Here's What Happens When You Give Psychedelic Drugs To Spiritual Leaders

On April 20, 1962, a group of theology students and professors gathered outside Boston University’s Marsh Chapel, waiting for Good Friday services to begin. These particular services were to be unlike any other: On their way into the chapel, Harvard psychiatrist Walter Pahnke administered the group a dose of psychedelic mushrooms. As part of his Ph.D. thesis under Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass), Pahnke sought to test his hypothesis that psychedelic drugs, taken in a religious setting, could provoke a genuine spiritual experience. His investigation would go down in psychedelic history as the “Good Friday experiment.” He was right. Nine out of the 10 students who took the mushrooms reported having a mystical experience. One of those students was the historian Huston Smith, who went on to write Cleansing the Doors of Perception, a classic philosophical work exploring the potential of psychedelic drugs as entheogens, or “God-revealing chemicals.”  “The experience was powerful for me, and it left a permanent mark on my experienced worldview,” Smith, who passed away in December, reflected. “I had believed in God... but until the Good Friday experiment, I had no personal encounter with God of the sort that bhakti yogis, Pentecostals and born-again Christians describe.” Today, another research project is taking up where the Good Friday experiment left off ― this time, with modern research tools an...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news