occurred to me despite the fact that I was doing the project as a result of my own relationship with Grandmother Ayahuasca. My unconscious never ceases to amaze me. I can only say that I must have thought I was one of the select few to be in communication with Grandmother Ayahuasca. This limited perspective set me up for a big surprise when the results came in — my findings led to a personal crisis regarding nothing less than my worldview and the nature of reality.
Measuring Mysticism
The nine pages of open-ended questions would yield a wealth of rich, qualitative information from people using ayahuasca in North America. These first-person reports are essential for ground-level exploratory research into a new phenomenon. However, the scientific preference is for quantitative data, and for this I turned to a well-established lineage in psychedelic research on mystical experience.
During the early sixties, when psychedelic research was still legal, Walter Pahnke was a Harvard-trained psychiatrist completing his PhD at Harvard Divinity School. He’s best known for the infamous Good Friday Experiment held in Marsh Chapel at Boston University in 1962.11 For this, he randomly assigned seminary students either to an experimental group taking psilocybin or to a control group taking a niacin supplement. Despite his hope that the side effects of niacin would pass for a psychedelic drug, both subjects and monitors quickly figured out who actually received the psilocybin. The experiment was held in the basement of the chapel, and the music from the Good Friday services held directly above was clearly heard. This was a serendipitous intervening variable in the study, since the religious music helped to create a sacred atmosphere for the divinity students. Many of them mentioned the importance of the music when they were interviewed twenty-five years later.
In that follow-up study, MAPS founder Rick Doblin tracked down the seminary students, many of whom were now working as ministers, and he asked them to once again complete the same questionnaire that Pahnke had used years ago. The results were startlingly similar. The people who had received psilocybin reported high levels of mystical experience, a conviction that had only grown with the benefit of a long-term perspective. Doblin wrote that they “still considered their original experience to have had genuinely mystical elements and to have made a uniquely valuable contribution to their spiritual lives.”12
An interesting aside is that one anonymous person from the original study refused to be interviewed for the follow-up twenty-five years later. It is assumed that he was the same person who had had a bad experience on psilocybin during the study. This seminary student bolted from the basement of the chapel in a mad dash to get away, and Huston Smith, who also participated in the Good Friday Experiment, later described chasing after him.13 The Boston University Chapel is located on Commonwealth Avenue, one of the busiest streets in Boston, and it is in the center of an urban campus. Even though it was a holiday weekend, lots of people were likely milling around the square outside the chapel. It must have been quite a sight to see Huston Smith, the eminent professor of religion from MIT, who was more of an aesthete than an athlete, tackling an escapee from a research study on mysticism.
Although I’m presenting this as a humorous anecdote, it raises questions about the possibility of a bad trip that have to be considered along with the healing benefits of psychedelic substances. At the time of the Good Friday Experiment, the medical standard was to give the would-be escapee a shot of Thorazine to bring him down. Evidently, this approach didn’t help this person integrate his difficult experience, since he refused to talk about it twenty-five years later. We now know more about how to work therapeutically with people when challenging moments arise during a psychedelic experience, but this requires a safe environment with skilled helpers. These resources are not always available during ayahuasca ceremonies in either North or South America.
Pahnke’s Good Friday Experiment was groundbreaking research — it was a first attempt to study mystical experience in a controlled experimental design. This was one of the first applications of psychological research to a traditional religious concept, and it was only possible because Pahnke understood that psilocybin could reliably lead to mystical experience. His focus on mystical experience was also prescient, as recent psychedelic research indicates that the mystical experience may be the critical variable necessary for a therapeutic outcome. To collect quantitative data, Pahnke developed a questionnaire designed to measure the universal qualities of mystical experience, which he named as unity, transcendence of time and space, deeply felt positive mood, sense of sacredness, noetic quality, paradoxicality, ineffability, and transiency.14 However, please note that an experience need not contain all of these aspects to qualify as mystical.
Three decades later, after research on psychedelics was once again possible, Roland Griffiths and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine were able to continue this line of scientific inquiry, studying the mystical effects of psilocybin. Based on Pahnke’s research, Griffiths’s team developed the “Persisting Effects Questionnaire,”15 which I adapted into an eighty-one-item questionnaire called “Changes in Yourself and Your Life” (see appendix A). Using a 5-point scale, I asked people to describe how they’d changed as a result of their ayahuasca experiences. Both Griffiths’s and my questions explore the same universal qualities of mystical experience originally described by Pahnke.
Most psychological research makes every attempt to evaluate the impact of a treatment as soon as possible to increase the chances of significant findings. In my study, this was impossible. I had no control over how long ago the participants had taken ayahuasca. Some people might have used the medicine recently, but for others it might have been years. Both Doblin and Griffiths reported that even after time had elapsed, people felt their psilocybin experiences were one of the most spiritual and meaningful experiences in their lives.16 These results gave me confidence that the effect of a mystical experience with ayahuasca would persist over time. I trusted that I could ask similar questions about spiritual experience with ayahuasca users and that the power of their experiences would persist indefinitely.
I also had the advantage of personal experience with ayahuasca, and most, but certainly not all, of the psychedelic researchers also have experienced the drug they’re studying. Because of the well-documented problems with LSD researchers during the sixties — just remember Timothy Leary, who imbibed more drugs than he gave to his research subjects — the fact of personal experience is not openly discussed in professional circles. But it’s an important factor in determining what questions to ask in designing a study. I know from personal experience that the impact from ayahuasca ceremonies is strong, powerful, and able to persist over many years. For myself, it is almost as if something has been imprinted into my operating system, and I have been permanently changed. While designing the research questionnaire, I knew the research would reflect this experience.
Once I designed the questionnaire, I was ready to focus on data collection. Then, out of the clear blue, a major gift arrived, something so serendipitous that I could only credit Grandmother Ayahuasca with arranging it. That is, if you’ll indulge my magical thinking.
Finding a Comparison Group
I knew from the start of the research that it would be impossible to have an experimental research design, in which subjects were randomly assigned to either a treatment group who would drink ayahuasca or a control group who would not. Such randomization means that every subject in the study has an equal chance of being assigned to either group. In the most tightly controlled studies, neither the subjects nor the scientists know whether the subject has taken the drug or a placebo. This is the gold standard in scientific studies, and it allows the researcher to conclude that any differences between the experimental group and the control group are due to the treatment — in this case, ayahuasca. Such an ayahuasca study has still not been done in this country. Researchers have not yet figured out how to control for the dose and potency of ayahuasca or for the circumstances surrounding its use. Finally, before an experimental study can even be conducted, the government has to approve the study, and it will only do so if and when
