The Psychedelic Quest for Faith, Meaning, and Divine Experience

When Wyatt traveled to Mexico in 2018, he was looking for a miracle. At 35, married and raising two children, he worked at his grandfather’s heating-equipment business in Pittsburgh. Privately, however, he was fighting a decades-long addiction involving heroin, crack cocaine, and other drugs. “I was very scared, very desperate, hopeless, and had a full-volume suicide tape on repeat in my head that had me convinced my family would be better off without me.”

As a last resort, Wyatt checked himself into Ambio Life Sciences in Baja California, Mexico. He paid more than $10,000 for a weeklong program that promised radical transformation. He had entered rehabilitation repeatedly over the previous 20 years, but Ambio offered something different: treatment with drugs intended to help him stop using drugs. In a white-walled room, a clinician administered ibogaine, a psychoactive compound derived from the bark of a sacred Central African tree.

A buzzing sound filled the room, like a vast swarm of bees. The noise seemed to move through his ears and organs until he understood, in the middle of the experience, that the bees were repairing his body.

Then he was somewhere else entirely: floating above his home in Pittsburgh and watching himself stumble down the driveway alone, a gun in his hand. He knew his victim. It was him. He saw the pain on his own face. Worse, his wife followed behind him, clutching their infant son while dragging their young daughter. The version of himself in the vision placed the gun in his mouth and fired. As his children watched him die and heard their “hellacious cries,” Wyatt had a profound realization about the suffering he was causing his family. He understood not only that he needed to stop using drugs, but that he was also in the presence of a higher power.

“I saw and felt firsthand what that would do to my family,” Wyatt says. “That started a reversal and a quieting of that awful tape being played for years.” He has been mostly sober ever since. Psychedelics, he says, have given him “life-changing experiences that I don’t know how else to describe other than spiritual.”

A Private Encounter With the Sacred

Wyatt grew up in a deeply Christian household; his mother is a Pentecostal minister, and he attended church regularly. Even so, he struggled to believe. That changed after his ibogaine experience. “God is real,” Wyatt tells me. “I couldn’t say that with the same conviction prior to working with these medicines. I still struggle to make sense of what exactly that means, but I’m in a much better place having that conviction.”

Since that first experience, Wyatt has repeatedly stepped away from his life in Pittsburgh, his family, his work, and his evangelical church to use a variety of psychedelics in quiet attempts to reorient himself. He is now sober, remains married, and is raising three children. He works in sales at the family business during the day and plays with his high school band, Garrison’s Basement, at night. “I’ve felt the divine presence. It wasn’t like heroin,” he says. “I no longer have to doubt if the Holy Spirit is real. I’m closer to Christ now than I’ve ever been.”

Hundreds of Psychedelic Congregations

Wyatt’s experience is part of a growing chorus. Over several months, I interviewed dozens of people who described transformation, revelation, insight, and encounters with God through psychedelic drugs. Wyatt’s life-changing experience of the divine occurred without a congregation or clergy. His sense of a higher power was evident to him alone.

I have read transcripts in which a priest described a full-body, 90-minute spasm that felt somewhere between an orgasm and childbirth. I have been told of magical doorways opening into the cosmos. I have heard people describe wild and celestial experiences as if they were unfolding in real time: meeting one’s own soul, hearing an angel’s wings, or watching ancestors release the burdens of the past. I have heard stories about Hasidic women in wigs sipping ayahuasca, visions of celestial surgery, snakes crawling over human skin, demons dragging bodies toward hell, divine light healing the body, fingers becoming roots, and the Earth breathing. I have also sat through a ceremony, dumbstruck, my brain sizzling in plant medicine as I confronted the nature of the universe, though with less magical results.

