Neurotheology: God in the mushroom

Magic mushrooms can induce mystical effects, study finds
By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
Published: 11 July 2006

A universal mystical experience with life-changing effects can be produced by the hallucinogen contained in magic mushrooms, scientists claim today.

Forty years after Timothy Leary, the apostle of drug-induced mysticism, urged his hippie followers to "tune in, turn on, and drop out", researchers at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland, have for the first time demonstrated that mystical experiences can be produced safely in the laboratory. They say that there is no difference between drug-induced mystical experiences and the spontaneous religious ones that believers have reported for centuries. They are "descriptively identical".

And they argue that the potential of the hallucinogenic drugs, ignored for decades because of their links with illicit drug use in the 1960s, must be explored to develop new treatments for depression, drug addiction and the treatment of intolerable pain.

Anticipating criticism from church leaders, they say they are not interested in the "Does God exist?" debate. "This work can't and won't go there."

Interest in the therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs is growing around the world. In the UK, the Royal College of Psychiatrists debated their use at a conference in March for the first time in 30 years. A conference held in Basel, Switzerland, last January reviewed the growing psychedelic psychiatry movement.

The drug psilocybin is the active ingredient of magic mushrooms which grow wild in Wales and were openly sold in London markets until a change in the law last year.

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http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/article1171389.ece
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back in the 60's and 70's and never knew it. ;) I don't know about religious experiences per se, but I sure did see some mighty strange things in those days. :hippie: Peyote buttons were always my personal favorites, things happened that to this very day I can't begin to explain. Call it mystical, religious.......whatever, they had a profound effect on my core being and I consider them to be the Big Kahuna of psychotropic plants.

The masses must never be allowed to connect with the universe that they are part of.

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=48

is the number of people I know who, like me, have had valid mystical experiences and have never taken "magic mushrooms" or the like. Having compared notes with old hippies, I realize our experiences are similar-but I find it fascinating that, apparently, some people can have the experience without drugs while others use drugs to have the experience. It would be interesting to find out why this is so.

Probably, those who can without drugs are able to generate those same neurochemical changes endogenously. But it is also possible that similar responses are produced by very different mechanisms... Interesting topic...

brain structure, allergies, experiences, - any/all of the above.

This study supports the notion that "god" is all in your head.

I posted a link the other day to a book called The Ethical Brain that studies the neurology of "morality"..... I think they (the shroom people and the author of this study) should get together.

This is well documented in the neurology literature as a number of epileptic patients report religous experiences during seizures.

Each time you hear the word "module" in neuroscience it is good to be a little suspicious, as it comes from the computer metaphor of the mind from the 80s. Nonetheless, it is true that stimulation in the anterior temporal lobe, and seizures occurring there, can produce something similar to a religious experience in people. Note, that this does not prove that is a God module. For example, ecah part of the brain is connected to many others; therefore, each time you stimulate one region, other regions that receive connections from that regions are stimulated indirectly too. Therefore, it is quite difficult to conclude much about the localization of function from these studies.

Mystics have said for centuries that God is within, that God is everything-not seperate or an "old man in the sky".

It is only the religions that view "God" as a transcendent rather than immanent force that have difficulty with such problems of brain chemistry. We should all be more Spinozan, is the point. ;-)

with and without (mostly without) the aid of outside influences. I look at such drugs as first keys to open that secret world if no one else is there to show you and then once you learn that you don't need the drug, sometimes you still take it as a tool to quicken the voyage there.

to find out what I learned 40 years ago?

"THOUGHT CRIMINAL!!!"

I think I'll have another cap. Pizza anyone?

the sickness you go through at first is worse than with shrooms, but the breakthrough is crystal clear - as i recall from the distant past................

never again! felt sick for 3 daze........I did not feel that any benefits balanced the negatives

and i almost went on home to sleep it off. glad i stuck it out with my friend and was lying on a hillside on a beautiful sunny rocky mountain day when the sickness burned off and the door to heaven opened! :-)

glad that someone had a positive, mystical experience with those seeds...; at the time, I wasn't so much concerned about the 'door to heaven' as I was that the door to the bathroom be open

i remember eyeing that bathroom door in the cafe we were in at the beginning longingly.. those were the days, huh.

I'm sure I already have a wealth of research knowledge I could share with any scientist who wants to pay...ah er ask me about it.

thanks

I liked the part where I trade in a mushroom for an additional jar.... or was it a heart piece? :)

Anyways, I'm with mzteris on this. Your so called 'religious experiences' are nothing than fluctuations of seratonin, dopamine, adrenaline, etc.

And what's with "nothing more than..."? That humans have for millenia developed ways of altering the chemical states of their brains seems a a damn important insight into the human condition, you ask me. :-)

Everything going on in our minds ultimately is probably "just electrical impulses precisely controlled by various biochemical paths"... I said "probably", because all we have is a correlation between certain mental states and certain physical processes... And we have such correlation only for a limited number of mental states... Needless to say, there is a certain tension between reductionistic views of the mind and the current organization of society... For instance, what is "ethics" in a reductionistic view of the human mind? One can handwave all one wants, but in the end there isn't much room for ethics in such a view... The next few decades are going to be very interesting.

to the single body. What has been developed in entheogenic or psychedelic studies is attention to set and setting - both the mind and body and all its various processes, AND the space and time of the experience: that is, the context in which one undergoes such experiences. Neither the body nor mind are closed vessels, in other words. One of the key taslks of religions has been to condition the set and create the setting for spiritual experiences (this would generally be called "ritual"). Cheers.

says the late Bill Hicks "Heaven's in a cow's ass!"