examples of the political implications of mystical experience,” also reflecting MAPS’ own utopian hopes: “There is an idealism at the core of the psychedelic community that is difficult to explain. It’s based in part on the conviction that even partial unitive mystical experiences, whether or not catalyzed by psychedelics, can have a transformative effect. The hope is that the lasting effects of these experiences include more tolerance and appreciation of diversity of all kinds, enhanced environmental awareness, solidarity with the poor and oppressed, and a willingness to work through difficult emotions rather than project them onto an external enemy or scapegoat” (MAPS’ lead-in in Kucinich 2002: 19). Thereby, MAPS took up Leary’s psychobiologization of political problems and his advocacy of the psychedelic experience as contributing to their solution. Pharmacospirituality was meant to promote peace: “Societies more open to psychedelic experiences are likely to be less blind to their own demons and prejudices, and perhaps less likely to wage wars of all types” (Doblin 2003).
However, Doblin refrained from reducing the political spirituality associated with psychedelics to a potentiality lying within the drugs themselves (an essentialist perspective that Richard DeGrandpre [2006] termed “pharmacologicalism”). Even though Doblin told me that “of all psychedelics, MDMA is the most inherently therapeutic, the most inherently warm and loving,” he also knew that “Charlie Manson used LSD for brainwashing and to get people to kill”; and he referred to an article in the Israeli press that reported on Hamas fighters using ecstasy from Tel Aviv as “go pills” for their night missions (the anthropological literature is full of examples of hallucinogen use for bellicose purposes [Dobkin de Rios 1984: 213]). “It’s not about the drug,” Doblin concluded. “It’s how you use it. The context is more powerful than the drug.”
Despite this more cautious attitude, it is certainly questionable whether MAPS’ politicized drug mysticism harmonized with either mainstream science or society. But the casting of psychedelia’s countercultural identity engendered a new ethos less antagonistic toward the Protestant ethic of capitalism. It was a this-worldly mysticism that no longer required “dropping out” of society. Instead it tried to translate the experience of unity and transcendence into forms of “active citizenship” (Kucinich 2002: 19). Rather than rejecting the entrepreneurial spirit and wealth generated in the American economy, this new stance sought to enlist the resources of capitalism in the service of advancing the psychedelic agenda. MAPS presented itself as a “membership-based non-profit pharmaceutical company” (Doblin 2002b: 3) and raised money for its projects from successful business people. In this respect, the culture vs. counterculture conflict had indeed been overcome.
When the revival began, drug mysticism could also connect more easily with elements of the Protestant ethic because, in the wake of the 1960s, American Protestantism had changed as well. The discrepancy between the Protestant focus on the scriptures and the drug mystics’ emphasis on intense spiritual experience was less pronounced than thirty years earlier. Not just the counterculture, but also the baby boomer generation more broadly had turned toward experience-centered forms of spirituality shared, for example, by evangelical Christianity and the New Age movement (Luhrmann 2003). In his book on the impact of the counterculture on mainline denominations, Mark Oppenheimer (2003: 6) goes so far as to argue that “by the mid 1970s, the counterculture had become the culture.”
This new appreciation of religion as experience (rather than normative order) inspired a growing number of attempts to bridge the gap between science and spirituality. Under the rubric of neurotheology, brain researchers began to study the neural correlates of altered states of consciousness induced by meditation, prayer, or transcranial magnetic stimulation (Joseph 2002). When we spoke, Doblin contended “that we have science and religion coming together in a way that they had not since Galileo.” The growing attention paid to this encounter had two roots. On the one hand, meditation was considered to be work on the self that led to increased concentration, heightened cognition and awareness, and emotional control. As such it was part of a broader interest in enhancement technologies. The culture of self-improvement provided a common matrix for both neurotheology and cosmetic psychopharmacology. On the other hand, the burgeoning neuroscientific interest in spiritual practices also reflected the changing role of religion in certain corners of the life sciences in the last two decades. Cognitive anthropologists came to acknowledge religious thought as part of human nature, contending that it could be explained in evolutionary terms (Boyer 2001; Atran 2002). After the limited success of two centuries of secularization, they had come to realize that religiosity was unlikely to succumb to the kind of materialist proselytizing practiced by many of their late nineteenth-century predecessors (Hecht 2003; Shapin 2008a). At about the same time, some of the brain researchers who had come of age during the Fourth Great Awakening and had followed the turn toward unchurched forms of spirituality had become powerful figures in their fields, setting their own research agendas. In the last ten or twenty years, the traditionally materialistic field of brain research has become significantly more accommodating toward scientists who break with this ontology and publicly express their belief in a “spiritual reality” (Monastersky 2006).
In fact, such avowals have even helped to obtain funding from private organizations. The Mind and Life Institute, for example, financed experiments, conferences, and retreats exploring the mental activities of Buddhist meditators (Tresch 2011). The Fetzer Institute, founded by a radio and television magnate, funded scientific projects fostering “the awareness of the power of love and forgiveness.”7 And the John Templeton Foundation, run by an evangelical philanthropist, promoted the employment of scientific methods to discover “spiritual realities” (Schüle 2006).
In an academic milieu that provided hospitable niches to those interested in the scientific investigation of religious experiences, a number of researchers came to apply the tools of cognitive neuroscience, especially neuroimaging technologies and electroencephalography, to spiritual practices. Hallucinogen research also profited from this assemblage of science, religion, and philanthropy. The Fetzer Institute, for instance, cofunded a number of psychedelic research projects together with MAPS and the Heffter Research Institute (e.g., Walsh and Grob 2005; Cahn 2006). Partially financed by the Council on Spiritual Practices, Roland Griffiths and colleagues’ (2006) study on psilocybin-induced mystical-type experiences mostly replicated the findings of Walter Pahnke’s famous Good Friday experiment in a more controlled setting, but it received such a significant amount of media coverage that it brought the return of psychedelic science at major research universities such as Johns Hopkins to the attention of a wider American public. Such neurotheological studies of the physiological correlates of the unio mystica rescued spiritual experiences from the realm of the subjective (or even imaginary), endowing them with some kind of reality. This “reality” was interpreted in two contradictory ways: either as reducing spirituality to an epiphenomenon of neural processes or as proof that the brain could be turned into a sense organ capable of perceiving the immaterial but nonetheless real dimensions revealed in such altered states (d’Aquili and Newberg 2002).
In contemporary neurotheology, an experience-centered spirituality and the heuristic individualism of cognitive neuroscience meet in the abstraction of experience from its social and cultural context. Mysticism is narrowed down to peak experiences and isolated neural events. Thereby it is also stripped of cultural difference and antagonism. This is certainly no big loss if one continues to pursue a “liberation from the cultural self,” as Leary (1965: 93) called it in a homage to Huxley. The neurotheological assumption of the universality of mystical experience has been inherited from Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy (2004/1944). The notion of philosophia perennis, which Huxley popularized in the twentieth century, is rooted in a tradition even predating Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s early modern quest for religious unity (Ch. Schmitt 1966). The supposed transcultural nature of drug-induced mystical revelations lends itself to a politics of confessional reconciliation, which had already been the goal of the perennial philosophy in seventeenth-century Prussia (Jordan 1927; Wake et al. 1934; Whitmer 2010). Whereas Leibniz and his contemporaries responded to interconfessional tensions between different Protestant sects, Catholics, and Jews, MAPS promoted psychedelics in America in the face of the political antagonism between liberals and the religious right, which had brought US president
