Kara & Michael’s Blog

I’m going to write about religion today. (“Oh boy,” I hear you saying.) I’ve had this sort of Grand Unified Theory of Religion for a while now, and I’ve never really set it down in print, so I’m going to do so here.

There are two parts to my theory:

1. Human religion and human spirituality are completely separate concepts.
2. The history of human spirituality is, in most cases, the history of hallucinogenic drugs.

Perhaps I should assure you at this point that I am not, in fact, insane. Let me address the less contentious part of my theory first.

I think it’s reasonable to assume that religion must either be a creation of God or a creation of humankind. Given the number of dissimilar and contradictory religions on this planet, the former seems unlikely. So if we assume that human beings created religion, we should assume that they did so to fulfill some purpose.

None of this is unconventional reasoning — most religious people will tell you that their religion was created to uphold and embody the universal truth. The problem is that there are many religions with dissimilar objective beliefs. So I reject the concept of a universal truth in favor of something more illusory — a universal experience. This is what I have found at the core of every religion I have ever researched. Call it what you like: enlightenment, oneness with God, Nirvana, Moksha, heaven (within certain limits), satori. The objective is the same.

If you are attached to a particular religion, this comparative mode of thought may seem rather callous, but remember that you cannot simply dismiss the presence of millions of other human beings who arrive at the same core experience as you by believing something completely different.

When one thinks about the concept of a core experience around which human religion revolves, one inevitably starts to consider the origin of religion. If we reject the idea that religion was handed down to us by God (as discussed above), then it starts to take the shape of something created by human beings to rationalize the experience at its core — the experience of enlightenment. What would happen if, thousands and thousands of years ago, God spoke to a human being? That human would go to great lengths to capture that experience in human terms; he would write scripture, for instance. And indeed this is the pattern we see in many modern religions: Moses and Judaism, Siddhartha and Buddhism, Jesus and Christianity, Arjuna and Hinduism. Of course, none of these people were the sole authorities on their religions, and many of them were probably not the first ones to whom God spoke, even within their respective societies. There are probably many older sets of beliefs that were never written down. It doesn’t really matter, though, because implicit at the core of every religion–present and historical–is a person who spoke to God in one way or another. So to speak.

So here’s where it gets weird. Perhaps all of these people spoke to God. Perhaps there is a single, supreme intelligence in the universe who tells people whatever they need to hear at a particular moment in time. It would explain the disparity between world religions. Perhaps there are many Gods who are unaware of each other’s existence, though that seems terribly implausible.

Or, perhaps “God spoke” to these people in a very different way.

The history of mind-altering drugs and their relationship with humanity is intriguing, and new discoveries are still being made. Of course coffee has enjoyed widespread popularity for a little over a thousand years, but there are stranger and much more powerful drugs with even longer histories of use. There are people in South America who have been brewing potent psychedelic cocktails since time immemorial. Western Europeans are now known to have been exposed at several points in history to ergot fungus on rye, which contains amides of lysergic acid that can have psychoactive properties. In the Rigveda, thousands of years ago, the Vedic people talk of a plant that brings spiritual enlightenment when consumed, so important to them that the plant itself was treated as a God. Though we will never know the identity of the plant, it seems likely from the description that it had some psychoactive properties (R. Gordon Wasson has hypothesized that it was the mushroom Amanita Muscaria, and he makes a fairly convincing argument.)

The list goes on and on, but the point is that long before the advent of written language, whether accidentally or on purpose, human beings were having drug-induced psychedelic experiences. One has to wonder how this sort of experience would have been interpreted, thousands of years before anything resembling modern medical science.

I say the answer is fairly obvious. There has been at least one modern controlled study in which a large percentage of people given psilocybin mushrooms reported having “religious experiences.” (The study was at Johns Hopkins University — 60% of participants had a “full mystical experience” and one third rated it as the most significant spiritual experience they had ever had.) And, studies aside, just ask anybody who’s taken a psychedelic drug whether they had a religious experience. Why would we choose so frequently to put the experience in those terms?