Everyone I spoke with returned from a psychedelic experience convinced that they had encountered spiritual guidance. Some kind of ultimate truth had been handed to them during the journey, often as a single word spoken in a hushed voice. These revelations continue to unfold as seekers everywhere discover what they experience as a portal to the cosmic, the spiritual, and even the divine through drugs. While church membership is declining and public trust in major institutions remains low, these individual experiences are increasingly being treated as revelations. The use of mind-altering substances for spiritual purposes is rising, producing countless self-described prophets who believe they have discovered God, or gods, within themselves. As participation grows, new churches form, and these experiences multiply, one question becomes harder to avoid: Are we witnessing a psychedelic religious revival?

During the past decade, psychedelics have become an acceptable activity for many adults. The number of people over 30 who took psilocybin in the past year has increased sharply, rising 188 percent between 2019 and 2023, according to a 2025 release from Annals of Internal Medicine. Doctors and venture capitalists, mothers and fathers, and even grandparents are leaving work and family behind to take psychedelics and connect with God. They may spend five, 10, or 12 hours ingesting carefully measured doses of hallucinogens—most often mushrooms or MDMA, but also ayahuasca, 5-MeO-DMT, peyote, ibogaine, and, for those seeking a more intense experience, LSD.

“God is real,” says a convert. “I couldn’t say that with conviction prior to these medicines.”

But these people are not generally seeking recreation. Of the three dozen or so people I interviewed, not one said they were taking psychedelics to have a good time. Instead, they described them as sacred medicines infused with intention and reverence. Journeys, they said, are meant for healing, wisdom, clarity, and self-knowledge. Some are even searching for God. Decades ago, those desires might have brought ordinary Americans to a church or temple. Today, more people are turning to psychedelics to satisfy their spiritual needs. Experts estimate that at least 700 psychedelic churches now operate in the United States, with memberships ranging from a few dozen people to several thousand. According to the Global Psychedelic Survey, religion and spirituality are among the leading reasons people in North America use these drugs, with that motivation appearing more frequently than in other parts of the world.

Philippe Lucas, a researcher at the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies and the founder of the survey, says it makes sense that this spiritual impulse is emerging. “This follows a trend in North America of moving away from traditional religious practices and seeking spirituality in nontraditional spaces,” Lucas says. “These substances consistently produce such a deep awe state that can often lead to reconceptualizations of people’s place in the world, and even experiences of life and death, feelings of oneness with the universe, so it’s understandable that people would assign a spiritual or religious component to some of these experiences.”

What It Means to Be Fully Human

Religious belief in the United States is changing, as it always has. The number of Americans who incorporate organized religion into their lives has declined over the decades. Today, fewer than one-third attend church regularly, according to the Pew Research Center. That does not mean people have abandoned the search for meaning. Seven in 10 Americans are more likely to describe themselves as spiritual than religious. From Silicon Valley to the Everglades to Brooklyn, people are gathering in churches, fields, living rooms, and hotel rooms to use psychedelics not as an escape, but as a way to find meaning and pursue the kind of mystical experiences once promised by organized religion. Having moved away from religious authority, they are seeking a direct relationship with the divine. Historians have a name for that impulse: an awakening.

The United States has experienced numerous religious revivals during the past two centuries. Historians often identify a pattern in American religion: movements on the fringe gradually become part of the center. Zealous Puritans became WASP powerbrokers. Radical followers of a young man in upstate New York became the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The strange Holy Rollers became Pentecostals, now one-quarter of the world’s Christians. In each case, the spiritual outsiders of one generation became the religious leaders of the next. At a moment when artificial intelligence is making human consciousness feel mechanized and unstable, many people are turning to psychedelics for revelation. Market forces and an executive branch with unconventional ideas about health are also working to make those experiences more available.

Industry experts predict that President Donald Trump’s Food and Drug Administration will soon approve psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms, for medical use.

