Sohrab In The Upside Down

And: East Toward Home (Budapest); Searching For 'Serious Happiness' In Paris

Sohrab Ahmari

Sohrab Ahmari has caused a minor stir among my circles with his account of traveling to Mexico to participate in a bespoke ayahuasca ceremony. The active ingredient in ayahuasca is DMT, the extremely powerful substance that some heavy psychedelic users take in a purified form. In his story, he struggles the entire time to reconcile what he’s doing with his Catholic faith. He’s right to do so; this is straight-up paganism. He has experiences that are fairly scary, but nothing remotely like the vivid and terrifying things that others have reported on the drug. It might have to do with his inner resistance to it, and it might also have something to do with the fact that he didn’t imbibe as much of the substance as others.

I think he had no business doing any of this. Believe me, I get his curiosity. Still, Christians should not be doing these things, not out of any rigid moral prohibition (though there is that), but because these substances really do work to open spiritual doors that ought to be closed. If one is a strict materialist, then one is bound to interpret everything that happens on ayahuasca, or any other kind of psychedelic, as produced only by the firing of neurons in one’s brain. It is all a hallucination.

But neither Sohrab nor I are materialists. We are Christians. We believe that there is another realm, a realm of the spirit. He seems to have tried to go into that realm as an explorer, counting on his Christian faith to protect him. It seems — seems — to have worked, though it will be interesting to see if he has any lingering spiritual effects from having participated, despite his inner reluctance, in a pagan ceremony involving psychoactive drugs that the people using and administering them believe open one to other spirits.

This part jumped out at me:

But participating in the ritual or “sacramental” aspects of the ayahuasca ceremony touched on a moral injunction of an entirely different order of magnitude: namely, the First Commandment. Unfortunately, even the few moral theologians who have weighed in on psychedelic medicine haven’t addressed this problem: namely, the use of psychedelics in their indigenous ritual or ceremonial contexts. Maybe that’s because the question is still fairly novel, I figured, in which case: Do I have an opening to proceed? But then another worry sprang up: Perhaps the Roman sages haven’t discussed this problem because the answer is so obvious, as clear and as searing as the Sinai sun—“I am the LORD your God. Thou shalt not have any other gods before me.”

The answer would turn on whether the art of the maestros involves actual communion with plant spirits, in which case submitting to the ceremonial aspects would implicate those dread no-no practices highlighted by the Catechism: animism, polytheism, idolatry, “spiritism.” Determined to have me receive the icaros [sacred pagan songs of healing connected to the drug — RD], Tod, my guide to this world, insisted on the opposite, demystified reading: namely, that what the maestros do is manipulation not of spirits, but of “energies” and “intelligences” that modern science can’t explain. If that’s the case, then the icaro should really be viewed as an indigenous “technology,” rather than an expression of some alternative cosmology to rival the biblical one. [Emphasis mine — RD] “Besides,” Tod said, tongue half in cheek, “if any global spiritual leader would approve of you doing this, it’s Pope Francis, right?”

Perhaps. But I’d encountered enough references to the plant as a “she”-spirit, and enough talk of the icaro as a form of “spiritual surgery,” to leave me wary of resolving the technology-versus-spirituality ambiguity on my own. And given the gravity of the First Commandment, slipping through some self-carved exception wouldn’t satisfy my conscience.

“Technology.” Ah. It doesn’t work on Sohrab, this line, but I’m quite sure that it works on skeptical materialists from the West. This implies that the drug should be seen as a tool to help the user gain more control over reality. This connects directly to the theme in Living In Wonder, about how Westerners are vulnerable to the false, or dark, enchantments of technology.

The modern Western mind is one that seeks mastery of the world. This is what Yuval Noah Harari meant when he described the passage of the West into modernity as “exchanging meaning for power.” That is, Western man figured out that if he jettisoned the idea that spiritual reality exists in any sense as part of the material world — that is, the older Christian belief that matter and spirit interpenetrate each other — then he is free to manipulate the material world to suit his own will and desires. What Tod is saying here is that Sohrab shouldn’t fear the spiritual side of ayahuasca, because it is nothing more than manipulating “energies” and “intelligences” to make them do the bidding of the user — to heal his broken mind and body by restoring him to some kind of deeper harmony with the cosmos.