Of course the answer is that religion as we know it is a very natural thing for human beings. It is, more or less, the path of least resistance for explaining the impossible. In my opinion, this points to the “original religion” being one that was created to rationalize and put in human terms an experience so profound and incongruous with everyday existence that no suitable way to communicate its nature existed.

As I said before, perhaps God spoke to Moses. Perhaps Krishna really did make himself known to Arjuna. It seems unlikely that these historical figures were insane — why would they have been respected members of their respective societies if they had been? And yet it’s also perfectly possible that these people, passing through unfamiliar territory, picked up and ate some unfamiliar psychoactive plant. What if it was this that precipitated their miraculous visions?

At least one scholar supports my opinion. According to a recent JTA news article: “Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has argued that the miraculous sights and sounds in the Exodus account of God’s giving of the Torah to Moses may have been drug induced.” Interestingly, Shanon’s argument is based on his own experiences with ayahuasca in South America, which caused him to experience visions that he thought bore striking similarities to records of Moses’s experience on Mount Sinai.

Muhammad, like Moses, found himself in unfamiliar surroundings when his truth was revealed to him. Who can say what happened in that cave? Perhaps it wasn’t unlike what happened to Moses.

Of course, I don’t think all religions can be explained this way. For example, I am not sure that there is an original religious experience at the heart of Christianity. If one reads the recorded words of Jesus while carefully ignoring the words and beliefs of his followers, a very different picture of Jesus emerges than what is popularly taught — it is a picture of a man who does not necessarily believe he is a direct recipient of the divine. Even if he actually said “I am the son of God” (for which there is no evidence) perhaps he meant it figuratively and his followers misconstrued it. There’s no accounting for followers. In other words, perhaps Christianity was just a charismatic offshoot of Judaism that went horribly wrong in the hands of, say, the apostle Paul. There’s probably enough discussion possible here to fill another entire post, but I will leave that for another day. Whether or not you agree with me, my view is that Jesus never attested to a particular spiritual experience of his own and did not believe in his own divinity, and thus the original religious experience present in Christianity is that of Judaism and Moses. (On the other hand, little is known about Jesus’s early life, and nobody can say for certain that he wasn’t dabbling in hallucinogens prior to becoming a great spiritual teacher.)

On the subject of Buddha I am entirely uncertain. Modern monastic experience has shown that people who dedicate themselves to the mindful search for “enlightenment” sometimes eventually find it, presumably without the use of drugs. Since Buddha made no claims about visions or other implausible concrete experiences, it is possible that he did simply sit under the bodhi tree. On the other hand, he had recently denounced asceticism and was wandering through the forest, which does present an ideal set of conditions for an unintentional forage-related psychedelic trip. Who knows?

Of course this exercise can be repeated for every world religion. But, if I am right, what does this imply about religion and the universe? I can’t say for certain, but I would like to lay out what I think it means.

First and most importantly, it means that God is a human construct. Sadly, God cannot be reconciled with human experience when you believe that the only significant evidence of his presence can be explained in chemical terms. At first it seems striking that so many cultures have the concept a supreme being, but what would you think if you heard a mystical voice speaking to you and felt as though your mind had been opened to the ultimate truth? These are both extremely common experiences associated with psychedelic drugs.

Beyond God, however, it means that virtually all of what is believed by the world’s major religions is crap: the inventions of human beings in an attempt to frame basic human constructs in divine terms. Life, death, hope, fear, good, evil — instead of addressing these issues as a species and acknowledging them as an innate part of human existence, we have assigned them to a nonexistent divinity and implicitly declared ourselves the arbiter of its will (though not necessarily with the arrogance that my statement might imply).

The conclusion, then, is that religion actively distracts people from the actual nature of things, ironically including spirituality itself. The question for humanity going forward is whether we have the courage to see things for what they are.

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