

Review
William Richards is an elder of the psychedelic therapy movement and an early
participant in the psychedelic treatment of alcoholism and other drug dependencies. His
career spanned the early and more recent phases of clinical research with psychedelics.
Furthermore, Richards’s professional formation in theology, comparative religion and the
psychology of religion brings a powerful combination of perspectives to bear on clinical
accounts, scientific research and his personal experiences with psychedelics to address
issues of core importance in religious studies and society in general.
Richards tells us that Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experience is about
“encountering the sacred and the discovery of eternal realms in consciousness” (p. xxv).
The major thrust of Richards’s book is that there are broad and profound implications of
psychedelic-induced experiences for issues in religious studies and mysticism, across a
range of academic disciplines, and for the broader society. Richards weaves together the
evidence from psychedelic experiences in his personal life and clinical research to
address some basic issues that remained unresolved in the minds of some who study
mysticism. A secondary intent of the book is to educate professionals across a range of
disciplines and to inform the general public about the promise of psychedelic substances,
countering decades of negative propaganda of the drug war that has unjustifiably
discredited them.
Richards’s perspectives are based on experiences across 25 years of legal psychedelic
research projects involving Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), N,N-Dipropyltryptamine
(DPT), Methylenedioxyamphetamine (MDA) and N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT).
These spanned the early period of the 1960’s until their suspension in the 1970s, and then
again since the resurgence of research in this area almost 2 decades ago. It was in 1999 in
the context of his participation in the renewal of psychedelic research at the John Hopkins
School of Medicine using a sophisticated double blind clinical trial (Griffiths et al., 2006)
that perhaps the most revolutionary implications of psychedelics were confirmed: a
significant proportion of the people receiving psychedelics have classic mystical
experiences and consider them to be the most significant spiritual experiences of their
lives.
Psychedelics as Agents of Mystical Experience
One of the undeniable implications of psychedelics manifested in thousands of clinical
records and across cultures and time is the ability of these substances, when used in
supportive contexts, to produce what people report as genuine mystical experiences.
These accounts are phenomenologically indistinguishable from reports of mystical
experiences that result from devoted spiritual practices—or which may occur
spontaneously without chemical agents or personal intention.
What makes the psychedelics so enigmatic is their repeated ability to produce mystical
experiences—as well as their often-unreliable ability to do so. Richards had a mystical
experience in his first encounter with psilocybin, ironically in the context of a study to
examine its psychosis-mimicking effects. But in subsequent sessions with comparable
doses and expectations of repeated mystical experience, nothing at all similar occurred.

Whatever role the psychedelics have in provoking mystical experiences is more than a
simple drug effect. Psychedelics do not produce a single form of experience, but a wide
variety of states generally reflective of the set and setting—the individual psychological
predispositions and the social factors in the context of administration, respectively.
The double blind studies by Roland Griffiths et al. (2006) establish, however, the intrinsic
ability of psychedelics to produce mystical experiences and associated behavioral
changes in the participants’ lives. Furthermore, while psychedelic ingestion does not
always produce mystical experiences, when failing to do so, they generally engage the
user with a variety of personal experiences related to childhood trauma or unresolved
emotions, especially fears, grief, anger and guilt. This reveals another powerful potential
of these substances to provide a variety of forms of relief for conditions often found
intractable by modern medicine (i.e., see Michael Winkelman and Thomas Roberts’
[2007] Psychedelic Medicine).
The core of Sacred Knowledge is about the nature of forms and features of mystical
consciousness that are manifested in psychedelic experiences. Clinical cases show how
psychedelics produce the common core of mystical experiences, namely: experiences of
intuitive knowledge and unity, transcendence of time and space, sacredness, ineffability
and positive mood. The mystical aspects of psychedelic experiences are strongly
supportive of the classic perennialist view of mystical experiences, the notion of
fundamental commonalities to mystical experiences across people, cultures and time.
The commonalities in the effects of psychedelic experiences reinforces that mystical
experiences are not merely the product of cultural expectations but rather represent
something intrinsic to human nature. The profound spiritual experiences of thousands
who have been administered psychedelics, including studies that have used double-blind
control conditions, attest to the evocation of some patterns of response that are universal.
These similarities in mystical and psychedelic experiences across people and cultures
reveals their transcendental innate nature rather than personal or cultural features. The
origin of mystical experiences in factors intrinsic to human nature is illustrated by their
elicitation and production by such diverse means as psychedelics, rituals, mental
practices and even behavioral activities such as ultrarunning.
While more than a century of scholarly research has debated whether these experiences
should be considered regressive or progressive, in the context of comparative religion and
mystical studies, these experiences have constituted the most significant contrast with
rational thought. Mystical traditions extol the comprehensive superiority of these
mystical forms of perception, considering the truths revealed to far exceed the
comprehensions of reality rendered by ordinary consciousness. The effects that such
experiences have on people’s subsequent beliefs, attitudes and behaviors are also a
significant factor in understanding the role and significance of these substances in human
evolution.