This is what magic is. Religion — at least the Christian religion — is about surrendering to God, not attempting to manipulate Him or any of the divine powers (e.g., angels) into doing what we want. Of course we pray that the Lord will do this or that good thing for us — heal us of sickness, fix broken relationships, give us victory over our enemies, that sort of thing. But the Christian always must know that God is entirely sovereign, and that He may or may not choose to answer our prayers. To think that God, and the things of God, are a mere “technology” to be used to get what we want — that is the sin of Simon Magus, a newly baptized Christian who tried to buy the spiritual powers of the Apostles, thinking of it as magic. Peter strongly rebukes him (Acts 8 :9-24). Simon thought that Christianity was merely a different kind of magic. In other words, Simon thought Christianity was a technology.

In Living In Wonder, I have a passage about the dangers of psychedelics, which were central to the demonic worship and practice of an ex-occultist academic turned Christian whom I call “Jonah”. Here is that passage:

Today, doctors are finding solid therapeutic uses for the once taboo category of drugs called psychedelics. This research brings welcome hope and relief to many people who live in psychological torment from trauma or abuse. Yet it is also the case that the recreational use of psychedelic drugs by seekers who want to have a magical or transcendent experience is growing. This is frightening—not because psychedelics don’t work to produce an experience of enchantment, but because they actually do.

Users of strong psychedelics, who sometimes term themselves “psychonauts,” report mind-blowing journeys into alternate realities where they meet various demon-like entities. Curiously, despite the fact that psychonauts come from widely varied backgrounds, many of them see the same entities in their visions. This suggests that these dramatic, intense psychedelic experiences involve entering into an objective realm. Some users report unwanted paranormal happenings, with unseen beings lingering after their psychedelic journeys.

Richard C. Schwartz, founder of the popular Integrated Family Systems model of psychotherapy, has encountered in his work entities that he calls “unattached burdens” (UBs). In a foreword to his colleague Robert Falconer’s 2023 book about UBs, The Others within Us, Schwartz confesses that he had to put aside his scientific biases to deal with the phenomenon of UBs manifesting in his therapeutic practice. In the book, Falconer discusses how the use of psychedelics—DMT especially—makes the self more porous while under the influence. If, as some researchers believe, the brain acts as a filter that keeps out information, then, says Falconer, by temporarily changing the brain’s settings, “DMT could be opening us up to perceive other dimensions or levels of reality that are just as real as our ordinary ones.”

I confess to Jonah that as a college freshman, before I became a Christian, I experimented with LSD and had relatively mild hallucinogenic experiences. Though I regret it, I must admit that it pulled me out of depression and opened my eyes to the fact that God was real. The unorthodox English biologist Rupert Sheldrake has noted that virtually everyone who tries psychedelics returns from their “trip” convinced that what they experienced was not a hallucination, in the sense of an escape from reality, but rather an intensification of reality—the lifting of the veil to reveal what’s really there.[ii] This was certainly my experience. Psychedelic use was part of my journey toward religious faith—something I have never wanted to talk about for fear of encouraging others. But it really happened, and I don’t think it serves the truth, or does anybody any good, to pretend that these events are all bad.

In my first year of college, I was in despair over (what else?) a girl who did not love me. One weekend, my new roommate, a fun-loving Jewish hippie from New Orleans, told me he had two tabs of LSD. He had never tried it; would I join him? Why not? Back then, I was so depressed that nothing mattered.

For my roommate, the experience was merely fun. For me, though, it was life changing. The drug chemically alters the brain temporarily, affecting serotonin levels and heightening one’s sensory inputs. It is not an opioid and does not produce euphoria. I did not hallucinate things that were not there, but the world itself was rendered breathtakingly beautiful.

During the twelve hours the trip lasted, I felt as though I were walking out of a dark, damp prison cell into a warm garden drenched with sunshine and filled with brilliant flowers. Like many people who have taken this drug, I had an overwhelming sense of the deep unity of all being, and of God’s presence suffusing it. When the drug wore off, I did not think that I had seen augmented reality; rather, I believed that I had been granted a glimpse of the really real.

My depression was cured in a stroke—and when Monday morning rolled around, I went to the campus bookstore looking for books about God. I found a little book about the philosophy of Kierkegaard, read it in a week, and accepted Christ. It took years of struggle to fully surrender to the Holy Spirit, but as embarrassed as I have long been to have taken the drug as a nineteen-year-old, it would be dishonest to deny that my pilgrimage to faith passed through this unusual place. If critics of psychedelic use fail to recognize that some people appear to benefit from them, both psychologically and spiritually, we will lose credibility.

For as long as it acts, the drug makes the self more porous. This is its spiritual benefit but also its spiritual danger. I told Jonah that I would never repeat that experience, because now, older and wiser, I believe it opens doors in the nous that ought to remain closed, unless opened by God through prescribed prayer and religious practice. When I read about people with no religious preparation consuming psychedelics far more powerful than what I ingested in the 1980s, it fills me with fear for their souls.