“The approval of psilocybin by the FDA will be the most significant event in the history of psychedelics,” Mark Nicolson tells me on Zoom this summer. Nicolson is an executive coach who helps prepare clients for psychedelic journeys in Silicon Valley. He says many technology professionals come to him seeking a new perspective on reality and themselves. “I have people creating AI companies, people who are creating the foundations of it,” says Nicolson, who holds an MBA from Stanford, a doctorate in clinical psychology, and teaches at the Esalen Institute, the Big Sur, California, retreat center. “They have these experiences and see how they hadn’t quite gotten it right. Instead, they see that love is the basis for everything. And that changes how they go about thinking about what this life can be. They’re coming because they can feel that there’s this moment, and they want to be as aware of what it is to be as human as possible.”

The Promise of Transformation

Inside the barbed-wire fences of a vast yellow-stucco resort in Costa Rica, the pitch is straightforward. The facility describes itself as the “#1 transformation center for individuals committed to personal growth goals and seeking profound results.” The Rythmia Life Advancement Center advertises more than 23,000 “satisfied souls” over the past decade and a “miracle rate” exceeding 98 percent. Every week, visitors arrive at the guarded compound on the Guanacaste Peninsula to participate in highly supervised ayahuasca ceremonies.

With an entry fee of $5,000 a week, the seekers searching for “soul satisfaction” are almost all American and usually middle-aged and middle-class. They have all come looking for transformation. As I walked through the property last summer, a wide range of lifestyle and longevity enhancements were available. Past the yoga shala, the spa, the medical clinic, the stem-cell injection center, and the vacation-home sales office, I heard the same refrain: “We are hoping for a miracle.”

That miracle usually arrives during one of four ayahuasca ceremonies attended during the week. In a large room with wall-to-wall carpeting, fans whir overhead while cleaning staff work in the afternoon heat. About a hundred twin-size mattresses line the perimeter, each covered with a pillow and a neatly folded brown blanket. At the foot of every bed sits a white plastic bucket and a roll of toilet paper. It is an unusual scene, somewhere between a hotel conference room and a tropical orphanage.

Tonight, approximately 80 guests are expected to gather with a shaman and several assistants and drink ayahuasca. As the medicine takes effect, they will spend hours vomiting, defecating, laughing, crying, and hopefully encountering their divine truth. If the experience becomes difficult, an EMT attends every ceremony, while two security personnel, three nurses, and one doctor remain on site throughout the week.

I meet many of the week’s guests in an air-conditioned conference room a few buildings away as they prepare for that evening’s ceremony. Seated in chairs, they look as though they have come to a corporate retreat, dressed in athleisure, slacks, and summer dresses. Yet the electricity in the room suggests that something different is underway. Michael Beckwith, a minister from Los Angeles, steps to the front and tells the crowd that they are on the verge of a new awareness: “You are stepping into an awareness that you’re a dynamic cosmic being.”

“There’s a real Spiritual hunger that psychedelics are solving,” says Michael Pollan.

Beckwith founded the Agape International Spiritual Center and is a frequent guest on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday. He also sits on the board of Rythmia, whose members include surfer Kelly Slater, Martin Luther King III, and celebrity dog trainer Cesar Millan. That afternoon, Beckwith leads the audience in a call-and-response as he presents a worldview in which ayahuasca will bring them into a transcendent state of reality and awareness.

“I’m in love with the divine presence!” he shouts, and everyone repeats his words. The room erupts in whoops and cries as affirmations and excitement build. “I’m here to be transformed! I’m here to be transformed!”

Do most Rythmia attendees experience God? “Yes!” says Rythmia founder Gerry Powell. Powell has conducted more than 350 plant-medicine ceremonies and credits psychedelics with changing his life. He first traveled to Costa Rica from rehab at Passages to attend a ceremony. There, he says, the plants told him to establish the Rythmia center. Still, he cautions that a spiritual experience without lasting structure can be dangerous. “What I notice,” he says, “is the gurus — the guys that have this experience, see the light, and make it their identity — they always end up in financial trouble. They always do. The exposure to God without rules or guardrails can wind up dangerous. These religions with rules are really there for a reason. Without ethics, with just ecstasy, the lines get so blurry.”

