“Mystical?” Cloninger laughed as he finished my sentence. “There is. And it’s real.We really do have a soul. And we really can listen to it. And it’s good and it’s intelligent and it’s what makes life worthwhile.”
To those inclined toward God, this makes perfect sense, while others may scratch their heads in puzzlement. As for me, I see this as an invitation to unravel the mystery of soul and body and their relationship to each other. It is a laughably ambitious task, and to even begin, we have to drill down further into the science.We must wade through the synapses and lobes and chemicals in the brain, the stuff of neurology that is so intricately tuned that it takes my breath away in wonder.
Let’s turn, now, to God as chemist. The brain is a cauldron of chemicals that color how we feel and think. Mania and depression, fear and love, all of our moods trace back to chemical reactions. Why not transcendence as well? And if there is a chemistry to spiritual experience, does that imply the hand of a Chemist? These puzzles led me to the ancient practices of Navajos and to the rebellious days of the 1960s. They zeroed in on a particular neurotransmitter that holds a key to spiritual experience. They took me to a type of spirituality that is both instant and measurable synthetic spirituality.
CHAPTER 6
Isn’t God a Trip?
THOSE WHO SAY LIFE IS SHORT have never attended a peyote ceremony.
This thought occurred to me just after midnight on July 23, 2006. Thirty-one of us formed a circle around a fire in an enormous tipi we had erected on top of a mountain near Lukachukai, Arizona. Thunder and lightning ripped through the sky, and heavy rain lapped under the edges of the tent, soaking our cushions and turning the dirt floor into a muddy paste. My companions sat cross-legged on the floor, motionless, gazing at the flames with sleepy eyes dilated by the mescaline from the sacred herb peyote. Three strapping young men with long black hair moved around the circle, pounding on a water drum and singing an urgent chant, which sounded to my untrained ears like,
Doo doo doo doo DOO DOO doo doo doo doo DOO DOO
. I understood nothing, since they sang in the Navajo language, Diné, but I felt the power of the chant like ropes wrapped tight around my body. I could not move, only breathe.
But I wanted to move. I was desperate to move. I had been sitting for three and a half hours on a thin, wet cushion. The only relief came in shifting from cross-legged to a kneeling position, and then for but a moment. Unlike my happy and stationary co-participants, I was not in fact stoned. I was an “observer”—an observer of one of the only forms of drug-induced spirituality sanctioned by U.S. law. Psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin (mushrooms), and mescaline had been outlawed by the “war on drugs” in 1971, ending most of the emerging research on the states these drugs seemed to uncork. Only peyote and ayahuasca used in Native American religious ceremonies are permitted, which is how I found myself sitting in a tipi, bobbing my head to Navajo chants with a silly grin, wet and sore and as close as I could legally come to observing mystical states created by Schedule I drugs.
Well, almost as close. I could have ingested enough peyote to reach an altered state myself. But I had opted out. Okay. I took a little. The law permitted Native Americans to ingest peyote for religious purposes only, and there appeared to be no loophole for NPR. More important, I thought the peyote might actually
interfere
with my work, since violent vomiting is common for the uninitiated. I then reminded myself that I had a stepdaughter, and tripping on sacred mushrooms might not be the best message to send a twelve-year-old.Whole truth be told, I also worried that the peyote would deliver on its promise and thrust me into an enlightened spiritual state. I fretted that God might be reduced to a chemical, making my own daily commitment to spiritual practices look a bit archaic. All that prayer and study, when I could just swallow a bit of mescaline—a little like using the Pony Express in the age of e-mail.
Once in the tipi, I found that skipping the altered state was, from a culinary point of view, less of a sacrifice than I had imagined.When the peyote man first came around with his coffee can full of dark brown sludge and spooned the peyote paste into my mouth—using the same teaspoon for everyone, I noticed—I nearly choked on the acrid taste and lima-bean-like texture. Just as I was recovering from the paste, another man thrust a silver bowl in front of me. I reached into what felt like a mass of writhing worms and plucked out a peyote button, the cactus herb itself. I held the soggy yellow button reverently in my hand until he had moved on, and then quietly dropped it on the dirt behind me. I looked up to find a third man kneeling before me with a jug of green liquid—peyote tea—which he pressed to my lips before I could brace myself.
