My experience with mysticism began in an unlikely place: a little Ohio town called Columbiana. And I was not the only kid in town with this proclivity.

Six years ago, for the first time in three decades, I visited this town where I lived from age 6 to 13. Once again I walked through the woods behind my family’s old house, enthralled with the enthrallment that I experienced there as a child looking for fossils, catching minnows in the creek, and making forts out of dirt and sticks. I felt the awe and wonder that filled my soul in my early years. I remember sensing the presence of an overwhelming transcendent energy when I was out in the woods. But I could not form words to describe those powerful moments.

As a kid, I sensed that these experiences had something to do with Christianity. But our family went to a “mainline” Presbyterian church where a mild form of Protestant orthodoxy was preached and taught, with no reference to the direct experience of God. Doctrine and Bible stories were the foci, not spiritual encounter. So it wasn’t until much later that I learned to connect the dots between my own mystical experiences and those of Jesus and the spiritually-awakened Christians who followed him.

Columbiana looks hardly any different now than it did when my family moved to California during the first Summer of Love in 1966. It’s a beautiful, peaceful, sweet place. A fancy night out in Columbiana is dinner at Das Dutch (as in Deutsch, as in Pennsylvania Dutch, as in German Mennonite) Haus, where the fare doesn’t get much more exotic than creamed chicken on a biscuit. Another night-out option is to watch a second-run movie at the Manos Theater on the roundabout at the center of town, which in my childhood seemed like the navel of the universe. The slightly-rolling but otherwise flat landscape formed a circumscribed horizon, as did the limits of access to the world beyond, consisting of three grainy channels on the black-and-white television and the pages of the Youngstown Vindicator newspaper. In those days, we had no felt sense of being “left out” by living in a small town in the Midwest.

“How to Change Your Mind“, by Michael Pollan, is a history of psychedelic drugs in America, a first-person account of the author’s contemporary foray into the realm of hallucinogens, and an analysis of how they are being used and studied today. As Pollan richly describes, there was a well-developed culture around LSD dating all the way back to the early 1950’s, when a great deal of promising research into its therapeutic benefits began. It was shown to be remarkably effective in treating alcoholism. “Bill W”, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was convinced of its usefulness, but was dissuaded from promoting it because of his new organization’s stated aversion to recovering alcoholics’ use of drugs of any kind. Thousands of engineers and corporate leaders, particularly in what later became known as Silicon Valley, took LSD and had powerfully positive experiences. One of them was the inventor of the graphical interface, and the original version of the Internet, Doug Engelbart. Without LSD’s impact on the computer industry, would I be rolling a mouse on my desk to edit this article right now?

As a geeky, tall, pale-faced kid, I was utterly out of place in Santa Cruz, which was well within the epicenter of the emerging counterculture. It took me a month to grow out my hair and change my name from Jamey to Jim and begin to fit in to the brave new world I had come to call home. Talk of drugs was in the air, as was the pungent aroma of marijuana. But in high school I was a serious student and political activist, and took no interest in drugs. In college I was just as serious, and since I paid my own way through the University of California doing menial jobs between classes, I could not afford to get stoned.

Meanwhile, back in Columbiana, one of my younger former classmates became fascinated with psychedelics. One of the notable families in our town was the Stamets clan. They owned a machine tool business, one of the major industries in Columbiana. Paul Stamets was two years younger than I. Paul’s older brother gave him a book about hallucinogens. He read it with enthusiasm and then lent it to a friend. His friend’s conservative parents found the book and burned it. When Paul found out what happened to the book, it only confirmed his conviction that the subject was very important.

Paul Stamets went on to become the world’s foremost mycologist. He now runs a lab in the Pacific Northwest where he has come up with dozens of novel practical uses for fungi. But the mushrooms that matter most to Stamets are the ones with psychedelic properties. Stamets has consumed many psylocybin mushrooms, powerfully sensing the interconnectedness of the cosmos when he does so. He observes that the mycelium of fungi form underground webs that send chemical messages between the tree roots into which they are integrated. In humans, the mushrooms induce a conscious experience of the very web of life in which they are integuments. Michael Pollan interviewed Stamets at length, and went hunting for mushrooms with him. Pollan later ate some of the mushrooms, and eloquently described the sublime revelations that came to him.

