Neuropsychedelia. Nicolas Langlitz
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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 George H.W. Bush to power. Doblin (2008) advocated a “global spirituality” that was meant to bridge the divide between organized religion and a scientifically enlightened liberal lifestyle open to drugs: “There is a rise in religious fundamentalism at a time when that world view is more and more difficult to sustain. . . . The fundamentalists are scared that psychedelics might delegitimize their particular religion, but I think psychedelics can reinvigorate religion and make people appreciate their traditions. Global spirituality is not inherently anti-religion.” The political neurotheology of the psychedelic revival oscillated between disenchanted but politically defensive atheism and mystically inspired libertarian activism. In accordance with MAPS’ mainstreaming strategy, Doblin deemphasized the marked ideological differences between the reanimated psychedelic movement and the powerful advocates of American conservatism who had also dominated Leon Kass’s President’s Council on Bioethics (Briggle 2009).
THE GLOBAL ASSEMBLAGE OF HALLUCINOGEN RESEARCH
And yet, even at our meeting in 2010, Rick Doblin was still worried that the political climate would change and that everything MAPS had built up over the past two decades could be torn down again. From the very beginning, such concerns had led the psychedelic revivalists to develop an international strategy. As Doblin told me: “We need mul tiple places where this stuff is happening. If there is a backlash in any one of them, hopefully there is a refuge elsewhere.”
Thus, the revival of psychedelic science was not restricted to the United States. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, new research projects were simultaneously budding in Russia, Britain, Spain, Germany, and Switzerland. Many of the protagonists of this development had known each other for many years through the conferences of the International Transpersonal Association established by the Czech psychedelic researcher Stan Grof in 1978. Grof and his allies promoted a form of psychology that studied self-transcendent aspects of human experience, including those induced by drugs. “They were going all over the world trying to unify scientists over spirituality and looking for a place to start this,” Doblin remembered. But not everybody involved in the global reanimation of hallucinogen research was an adherent of transpersonal psychology. In Germany, for example, the group around the biological psychiatrists Manfred Spitzer, Leo Hermle, and Euphrosyne Gouzoulis-Mayfrank was more interested in experimental psychosis than in experimental mysticism. The symposia of the European College for the Study of Consciousness, a virtual institution founded in 1985 by the German psychiatrist Hanscarl Leuner, provided a meeting place for the small but burgeoning scene of European hallucinogen researchers, mostly from Germany and Switzerland. Here, members of different ideological camps came together. Advocates of psycholytic therapy exchanged ideas with basic science researchers, while stern biological psychiatrists spoke to anthropologists practicing neoshamanism.
It did not take long until Europeans and Americans met. In a 1989 newsletter that MAPS sent out to its supporters, Doblin (1989a) mentioned the possibility of conducting MDMA research in the Soviet Union before FDA permission was granted for US studies. A small group of scientists was already active in Moscow and Leningrad. Since 1985, for example, the Russian psychiatrist Evgeny Krupitsky had treated alcoholics and heroin addicts with the hallucinogen ketamine. As the Iron Curtain fell and the USSR began to disintegrate, an opportunity seemed to open up for MAPS: “Soviet state-funded science is in a crisis. It is now possible to assemble a world-class psychedelic research group for a fraction of the cost here in the US” (Doblin 1992).
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