When I ask Rythmia attendees how they decided that an expensive weeklong psychedelic retreat was the right step in their spiritual journey, two names recur again and again: Michael Pollan and Ram Dass. The long history connecting psychedelics and religion includes scientists, anthropologists, mystics, shamans, outlaws, and prophets. But Pollan and Dass have become, more than anyone else, the patron figures of the current psychedelic revival.

Published in 2018, Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind chronicled the journalist’s investigation into the history and science of psychedelics, including his own experimentation. The book became a bestseller, and suddenly psychedelic journeys seemed almost respectably middle-class. Discussions of trips became common at book clubs and preschool pickups. When I ask Pollan how it feels to be a modern apostle of psychedelics, he laughs and rejects the description. “I have launched a thousand trips,” he says, referring to the many emails he has received over the years. He acknowledges, however, that “the book has inspired a lot of people to do something they might not have done otherwise.”

One psychedelic guide calls people influenced by Pollan “Pollanators.” Usually older and well educated, they seek major change in the middle of life, hoping to release their egos, have a breakthrough, and see more clearly. “There’s a real hunger for spiritual development that people feel right now,” Pollan tells me. “These are very trying times. The future is looking pretty perilous, and so people turn to spiritual matters. There’s a real hunger that psychedelics are solving.”

A Tradition Older Than Modern Psychedelic Culture

The religious use of psychoactive plants dates back thousands of years. Evidence suggests that Zoroastrian, pre-Incan, and Vedic cultures all used psychoactive substances to connect with the divine. Near the end of the 19th century, William James, often regarded as the father of modern religious studies, experimented with nitrous oxide. “Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler,” he later wrote. For decades afterward, however, psychedelic use in America remained underground. Native Americans using peyote in ceremony and the CIA’s experiments with LSD both reinforced the perception that tripping belonged to the margins.

Then, on a warm January day in 1967, Timothy Leary stood on a stage in Golden Gate Park and delivered what became a rallying cry for a generation: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” For many Americans, the former Harvard professor became the face of the psychedelic revolution—brilliant but erratic, increasingly paranoid and nihilistic, and fiercely antiestablishment.

Yet Leary had a less famous co-founder and fellow conspirator who followed a very different path. Richard Alpert was a wealthy, handsome young professor teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, and Harvard, where he worked alongside Leary in the psychology department. Together they conducted the famous acid tests on themselves, students, and faculty, actions that helped lead to their dismissal. As Leary became an LSD-using outlaw whom Richard Nixon called “the most dangerous man in America,” Alpert grew tired of the endless parties and substances. Zach Leary, Timothy’s son, says Alpert first traveled to India in 1967 seeking an alternative to psychedelics. “His initial trip to India was born out of frustration,” Leary tells me. After countless acid trips, Alpert met an Indian guru who practiced Bhakti yoga. On that journey, he became a disciple of Neem Karoli Baba and renamed himself Ram Dass. “He discovered a man who never came down,” Leary says. Alpert, now Ram Dass, returned from India in white robes and bare feet, preaching and writing about consciousness. His 1971 book Be Here Now became a manual for a generation of spiritual seekers.

Timothy Leary’s version of psychedelics became the dominant public image, and when President Reagan launched the War on Drugs, psychedelic substances were condemned as a path to ruin. Use returned underground for decades. The post-Reagan consensus began to shift in 2006, when Johns Hopkins University published a landmark study titled “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance.” Lead author Roland Griffiths gave three dozen healthy adults with no history of drug use a large dose of psilocybin. The results were striking: More than 60 percent reported mystical experiences, and one-third called the event the most spiritual experience of their lives. Further studies followed, including research conducted about a decade later at Johns Hopkins with religious leaders.

“The core of our religion is not faith. It’s direct experience. The goal is access to your soul.”