Pollan described the “Good Friday” experiment at Harvard Divinity School. The seminarians who took the drug had profound mystical experiences. The Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary conducted LSD research, and one of his subjects was Huston Smith, who became a globally-venerated scholar of comparative religion. A life-long Methodist, Smith was deeply impressed with his LSD experience and strove to integrate what he had learned from it into his own spirituality. About 16 years ago, I had the privilege of sitting with him for a whole day in Berkeley with a small group of other campus ministers. He’d just written a book about his psychedelic experience: “Cleansing the Doors of Perception”. Smith was well into his 80’s and apparently felt that the “statute of limitations” had passed on any bad effects on his career that might arise from his revelations of the powerful positive impact on his spirituality that LSD had on him. Smith was one of the founders of the Council on Spiritual Practices, which advocated for the responsible, controlled use of psychedelics for the purpose of mystical enlightenment.

I had my own experiences when I was in seminary in the 1970’s, and it was a privilege to be able to talk with Huston Smith about them. San Francisco Theological Seminary had an odd blend of students in that era, and I found myself drawn to the oddest. I concluded that if there was ever a place and time to do some extreme spiritual exploration, seminary was it. Pollan, in his book, makes much of the effect of “set” and “setting” on the experiences of people who ingest psychedelics. The molecules themselves have no fixed experiential content. Rather, they open up the “doors of perception” so that the pre-existing “set” or emotional state of one’s mind, and the “setting” or environment in which one ingests them, are hugely influential on the subjective experience. Good “set” and “setting”, you are likely to get a good “trip”. Negative “set” and “setting”, you may well suffer a “bad trip”. If you’re told it will induce a carnival, you might well end up in one. If mystical union with the Divine is suggested, you’ll tend to experience that. I went to a seminary that looked like a Scottish castle, with a spectacular view of the redwoods flanking Mount Tamalpais. I was learning how to practice vipassana – mindfulness meditation – from my roommate who had spent a year in a Buddhist monastery in Nepal before his Tibetan lama told him he ought to go study the religion of his home culture. I had the right “set”, and the right “setting”.

It powerfully confirmed what I was learning in meditation practice. What I think is just what I think: it is not what is real. My definitions of what I see and experience are just that: definitions. They aren’t the realities which I have defined. There are thousands of other amazing, boggling, fascinating ways to interpret and define these underlying realities, and psychedelics open you to a bunch of them. There is a reality far deeper, far beyond our conventional mental categories and assumptions. Opening myself to a fresh encounter with that underlying reality is an out-of-ego experience of jaw-dropping wonderment. An overwhelming awareness that everything is connected; a palpable, visible certainty that Love holds the universe together, and that in this Love, the meaning, purpose, and value of life is to be found.

It was a very memorable place to visit, but I saw that if I wanted to live there, I’d need to do so without psychedelics. Since that time long ago, I have not taken any, nor have I recommended that others do so. After my experiences, I got even more serious about contemplative meditation. It’s legal, it’s free, and it’s available all the time, everywhere. It revolutionizes my mind, and if we all did it, it would revolutionize the world.

In 1986, I went to an event in Marin County held by the Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly Magazine. Whole Earth was founded by Steward Brand, a very creative but sensible leader in the counterculture movement from the 60’s forward. He was much influenced by his psychedelic experiences. The event celebrated the publication of a book of CoEvolution articles, mine among them. The highlight was a conversation between Stewart Brand and Ken Kesey, the novelist and leader of the Merry Pranksters, memorialized in Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”. On stage, Brand asked Kesey: “Why did the 60’s counterculture sputter and stop?” Kesey’s answer: “We ran out of acid! There was a bottleneck in production. If only we’d had enough production capacity, we could have reached critical mass, and enough of the American population would have been turned-on so that the culture would have permanently changed.” An outrageous statement. But even as I and the rest of the crowd laughed, I thought to myself: “Maybe he’s right.” (Pollan reports that Timothy Leary estimated the “critical mass” number at 4 million. But only 2 million Americans had taken psychedelics by 1969.)

