Fingerprints of God (16 page)

After the ceremony, a gauzy-eyed Mary Ann told me she was “too peyoted up” to talk with me, as did most others I tried to interview. After a few hours of waiting around, I reluctantly started off for Albuquerque without hearing Mary Ann’s story.

Wending through the mountains of Navajo country, I reflected that the ceremony I had just witnessed was more parts Catholic Church than Berkeley party. The tipi fire, and the church candles. The sacrament as peyote, and as a wafer. Confession to the fire and the people, to Christ and the priest. The Diné chants, and the Gregorian. The offering of food, and the collection plate. And after the service, in each case, the breaking of bread.

Still, peyote’s chemical makeup made me question how mystical the experiences can be. Knowing God through psychedelics. Seeing God through hallucinations. Hearing God through the serotonin system. Is it real? For Navajos, yes. Is the Eucharist the body of Christ? For Catholic believers, yes. Do I communicate with God through prayer? Yes, I believe I do, and when I am praying deeply, my brain waves no doubt slow, or my serotonin levels probably rise—and in that altered state of consciousness, I find God.Who am I to say that peyote does not unlock the door to the transcendent?

Two months after the peyote ceremony in Lukachukai, I called Mary Ann from my office in Washington. I was curious to know if her shingles had really disappeared, as she joyously proclaimed in the middle of the ceremony, or if the “healing” wore off with the peyote.

“Oh! That night, the pain stopped and never came back,” Mary Ann sang happily.

“You’re kidding.What happened?”

“While I was fixing the Medicine [the peyote] before the ceremony,” she said, “I talked to the Medicine. And I said, ‘I want You to help me.You know all the suffering I’m going through, and I want to get well with You. I want to put my faith in You, and trust You. Help me. Doctor me. Fix me up.’ That’s what I was saying to the Medicine while I was fixing it. So it did. It
sure
did.”

“Remember how you talked about the man you hit,” I said, recalling that Mary Ann had been raised Catholic. “Was that a confession?”

“Yup. You can’t hide anything from peyote.You have to tell it, this is what the sickness is all about. This is where the sickness comes from. So the main thing about the shingles was the fear. The person that I ran over. It wasn’t my fault. Someone else ran over this person. I didn’t see it and I came up the hill and I couldn’t put on the brakes so fast or stop. I got so scared, and I never went back.”

“So the peyote cleansed you when you spoke to it?”

“Uh-huh. So when I prayed with the spiritual food, the person [who had been run over] came in front of me, sat in front of me. And I told him, ‘I don’t know who you are. I know you have a mom and dad. And I know you have grandparents. And I know I ran over you. But it wasn’t my fault. You have to forgive me, it wasn’t my fault. And because of that, I’m sick. I want to get well. I want you to forgive me.’ So the spirit just left me. He came in front of me, and he left me. And that’s when my pain stopped. He forgave me.”

She giggled girlishly. “I can’t believe I’m alive again! I’m so happy. The pain never came back at all. It was a miracle.”

We hung up then, and I considered the possible explanations. The first, preferred by hard-core materialists, is that peyote has antiviral properties that can cure the shingles. Many doctors and psychologists would no doubt opt for the second choice: that Mary Ann’s pain was in part psychosomatic, and once the fear and stress had dissipated, so did the pain. But spiritual believers hold firmly to the mystical explanation: Mary Ann had enjoyed a genuine spiritual healing, empowered by confession and forgiveness, by the supernatural character of peyote, and by prayer. Of course, she could simply be lying, but that seemed the least plausible of all the explanations.

Peyote has been intertwined with the divine for centuries among native people in North and South America. But only in the past two decades have scientists possessed the technology to peer into the brain and witness the effect of the sacred herb. Now, in the twenty-first century, drugs allow neurologists to watch the mystical experience unfold
in real time
. They can view the hand of God, or God’s chemical proxy, as it courses through the brain, stimulating some parts, damping down others, to transport the subject to heaven or hell. It is like having God on tap.

For nearly four decades, this synthetic God lay just beyond their grasp. The war on drugs outlawed both recreational use and scientific research on the effect of psychedelics in the 1970s. It would take thirty-five years for the government to relax its grip on this scientific research. But happily, in 2006, more than 2,000 miles away from that tipi in Lukachukai, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University had just published a study on the chemistry of mysticism.

Roland Griffiths led me through the institutional halls of Johns Hopkins University Medical Center, turned the knob on a nondescript door, and ushered me into his mushroom mecca. The plush carpet sank beneath my feet, the pastels in the room soothed my eyes. I spotted a statue of the Buddha, a Shinto shrine, a crucifix, a painting of a vast landscape, something for every religious sensibility or none at all. Here, thirty-six people—one at a time over the course of many weeks—had rested for six to eight hours under the influence of thirty milligrams of psilocybin. They had stretched out with eye-shades and headphones attached to a stereo, cutting off the normal sensory information so that the psilocybin could hold court in their minds.

Griffiths motioned me toward a deep chair. He moved toward a white sofa, where he folded his thin legs into the lotus position. He was the chief investigator in a Johns Hopkins study on psilocybin and spiritual experience.
²
He was older than I anticipated, entirely gray-haired and drawn. A self-confessed “gym rat,” he was strikingly slim in the style of people too busy to eat.

This breakthrough project, Griffiths confessed, sprang from a metaphysical question that dogged him for years.