In one of his short concluding chapters, Richards points out that the implications of these
experiences demand new paradigms of explanation. The traditional concepts of
consciousness, time, causality and intuition fall short of explaining the complex forms of
consciousness revealed by psychedelics. Perhaps if Richards had also been trained in
physics, biochemistry, neurosciences, epistemology, evolutionary psychology and
cognitive sciences he might have felt empowered to attempt to build this new paradigm.
Clearly the explanation of the nature, significance and effects of psychedelics requires
such interdisciplinary endeavors.
Richards perhaps approaches a general theory of psychedelic and mystical experiences in
addressing the archetypal quality of many visionary experiences. Referencing Carl Jung’s
notions of collective unconscious and the notion that certain universal experiences reflect
the innate foundations of our unconscious minds, he rejects the longstanding notion of a
the brain as a tabula rasa in favor of an understanding of the human mind as innately
structured. It is these innate structures that are reflected in the constants of psychedelic
and mystical experiences.
The psychedelic experiences themselves reveal something about their nature, and have
direct ties to longstanding issues in the philosophy of knowledge. Classic forms of
mystical experiences (i.e., the noetic, void, and selfless qualities) can be characterized in
neuroepistemological terms in reference to the functioning of the major information
systems of the brain and in relation to various forms of self reference (see Winkelman,
2010, Chapter 4). The “I-Thou”—self and other—relationship so often found in the
personalized theistic mystical experiences points to the significant role of self-concept
and social reference – or their loss—in the fundamental features of mystical experiences.
The visual and ineffable aspects of the experiences point to a system of knowledge and
representation of reality long recognized in philosophy in its tangled engagement with
concepts such intuition, tacit and implicit knowledge. The ineffable and visual features—
incapable of being expressed in language but incredibly complex images—point to the
manifestations of a pre-linguistic symbolic system known as presentational symbolism.
The effects of psychedelics on the brain also inform a neurophenomenological approach
to shamanic experiences (Winkelman, 2010). Serotonin is the primary neurotransmitter
(neuromodulatory) system affected by psychedelics. Psychedelics produce
hypersynchronous slow wave brain discharges in the serotonergic circuits that link the
hypothalamus, limbic brain and lower brain systems. Psychedelics initially stimulate
serotonergic (especially 5-HT2a) receptors, but also have blocking effects at some
serotonin receptors. Psychedelics are resistant to the normal reuptake mechanisms and
saturate the serotonergic system by locking into serotonergic transmitter sites, eventually
reducing the regulatory processes of the serotonergic system and modifying control and
coordination among the major brain subsystems. Psychedelics release serotonergic
blockage of the ascending flow of information and emotional responses, stimulating an
upward flood of information from ancient levels of the brain. Psychedelics stimulate
emotional areas and visual information systems, resulting in the release of normally
unconscious personal and emotional dynamics.

Psychedelics change our normal mental states through interference with typical coupling
and networks, decreasing functional coupling of the frontal cortex and medial temporal
lobe nodes and other brain areas that are typically synchronized and functionally
connected. This disorganizing of high-level networks results in the release of primary
cognitive states involving somatic awareness and subjective feeling states. The visionary
experiences similarly reflect the loss of the inhibitory effects of serotonin on the
mesolimbic temporal lobe structures and resulting in visionary experiences. These visual
experiences engage a presentational symbolic modality, a nonverbal symbolism that
represents self, others, emotions, and attachments and their connection with the body-self
at a pre-egoic level through processes of ancient brain levels.
Psychedelics, Society and the Future
Richards reviews a variety of ways in which the use of psychedelics can contribute to the
quality of life for many and bring significant implications for a number of scientific
fields. The implications of Richards’s book are not just theoretical and academic, but also
practical in addressing how these substances can be applied to address serious mental
health issues and intractable social problems such as addictions, where it is increasingly
recognized that there are powerful healing effects that can be released by these substances
(c.f., Winkelman and Roberts, 2007; Winkelman, 2015).
Richards contributes protocols for administering these substances and supporting the
person during the experience. Richards also speaks to the importance of the subsequent
integration of psychedelic experiences. This involves the repetitive intention to move
between our memories of these profound insights and inspirations and our engagement
with everyday life where we work on the modification of our thoughts and actions.
Richards’s short book is for anyone with an interest in psychedelics, drug treatment
policy or mysticism. It is an easily accessible introduction to the relations of psychedelics
to spiritual experiences, an area of inquiry that has spawned a complex interdisciplinary
field within consciousness studies. One can find broader coverage of psychedelics and
therapeutic issues in the two edited volumes Psychedelic Medicine (Winkelman and
Roberts, 2007); of the religious implications of psychedelics in J. Harold Ellens’s (2014)
two edited volumes Seeking the Sacred with Psychoactive Substances; more in-depth
consideration of potential implications for society in Roberts’s The Psychedelic Future of
the Mind; and a broader assessment of the ramifications for human rights and drug policy
in Ellens and Roberts’s (2015) edited collection The Psychedelic Policy Quagmire.
Notably Roberts contributed to many of these edited volumes.
But none of these works follow Richards’s groundbreaking path, the history and
personages revealed through his recounting of his personal engagement with the field,
and his highlighting of what may be arguably the most important implications of the
clinical research with psychedelics revealed in the empirical reports of many of the
sessions that he supervised. It is this repeated unexpected direct encounter with primal
religious and mystical experiences provoked by psychedelics and the full array of
features of classic mystical experiences which are often produced that have the most

profound implications for religious studies, mysticism, philosophy, epistemology and our
understanding of the spiritual and sacred.
Sacred Knowledge serves as a call to recognize the biases that have entered into our
assessments of the psychedelics and the necessity for using current scientific research to
reevaluate the significance of these powerful entheogens for understanding human nature.
Richards’s account serves to catalyze us to rethink the cultural taboos that we have
acquired regarding psychedelics, and instead place them in the context of more
dispassionate rational and scientific examination. There we will discover the irrefutable
evidence of psychedelics’ immense potential for addressing and ameliorating many
intractable personal and social issues that afflict humankind.
References
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