Around this time, psychedelics began reentering mainstream American life, largely through the language of mental health. Research into their potential uses for depression, PTSD, end-of-life care, and anxiety has expanded rapidly, while recreational use has also increased. Most clinical studies, policy changes, and private investment remain focused on therapy and mental health, but spirituality often appears in that conversation. Major universities, including Harvard, Berkeley, Emory, and others, have launched programs, conferences, studies, and institutes examining the relationship between psychedelics and religion.

Before Ram Dass died in 2019, a small group of researchers, scientists, and academics traveled to see him and ask for his blessing on what is now called the psychedelic revival. “He was 100 percent all for it,” Raghu Markus tells me. Markus is executive director of Ram Dass’ Love Serve Remember Foundation, which offers retreats for people who have had a psychedelic awakening and want to incorporate it into their daily spiritual lives. Markus says Dass emphasized integrating these substances into an ongoing practice and “the importance of being able to surface their true nature through a psychedelic experience.”

Psychedelics as Spiritual Accelerants

Every psychedelic experience is unique, although recurring themes emerge. Denis De Souza is a prominent Los Angeles hairdresser whose clients have included Alessandra Ambrosio, Lily Collins, and Nicole Richie. He began attending ayahuasca ceremonies more than a decade ago, and his life and identity have changed substantially. He describes his journeys as “the most divine experience” of his life. He now performs what he calls “life-force activation,” which he describes as “yoga for the soul.” A doctor I interviewed tried several psychedelics out of professional curiosity. During her journeys, she encountered angels, witches, her soul, and the Earth. I also spoke with a Grammy Award-nominated producer who believes mushrooms were brought to Earth by an alien civilization to enlighten humanity, a belief found in some psychedelic circles. Raised Roman Catholic, he has used his journeys to understand ancestral trauma.

These people and many others described mystical, extraordinary, life-changing experiences. Yet almost none would characterize themselves—or their experiences—as religious. To them, the word sounds old-fashioned, restrictive, subservient, and burdened by history. From an academic perspective, however, their journeys contain the essential elements of traditional religion: rituals, sacraments, ceremonies, mystical experiences, and communities.

Seekers often prefer the word “journey” to “trip,” which they associate with recreational and festive drug use. For some, the journey is a private concierge experience led by a psychedelic coach who reviews a client’s background and intentions. Intake is followed by a carefully measured combination of psychedelics, usually administered alone with the coach and lasting from daytime into night. Private rooms, mattresses, candles, eye masks, and custom playlists are common. Afterward, the client receives further coaching, in person or over Zoom, to integrate the experience into everyday life. Costs range from a few hundred dollars to $15,000.

For some, psychedelics are not a path to religion but an enhancement of it. Hunt Priest is a former Episcopal priest who led a parish in Washington state when he entered the Johns Hopkins religious-leader trials 10 years ago. Suffering from a loss of religious purpose, he found that two psilocybin journeys profoundly altered his sense of vocation. “Psychedelics are an accelerant … an accelerant to the connection,” Priest says. He began looking for ways to incorporate psychedelics into his ministry. In 2021, he founded the nonprofit Ligare to help clergy better understand and experience their faith through mystical experiences occasioned by mushrooms. “Religion is spirituality with rigor,” Priest says. “When people say they’re not religious, it often means they’re not Christian.” But in 2025, the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia investigated Priest’s activities and issued an ultimatum: choose psychedelics or choose the Episcopal Church. He resigned his ordination. “I’m so committed to the work I’m doing, and I see it as a vocation, as a Christian vocation.”

Jeffrey Breau, program lead for Harvard Divinity School’s Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality, studies emerging psychedelic churches. He says he is not surprised that people disliked my use of the word “religion,” even when they described themselves as members of a church. Breau says organizational leaders are often more willing to use that term because it can provide legal protection in the United States. Community members, by contrast, may reject “religion” as too restrictive and dogmatic. According to Breau, this confusion reflects the way American law treats psychedelics and religion. “There’s no freedom of spirituality,” he tells me pointedly. “There is an embrace of the term ‘religion,’ and there is an embrace of the term ‘church’ … because that will help them with religious freedom.”

