Religious Riptides

"A New, Earth-Sweeping Spirituality"

By Carl Teichrib

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A few weeks ago, when attending Psychedelic Science 2025 (PS2025), the intractable connection between psychotropic substances and spirituality was strongly impressed. Repeatedly the two seemingly unrelated realms – science and religion – were openly blended within the narrative of the psychedelic renaissance. A new metaphysical worldview is emerging; one in which neuroscience and indigenous spiritual knowledge walk together, chemistry and Hindu Advaita philosophy bow in reverence, and psychotropic-trained clinicians and chaplains join in an alchemical union. It is the marriage of materialism with mysticism, flesh and spirit, with promises of an inner journey back to the garden and healing-for-all. As stated during the PS2025 opening ceremony, the goal is “net-zero trauma by 2070.”¹

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For other Convergence essays on this subject, see the following:

Psychedelic Spirituality

Where There Is Smoke

The Not-So-Magic Bus Ride:

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Contributing to the volume DMT Entity Encounters, professor of mathematics and astronomy, Bernard Carr, put it this way: “we need to make a bridge between matter and mind, experiment and experience, and science and spirituality… and psychedelics are a crucial part of that bridge.”²

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD, acknowledged this co-joining in his essay, Natural Science and the Mystical Worldview. As Hofmann postulated, these two seemingly disjointed branches of knowledge — understood as expressing one ultimate and unified reality — could “become the basis of a new, Earth-sweeping spirituality.”³

The psychedelic renaissance thus portends religious restructuring, a new spiritual framework. This is openly admitted by numerous personalities in the psychedelic space, but the use of a particular label points to the deeper spiritual influence of these substances: Entheogen.

Entheogen, considered a more sacred term for psychoactive substances — especially plant medicines — is a neologism coined in 1979.⁴ The word was meant to convey a ritualized or ceremonial aspect, an intention, leading the user toward the shamanistic experience that “the divine infuses all beings.”⁵ The word itself means becoming the divine within or generating God. Hence, entheogens-psychedelics act as a chemical sacrament, offering a gnostic path to self-salvation, inner healing, and the discovery of heaven within. And you will know it and affirm it — dogmatically! — because of your internal experience.

“A psychedelic society,” explained visionary Terence McKenna, “would abandon belief systems for direct experience.”⁶

I see it a bit differently. That is, the entheogen experience creates its own belief system, constantly reinforced by the larger psychedelic community, a global congregation with its own mythos, priest-class and clergy, evangelists and disciples. Yes, a belief system may be abandoned, but belief is not suspended. It is exchanged.

With the above as my introduction, allow me to explain the essay I’m submitting this week — its an American story of spiritual transformation, with global consequences.