The massive turn to psychedelics plays into the reckless quest for forbidden knowledge that is deeply embedded in the Western spirit. In his Inferno, Dante sites Ulysses among the damned because he used his extraordinary way with words to convince his crew to sail past the dangerous outer borders of the sea, goading them to go gloriously where no man had gone before. They all died.

Similarly, Charles Foster, a well-known English intellectual who writes on enchantment, wrote in the pages of an elite British publication that there are “no good reasons to inhibit research on psychedelics. Indeed there are no true reasons at all. I suspect that the real objections well up from a deep and old intuition that, although we are designed for travel outside our usual modes of consciousness, there are nonetheless worlds that are out of bounds—or out of bounds to most people in most circumstances.”

To be sure, Foster, who is a Christian, expressed at the conclusion of the piece personal apprehension about the recreational (versus medicinal) use of psychedelics. But his lines above capture a widely shared inability of modern people to imagine that there might be dangers in opening the doors of perception and plunging through to unknown psychic realms.

Jonah, who has long and intense experience as a psychonaut, strongly affirms my negative judgment on the recreational use of psychedelics. He, too, has known people who were first brought to a real faith in God through psychedelics. “In my estimation,” he says, “this is less an advertisement for psychedelics and more a testament to how the Holy Spirit can choose to work through whatever it wills.”

(Later, I heard a horrifying story from an Orthodox believer, a lawyer, who had never done drugs but who had been talked into trying a mild psychedelic. He had a vivid out-of-body experience in a dimension in which he encountered demons. He was told there by a being he believed was his guardian angel never, ever to ingest these drugs, because they really do give one access to a forbidden realm—one in which you can lose your eternal soul.)

As a one-time heavy user of psychedelics, Jonah now says that these drugs “are never worth the risk because they place us in a hypervulnerable cognitive state, ripe for demonic manipulation.

“These drugs can bring you into contact with spiritual reality but in a manner rife with misinterpretation, ego inflation disguised as humility, confirmation bias, or even more openly demonic forms of deception,” he says.

He’s not alone in making these assertions. In the online political and cultural magazine UnHerd, journalist Ed Prideaux sounded an alarm against “the psychedelic-industrial complex,” his term for the way psychedelic experiences are now being marketed as instant re-enchantment. Prideaux points out that “indigenous and mystical traditions have warned the West against conquistador exploration of ecstatic states for centuries. The Eastern Orthodox tradition, for instance, has a rich literature of prelest, a spiritual malaise in which the seeker of private mystical experiences becomes possessed, obsessed, deluded, or corrupted by egotism.”

To repeat: psychedelics aren’t dangerous because they don’t work, but because they do. It is certainly the case that God can manifest to users in this state, in some sense. It happened to me in college! But this is playing with fire. If you walk on a rickety wooden footbridge across a gorge, you can have a potentially life-changing experience of staring into the abyss from a perspective you wouldn’t have had otherwise. But you also run the risk of falling off, to your death.

I allow for the possibility that these substances — or at least some of them — might be used under narrow, controlled conditions, to treat mental illness. I don’t feel comfortable dismissing them entirely, especially as research has shown that some patients suffering from terrible mental traumas (PTSD and the like) have been delivered of their suffering from the therapeutic use of these drugs, accompanied by the care of doctors.

My hesitation, and it’s a strong one, is that the spiritual dangers of these drugs do not cease because they are administered in a clinic, with the sole intention of healing sickness (as distinct from having a cool experience). There is no such thing as a risk-free trip into the Upside Down. Sohrab counted on his Catholic faith to keep him safe from anything demonic that might be present at this ceremony, and maybe, in the end, it did. But this was a very, very foolish thing for him to have done, and I hope no one is encouraged by his account to try it for themselves.

The thing is, so very many people today are trying psychedelics, seeking instant enchantment. This is something that we have never had to deal with in our culture and civilization. Well, it’s here — and neither pastors nor lay Christians are prepared to deal with it. That has to change. It has to. My new book is mostly a book of light and hope, but I hope that Living In Wonder wakes up Christians to the real and urgent spiritual crisis that is driving people to dabble with these substances, and to the serious dangers to the soul they pose.

(Incidentally, as someone who has never been a cannabis user (except for brief dabbling in gummies in the past), but who had no strong moral objections to its legalization, I have come to really regret my lax attitude, now that cannabis has become ubiquitous. The New York Times ran a piece the other day talking about how doctors are now seeing all kinds of serious medical problems with it, including people who are addicted to it, and some who suffer from cannabis-induced psychosis. Legalization was a bad idea.)

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