Breau is referring to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by Congress in 1993 with broad bipartisan support. The law, commonly called RFRA, states that the government cannot substantially burden a person’s religious exercise unless it has a compelling reason and uses the least restrictive means possible. Decades later, psychedelic churches and spiritual groups have invoked RFRA, arguing that substances such as ayahuasca and psilocybin are not recreational drugs but sacraments essential to their religious practice.

The Trump administration’s approach to psychedelics is complicated. Conservatives have historically opposed them, but the courts have also long protected religious freedom. Adding to that tension is the emerging “psychedelic right,” a faction associated with MAHA that has been lobbying for research and regulatory reform. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry chairs Americans for Ibogaine and has become one of the substance’s most prominent advocates. In April, Joe Rogan stood behind Trump in the Oval Office as the president issued an executive order calling for accelerated research into psychedelics as treatments for mental illness. The reasoning is ironic: the teetotaling Trump, who has spent years advocating the death penalty for drug dealers, is now promoting funding for psychedelic therapy. “Can I have some, please?” he joked while signing the order. “I’ll take some.”

From Counterculture to Mainstream Culture

Sean McAllister is a Denver-based lawyer who works on religious freedom and psychedelics. He has a long mullet, a body covered in spiritual tattoos, and a bio photo showing him with prayer hands. In conversation, he speaks rapidly and sends out a monthly newsletter from his law office with headlines such as “Modern Psychedelics Are a Mess (But Hope Remains).” McAllister says there has been progress. Not long ago, only two psychedelic churches were federally recognized; today, there are five. His clients have included several groups that sued the DEA for an RFRA exemption. Two ayahuasca churches, the Church of the Eagle and Condor and the Church of the Celestial Heart, secured successful settlements and exemptions within the past two years.

Despite his success advocating for these groups, McAllister says they do not always fit neatly into the legal framework of religion. “To me, the term ‘spirituality’ is bigger than religion,” he says. “Religion is like, ‘I know what God said, and I’m gonna write it down, and we have a doctrine.’ This movement is spiritual, not religious. But, you know, in the U.S., we protect religion, so we’re kind of shoehorning spirituality down to the box of religion. We have to move from counterculture to culture.”

Within Indigenous communities, there is growing concern about the proliferation of new psychedelic churches and the effect these organizations may have on long-standing rituals and ceremonies. “We have concerns about the churches popping up,” says Mona Polacca, a member of the Native American Church and a leader in the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers. “These churches really don’t have a long line of practice, discipline, things like ceremony or ritual.”

Polacca is troubled not only by the appropriation of Indigenous spiritual traditions but also by the increasing use of rare sacred plants by outsiders who may not share a history of reverence for them. “They’re treating it now as if it’s a commodity,” she says. “They create these commodities, and then they control the market. And then it’s no longer for us, it’s no longer accessible to these original people.”

The next major question concerns the relationship among psychedelics, new religious organizations, and the law. “There are people itching for a fight about this and looking for the right case to take through the courts to test whether you could have an LSD church or a psilocybin church that wasn’t tied to some traditional culture or Indigenous people,” Pollan tells me. “The thinking is that this will be like an exploding cigar when Samuel Alito takes a puff on it.”

McAllister wonders how that argument might unfold: “Some would say that Americans are the indigenous medicine keepers of LSD, since we’re the culture that birthed LSD. So, is there a unifying, spiritual, or religious principle behind every molecule of LSD? Is LSD really a religious thing?”

