Entheogens and Spirituality
Entheogens are fundamentally hard to study.
Recent years have seen a renaissance of academic research into the function and effects of entheogens such as psilocybin. In 2025 we have an ever more comprehensive understanding of the biological mechanism and effects of the compound. Science is providing a new facet for understanding psychedelic phenomena.
In 2023 over 50 clinical trials involving psilocybin medications were announced with dozens progressing to phase II. The holy grail for this collective endeavor is to isolate and distill unique healing qualities while eliminating the hallmark psychedelic experience. This would allow for a new line of psilocybin pharmaceutical drugs with easy treatment plans. For those of us who have used and benefited from the medicine, this is laughable. The experience is fundamental to the medicinal effect.
I have taken mushrooms and have felt the slow turning of endless time. I have felt rich love from the soil and the trees and the mountains. I have wrestled with demons and passed through dark avenues of painful memories. I have passed through dark waves of dread and emerged cleansed and raw. With every session, my consciousness is expanded. I have sat outside of time. On a few occasions, I have forgotten my name. These experiences are the point, not the side effect of the mushroom.
What is science to do with a chemically delivered spiritual experience? Mushrooms are hard to measure, difficult to qualify and are loathsomely mystical. While they are remarkably effective, they elude efficacy in the lab. They defy being tamed or bottled or neutered. If cognitive neuroscience is the bridge between cognitive science and cognitive psychology, then mushrooms threaten to detonate the trusses.
There is a belief amongst the neuroscience community that all current mind-based concepts will eventually be replaced by neuroscientific concepts: love as explained by the release of neurotransmitters, ego as marked by the interface of the Default Mode Network and consciousness as the pattern of neuronal webs. This school of thought would strive to distill the psychedelic lived experience to some similar mechanical transaction in the brain. This, I believe, is impossible.
To put it simply: the medicine is our consciousness experiencing itself. While MRIs might show how psilocybin depresses regions of the brain associated with understanding of self, it can not bottle what it means to personally experience ego death. While studies show psilocybin grows neuronal pathways, science can not manufacture the psychedelic interface that determines where those new neurons link to. When studies show mushrooms to be a powerful antidepressant, they cannot ignore experiencing transcendence.
Thankfully, mushrooms can not be gatekept. They are not a pill or a patch or a tab. They do not need to be derived or distilled or reduced. They are grown from the ground and collected in the woods. They blossom in closets and basements and bedrooms. They belong to us, the ones who seek them out.