The trinity of peyote would return every two hours or so, but after the second circuit I politely declined, leaving myself in a wired but not altered state. At just after midnight, the drumming ceased, catapulting us into silence, save for the hiss of the fire. Eventually the Navajo woman in the place of honor cleared her throat, and we all turned to gaze at her.
“I want to thank you for praying with me,” Mary Ann began in a reedy voice. “I know that the peyote and your prayers will heal me. Now I want to tell you something I have never told anyone.” She paused, looking around the circle. “I need to confess to the fire.”
Jesus as Chemical Compound
I had met Mary Ann the morning before. She showed up just as a group of us—about a dozen Navajos, a Harvard professor, his wife, and I—were heading off to set up the tipi for Mary Ann’s healing ceremony the next night. She had come to work out the last-minute details.
My instant impression was that this was a woman in long-term pain: She was sixty-four, and her golden face bore deep lines around her nose and mouth, which was set in grim resignation. She jackknifed slightly at the waist, bent in discomfort.When I introduced myself as a journalist who would be attending her ceremony, she poured out her story of shingles and unreceptive doctors and unrelenting pain.
“I’ve been suffering, suffering for five months now,” she said, her voice wavering. “I can’t get out of bed. My husband has to do everything for me.” Her husband, frail and ancient, nodded soberly.“Tonight I’m going to ask the peyote to help me. I’m putting faith in the medicine to heal me.”
I murmured sympathetically. I thought it unlikely that mescaline would do the trick.
Her wording captured the difference between Native Americans and a white girl like me. I thought of peyote as a chemical compound that alters consciousness; they thought of it as a divine gift throbbing with supernatural power. In my conversations with Mary Ann and others, I noticed that Navajos referred to peyote as a being, a personality. One called it the flesh of God, another called it a spirit. A third said it was holy medicine intended by the Creator only for native people.
Peyote, Andy Harvey explained, is “a sacrament.”
With laugh lines around his eyes and mouth, Andy’s face welcomed all strangers. His lustrous black hair took a decade off his forty-nine years. His stocky body suggested that he had not seen much physical labor since he began working for the economic development office of the Navajo Nation.
Peyote is like the Eucharist for a Catholic, he said. It
is
God, and it
opens the way
to God.
“We take it, we pray with it, and we ask the Creator to help us in the experiences that we would have as we ingest that peyote. So in a sense we ask the peyote to help us to come to realize certain things in our lives that we want to realize. And some things we can’t understand, when we want answers to certain things. And in the case of being sick, sometimes we ask the peyote to help us cleanse the illnesses away and cleanse our mental being, our spiritual being, our psychological and emotional being. And we believe that’s what peyote does. That’s why we call it a sacrament.”
“For a Christian, it might be like addressing Jesus,” I offered, trying to translate into a metaphor I could understand.“It’s like an intermediary between you and God.”
“Right,” he agreed.“And just like Jesus Christ was sent to save mankind, to provide us a means to salvation, this sacred herb has got the same philosophy. We believe that the Creator put it on this earth for us to utilize and provide salvation, and provide us a life that we could be satisfied with. And,” he added quickly, “I’ve never taken it for the fun of it.”
“The word
peyotl
,” John Halpern explained to me a few minutes later, “means ‘heart of God.’ And these people believe it is a blessing of God to all native people, for their healing, for their strength.”
Halpern and I were seated on a log a few hours before the ceremony, basking in the mountain sun. At thirty-seven, he was balding, enthusiastic, a study in kinetic energy, and very smart: Halpern was the associate director of substance abuse research at Harvard’s McLean Hospital. Years earlier, he began studying why members of the Native American Church, who ingest peyote as religious ritual, enjoy vanishingly low rates of alcoholism compared with other Native Americans.
1
From there it was a short hop to fascination with all things Indian, including attending several peyote ceremonies. It was John who had wangled me an invitation to the ceremony, and for that I was grateful.
“They refer to peyote as medicine,” Halpern continued, “but it would be with a capital
M
rather than a small
m
.We’re talking about a
spiritual
Medicine.”
Yes, but it’s also a psychedelic drug, I pointed out.
