Pastors on Psychedelics: The Return to Mystical Spirituality?

In this post, we’ll look at the implications of a university study of dozens of religious leaders who chose to ingest psychedelics, specifically psilocybin, a hallucinogenic compound in certain mushrooms. And we’ll consider the broader ramifications of what they experienced.

In 2015, researchers at John Hopkins University and NYU specifically wanted to invite religious leaders with an interest in further exploring and developing their spiritual lives to ingest mushrooms. The result was that many of the participants became evangelists for psychedelics for spiritual purposes. That study and its participants were the focus of a recent article by Michael Pollan, entitled “This is Your Priest on Drugs,” that appeared in the May 19, 2025, issue of The New Yorker. Ironically, one of the participants was an Episcopal Church minister named Hunt Priest.

So, Priest joined about 30 other religious leaders from Christian churches, including a Catholic priest, as well as an Islamic leader, a few rabbis, a biblical scholar and a Buddhist roshi. While the study lacked some of the usual scientific rigor, like certain controls and a sample size typical of scientific studies, it nevertheless provided some interesting insights that can help shine new light on the current movement to make possession and use of psychedelics legal in various states.

The insight I found most intriguing was the confirmation by these traditionally oriented religious leaders of mystical spiritual visions and revelations associated with their psychedelic experience. In fact, Hunt Priest reported a divine encounter that included seeing gorgeous fractal patterns. That accords with my own experience a year and a half ago with a different psychedelic in which I saw visuals and received a message that Christ is a fractal, which launched my deeper dive to understand what that might mean, which I’ve written about in Finding the Fractal Christ: An Integrative Spiritual Quest.

Of course, this is nothing new—not the personal experience of the divine, not the vivid imagery, not even the fractals—in terms of psychedelic experiences. In fact, in his article, Pollan refers to a peer-reveiwed academic paper that came out around the same time of his article on the “Effects of Psilocybin on Religious and Spiritual Attitudes and Behaviors in Clergy from Various Major World Religions.” That appeared in the journal, Psychedelic Medicine. Those interviewed for the academic paper talked about having authentic spiritual or religious experiences, realizing that they had experienced what mystics reported experiencing spontaneously. Other notable insights included that no one reported seeing familiar historical or biblical figures in their visions and revelations. Some participants in the 2015 study even saw imagery or frameworks from other religious or spiritual traditions outside their own.

The New Yorker author, Pollan, even reached out to noted religious scholar and Princeton professor of religion, Elain Pagels, for context. Pagels has written a great deal about the history of Christianity, confirming that the early Christians of the second and third century believed that divine revelation could be accessible to anyone. Indeed, many verses in the New Testament and other early scriptural documents like the Gospel of Thomas teach us exactly that.

While the early church leaders knew very well about these biblical references encouraging personal revelations and experiences of the divine—the mystical roots of Christianity, theirs was an agenda of conforming orthodoxy, universal doctrines and dogmas. And anything else was … deemed heresy. Pagels has written that it changed the course of Western Christianity. Other religions reveal similar insistence on conformity to approved dogma and doctrine, rejecting non-conforming personal divine experiences and revelations.

But wait… There’s something else going on at the same time that makes all this even stranger. New discoveries and ideas about human consciousness suddenly are appearing everywhere.

A professor of physics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, believes that hidden dimensions may explain consciousness. Michael Pravica, Ph.D., says that consciousness enables us to transcend the physical world in moments of heightened awareness. This concept aligns with the theory of hyperdimensionality, meaning that our universe is not composed of only the three dimensions we perceive but might actually be part of a much larger nexus with hidden dimensions, according to Pravica.

If he’s right, he says that would compel us to accept that some beings may exist outside the physical realm, free from limits of space and time, but more importantly that our consciousness might possess a similar ability.

Meanwhile, a recent article in Popular Mechanics explains how scientists are now mapping specific regions of the brain to understand how and why the brain has awareness of the divine. They call it neurospirituality. According to their research, human brains appear to have a real neurological foundation for the sacred. Neurospirituality focuses on understanding the intersection of neuroscience and spiritual experiences. Their findings show that our sense of the sacred and our pursuit of spirituality correlate to deeper regions of the brain, like the brainstem, suggesting just how deeply ingrained divine experiences are within us.

Finally, there’s news of a new biotech startup that is developing next-generation psychedelics specially designed to evoke specific, curated states of mind. The startup, Mindstate Design Labs, is using a proprietary AI called Osmanthus that looks across the largest global dataset of human psychotropic experiences with known brain receptor targets to map how specific chemical combinations shape our consciousness. Their goal is to create the kind of flash of insight the Greeks called divine knowledge, or epiphany. Mindstate says that their plans include structuring even mind states like mysticism and revelation.

Okay, look, my question is: why is this incredible convergence happening of psychedelic use embraced by religious leaders, breakthroughs in mapping the brain to access the divine and creating a new class of psychedelics to invoke mystical experiences and revelations right now? When American culture seems so increasingly divided, much less open and tolerant of others’ experiences and beliefs compared to when I was growing up—at the same time, we see this broad push to legalize certain psychedelics, the kind with proven value to enable mystical spiritual experiences.

Meanwhile, clerics from various religions and spiritual traditions who have reported divine revelations and mystical experience are coming back to their churches, their congregations, their followers, with a new understanding and awareness that something has been missing—the power and profound spiritual impact of personally experiencing the divine. Of course, that can also make it threatening to religious institutions who cannot differentiate the authentic revelation from what we today might call “fake.”

Now, from a truly spiritual perspective—no, from within the authentic spiritual experience of divine revelation, the seeker sees and knows the Truth as it pertains to him or her: no one can or should try to validate or invalidate any other person’s experience of God, of the divine, or spiritual guidance. Spiritual revelation, Truth and salvation are not the product of crowdsourcing or consensus or research results from the latest Pew poll. THAT is what the early Christian mystics knew from their Source, like other mystics from other spiritual traditions going back to ancient civilizations.

Could we be witnessing a return to spiritual mysticism through science, technology and innovation, completing another round in a never-ending spiral, but bringing us to a very different level, perhaps opening greater access to a higher consciousness or dimension? Those who have seen the vibrant fractals in higher states of consciousness through the door of psychedelics can recognize them as self-same divine patterns that repeat…and scale to infinity—the essential characteristics of a fractal. Some call them portals to different realities or dimensions. It remains to be seen whether we will have the courage, the faith, and the spiritual guidance to step through them and see for ourselves what lies beyond.

Copyright © 2025 Joseph Kornowski