Pollan’s book comes out at time of significant resurgence in the use of psychedelics by Americans. In Silicon Valley, its current manifestation is in “microdosing”, taking small doses of hallucinogens on occasion in order to enhance capacity for creativity and complex problem-solving. College students are “tripping” in large numbers again. Other folks are using them for periodic mental and spiritual “tune-ups”. A rapidly growing number of researchers are freshly probing the therapeutic benefits of these substances. Pollan describes the emerging, underground profession of “spiritual guides” that has emerged. They’ve developed their own set of ethical standards and shared practices, which strike me as equally useful for guiding people through mystical experiences that are not induced by psychedelic substances.

This is a good time to reconsider the outlandish words of Ken Kesey and Tim Leary. What would America be like – what would the world be like – if everyone had psychedelic experiences? More specifically, had them with a healthy, positive “set” and “setting”, and with a sensitive guide? What if everyone got it, viscerally, with all their senses convicting them unassailably, that Love is God, and that every grain of sand and every ant crawling on the ground is suffused with this Divine Love, and that everything and everybody are crowns of creation to be encountered with reverent awe?

But even in the wildly improbable event that the whole country tuned-in and turned-on, there would be the day-after problem. What will we do, take psychedelics with breakfast every day? For one thing, it’s a strictly controlled substance. That could change, but I doubt it will go the way of marijuana any time soon. And there’s the practical matter of going to work and getting things done, which is tough under the influence of a mysticism-inducing dose of the stuff.

There are multiple possible take-aways from Pollan’s excellent book. It can be seen as an argument for once again giving psychedelics the status they had in the 1950’s, when they were researched for their potential therapeutic benefits, and from there find a way to make them available to the general population under controlled circumstances.

But in it I heard a call for tuning-in and turning-on to contemplative practice, to good religion that guides us into the direct experience of God as the Love at the source, center, and goal of existence. As Pollan explains, mysticism is revolutionary because the experience has its own authority, putting it in competition with popes, preachers, and politicians. The cure to fundamentalisms of all kinds is to know God, rather than to believe stuff about God that “authorities” declare. The cure to the selfishness, greed, and fear that motivates the leaders of our federal government today, and the voters who support them, is the sensed subjective conviction that Love is the Ultimate Reality. Some folks may “drop” some LSD or “magic” mushrooms now and again, to get there. But how much better to “drop” some Meister Eckhart, Buddha, Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, Jesus, Rumi, Hafiz, or Thich Nhat Hanh every day! Let’s do what they did. Let’s go where they went. Special molecules are not required to follow this mystical path. And the revolution that will follow will bring more of heaven to this earth.

The poet Allen Ginsburg dropped LSD for the first time in 1960. Immediately he took off his clothes and announced he was going out into the streets to start a “peace and love movement”. He tried to call Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Mao Zedong to broker world harmony, but – funny thing – he couldn’t get through on the phone. Pollan suggests that Ginsburg’s first “trip” was the start of the 60’s counterculture era. Its excesses and abuses gave it a bad name. It wasn’t just for lack of LSD that the counterculture got countered.

So this time, let’s get it right. Psychedelics? Maybe someday we’ll find a way to integrate them, legally and safely, as tools for mental health and spiritual growth. Meanwhile, I recommend mindful contemplation to everyone. Let’s keep our clothes on, do the simple but challenging disciplines required to experience God directly every day, and let them influence our behavior toward kindness. This can bring the revolution that my generation dreamed would happen fifty years ago.

Rev. Jim Burklo, Associate Dean of Religious Life, USC
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG Weblog: MUSINGS Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
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Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California