He nodded. Peyote contains mescaline. It is a “phenethylamine hallucinogen” that has stimulant-like properties. Translation: it acts like speed and dramatically alters your state of consciousness, and if the dosage is high enough, you will experience visions like those described by William Blake and Saint Teresa of Ávila. That would be 350 to 400 milligrams for an adult, though how that translates into teaspoons from a coffee can, I could not guess.
Halpern explained that like more commonly known hallucinogens, such as psilocybin, LSD, and DMT, peyote targets the serotonin system in the brain, which is the system that regulates mood and emotion, among other things. Also like other psychedelics—and unlike, say, alcohol—peyote is believed to make people hyperperceptive, because it stimulates the brain cells and increases blood flow to the frontal lobes, or the “executive” part of the brain.
Then I voiced the question that haunts me: Does peyote swing open the door to a different layer of consciousness, where “God” can be known, or does it merely spark chemical reactions?
“There is this claim that the use of hallucinogens will increase magical thinking so you think there are more connections than reality would show,” Halpern conceded. “And it’s so nice to believe that science can explain everything. But do we really have to understand the machinations, the steps in which a person ends up communing with God? Is that going to serve a useful purpose to operationalize a human experience? To what end?”
I could almost hear his loyalties ripping down the middle as he gave his impassioned speech. John Halpern the Harvard doctor knew that the whole purpose of science is to “operationalize” human experience, to dissect it in order to understand it. And yet, he clung to the mystical. “We are spiritual beings,” he said, “and to deny it does not make it go away.”
Soon, I would see all these faces of peyote: the chemical and the god, the sacrament and the medicine—but a medicine with strings attached, one that required confession before it made you whole.
Confession and the Headless Man
“I need to confess to the fire,” Mary Ann said, studying the flames as if to confirm they were ready to listen.
“One night, about twenty years ago, I was driving through Utah with my kids,” she began.“It was the middle of the night, and we were coming over a hill. Suddenly, there was a man waving at me to stop, but we were going too fast. And then I saw a body lying in the road—he was already dead, but I ran over him, I couldn’t stop. I think I ran over his head.”
Startled and relieved that the endless drumming had ceased, I glanced around the circle to see if anyone had registered what may have been a confession to vehicular homicide. They merely smiled benignly, heads swaying happily like bobble-head dolls, and stared into the fire.
“I know I didn’t kill him, but he kept haunting me,” Mary Ann continued, a bit frantic now. “Once, a few years later, I was in my car, waiting outside a [peyote] ceremony. And a headless man jumped up outside my car window. I screamed. I was so scared. Sometimes I still see him.”
She began to cry. “I need him to forgive me. I know I’m in pain because he hasn’t forgiven me. I need peyote to heal me.”
Mary Ann fell silent, and Fred, the “roadman” orchestrating the ceremony, began to chant prayers in Diné. The peyote man grabbed his tin full of paste and scooped a spoonful into Mary Ann’s mouth, as a mother bird feeds worms to her chick ... one scoop, two, three, four, five scoops, then a peyote button, washing it down with several gulps of peyote tea.
Mary Ann leaned back, sated. The drummers resumed their chanting. Two hours passed.
Two-thirty a.m.: “I had a vision,” Mary Ann stated, “a vision of a bald eagle.”
The others nodded. The peyote men fetched their medicine, and the group consumed the mescaline again, all except me. Then I noticed Mika, John Halpern’s Japanese wife. She bowed forward as in a formal tea ceremony and, her face a mask of stoicism, rid herself of the sacred herb. No more peyote for Mika. Two more hours of drumming, and then, at four-thirty a.m., Mary Ann spoke again.
“The shingles are gone!” she cried triumphantly. “The peyote has healed me!”
Right,
I thought,
let’s revisit this issue in forty-eight hours.
The next three and a half hours crawled by in comically slow motion. The ache in my legs escalated minute by minute, although this did inspire prayer:
Please, God, let this end.
I found myself gazing at the smoke hole at the top of the tipi, willing with all my might for the inky black sky to turn blue. But I was also mesmerized by the prayers and chants, and for the briefest of moments I did not want the ceremony to end. At eight a.m., eleven hours after we had crawled into the tipi, the roadman and his wife passed around water, corn, meat, and fruit as a ritual closing. The ceremony ended with a final blessing for Mary Ann: six spoonfuls of peyote paste, a button, and tea.
There goes that interview,
I thought as I watched her final peyote hurrah.