“I started meditating ten years ago, and it opened up a window to the spiritual world,” he began tentatively, gauging my reaction.

I nodded.

“It was astonishing. I felt as though I had connected to another reality. Somehow, we are pre-wired to have that experience—penetrate that reality. But why? Evolutionary biology? Or is there some sort of mysterious pointer? If we’re wired that way, I want to know
who did the wiring
!”

I gazed at him, reflecting that most of the scientists I met who researched spirituality had experienced something mystical themselves. Personal, urgent curiosity—
What happened to me?—
drove them to the kind of alternative research that was at best a detour from the mainstream and at worst a risk to their careers. I sympathized completely. That curiosity drove me as well.

Griffiths continued. “And I thought, here I am a full professor at Johns Hopkins, flying around the world presenting papers on drugs, when there are huge, much more compelling questions to explore. What is the nature of consciousness? And finally, we got some modest funding to study spirituality and what happens to the brain in an altered state of consciousness. We’re just beginning, but it’s been the most exciting research of my career.”

With that buildup, you might think Roland Griffiths had extracted the God serum, a distinctive juice that ignites the brain into orgasmic mystical experience. In fact, his findings were somewhat more modest. This is the headline: Psychedelics can spark mystical experience. More precisely, twenty-two of the thirty-six volunteers (more than 60 percent) reported full-blown mystical experiences. They described feelings, visions, and insights that appeared to be similar if not identical to those experienced by mystics down through the centuries.
³
And, like other “natural” mystics I had encountered, Griffiths’s subjects saw their worldview, their relationships, and their priorities rearranged by the experience, which they considered as meaningful as, say, giving birth to their first child.

Hardly the discovery of the double helix, surely, but allow me to inject a little perspective here. Science usually measures its progress in millimeters, not miles. In the world of neuroscience, which has endured a deep freeze on studying psychedelics, the fact that the government gave Griffiths permission to administer psychedelic drugs to volunteers
at all
was a watershed. The camel’s nose was in the tent, and soon more researchers would follow with similar studies.

As neuroscientist Solomon Snyder, the lean, stately chairman of the neuroscience department at Johns Hopkins University, put it: “It’s not what the dog says that’s important. It’s the fact that a dog can talk at all.”

But for me, what the dog said deserves attention in itself, because the dog is talking about
serotonin
. Remember, we are looking for a “God chemical” that opens a person’s mind to another dimension of reality. And psilocybin—the psychedelic given to Griffiths’s volunteers and to my happy compatriots in the peyote ceremony—affects the serotonin system.

I asked Snyder whether Griffiths had caught the scent of a “God chemical.” He considered the question, then responded carefully.

“Seeking the locus of religion in the brain,” he said,“is by no means fanciful.”

Snyder clearly does not traffic in hyperbole, so let me elaborate on his response a bit: What he is saying is that neuroscientists may be able to find the divine spark in our heads. Is that big enough?

Snyder himself became intrigued by the serotonin system when he was a medical intern in San Francisco in 1963. It all began when a friend lost her job at the medical center at the University of California in San Francisco. As a parting gesture, she filched a bottle of LSD from the laboratory refrigerator. For the next few weeks, Snyder and his friends gathered together every Sunday to do “research.”

Those Sunday trips led this young agnostic Jew to a religious insight. Thanks to a glass of LSD solution, he could see through the eyes of mystics.

“I had this sense of being at one with the universe, which involves a loss of ego boundaries, such that you can’t tell the difference between yourself and the rest of the universe,” he said, looking slightly embarrassed. “Now, that doesn’t make any sense. But let me tell you, that’s what it feels like. And there’s a vast literature, where everyone who has a mystical experience—whether Christian mystics, Zen mystics, or whatever—they describe almost exactly the same thing.”

Snyder told me that scientists have long suspected that spirituality—or at least the farther edges of it, such as mysticism, hearing God, feeling the presence of the “Other”—might have something to do with neurotransmitters in the brain. One candidate is dopamine, the feel-good chemical involved in Ecstasy and “runner’s high,” although dopamine has received less attention in this context. Most scientists have zeroed in on serotonin and the serotonin system as the main triggers of transcendent experience.

Millions of Americans have an intimate relationship with serotonin: Prozac and other antidepressants are believed to smooth out moods by increasing the activity of serotonin in the brain. It turns out that LSD, psilocybin, peyote, and several other psychedelic drugs look very much to the brain like serotonin.When psilocybin enters the brain, it glances around for a place to camp out, and heads toward some very specific docking stations called serotonin 5-HT2A receptors. This is a close cousin to the serotonin receptor that Swedish doctors identified when they were looking for a “God gene,” or a genetic predisposition to spirituality.
⁴

This fake serotonin is an unruly thing. Imagine a bunch of six-year-olds being let out of school, their mothers waiting in the playground. They burst through the door and make a beeline to their mothers, who give them a hug and take them home. One day, a bunch of imposter six-year-olds, virtually identical to the real children, run to the unwitting mothers, who then hug them and take them home. Those impos ters are psilocybin, masquerading as serotonin. The psilocybin excites the receptors and confuses them—or, in our analogy, the imposter children wreak havoc once they get home, upending furniture, knocking over lamps, smearing their chocolate-covered fingers on the walls. In the brain, the psychedelic drug creates visual and auditory perceptual changes, a sense of boundlessness, and the loss of time and space.

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.