Sacraments, Commerce, and Controversy

For some participants, the substances themselves approach objects of worship, a model Breau calls the “dispensary model” of churches. At the Zide Door, the largest psychedelic church in America, congregants pay a fee to receive their “entheogenic sacraments,” including psychedelic mushrooms. Founder Dave Hodges opened a medical-marijuana dispensary in California in 2009, before legalization. Years of legal battles followed, and the city of San Jose ultimately passed a law shutting him down. Hodges says that process taught him a great deal about drugs and the law. He did not originally consider himself religious, and his path to the pastorate began more than a decade ago at Burning Man, where he started the Church of More Pot. “You know the magic of the playa,” he tells me with a stoner’s wink. “We had 13 commandments. I got my playa name: Preacher.”

Seven years ago, Hodges began experimenting with increasingly large doses of mushrooms. He says he eventually had a breakthrough experience. “I had three golden beings who sat down with me and told me everything that I had gone through in my life, the point of it, and what they needed me for. They said, ‘Hey, you’re somebody that can understand us. You’re somebody that can fight for us.’” Through these experiences, Hodges came to believe that psilocybin was brought to Earth to awaken people and change reality.

Life at the Zide Door is not only golden beings and revelation. Part of the church’s work involves preparing for conflict. Also known as the Church of Ambrosia, the organization was raided by police in 2020. Hodges has adapted his methods and grown his following. Forbes estimated in 2024 that the church generates about $5 million in annual revenue through sacrament sales. Hodges says he avoids holding personal money or property and does not pay himself a salary.

When I ask Hodges what faith looks like at his church, he pushes back against the concept. “The core of what our religion is, it’s not faith. It’s direct experience, right? The goal is for us to give you access to your soul, and that means making sure that you have safe access to the sacraments that we provide.”

Alex Gearin, a medical anthropologist who has studied psychedelic-medicine use, says that while some neo-shamanic seekers try to reproduce Indigenous practices in pursuit of spiritual goals, others use religious sacraments for more worldly aims. “This is part of a wider trend, where spiritual practitioners try to justify their practice in secular terms,” Gearin says. He describes a group of Chinese businessmen he studied who used ayahuasca partly in hopes of improving their success. Gearin says retreat leaders know that clients value the ability to see beyond conventional patterns and approach business problems from new angles. Although that may sound like a betrayal of spirituality, Gearin points out that Indigenous peoples have long used plant medicine to navigate practical demands. “Given the wondrous edges that these states of mind can take people to, you can see how they become useful during a period of rapid social change when things start to break down. Shaking up your consciousness and moving into an altered state is a relatively common thing that humanity has done for eons.”

The Risks Behind the Search for Transcendence

Not every seeker receives healing or awakening. Not every journey is filled with angels and light. Alongside the stories of transformation are accounts of terror, confusion, nihilism, and psychological collapse. Although many psychedelics are not physically addictive, they carry real risks of abuse and psychological harm.

Dr. Alejandro Gutierrez has worked for two decades in Nosara, Costa Rica, a popular yoga and surfing town. He has a vivid collection of stories about American tourists whose spiritual quests went wrong. “They come down here, and they’re looking for magic,” Gutierrez says. He describes the past five years as especially intense, with visitors arriving in large numbers in search of the kind of neo-shamanic transformation they see on Instagram. “They think they’re going to see God,” he says. “Some of them stopped their meds and came here to get enlightened.”

He estimates that he treats about 20 bad trips each year, rescuing people from yoga spas, sedating them, administering IVs, and arranging air transport for more serious medical care. Some are not people seeking drugs at all. Gutierrez also treats hotel staff who accidentally eat chocolate or candy laced with psilocybin and left in guest rooms. “They show up at the clinic tripping balls.”

If you were waiting for the point in this story when I decide to see God and take mushrooms, the answer is no. I have experimented, occasionally, with psychedelics since my teenage years. Most of that was recreational, but six years ago I attempted an intentional journey that made me never want to use psychedelics again. On a December night in 2019, I entered a wooden shack in the Costa Rican jungle. Friends connected to the Santo Daime church, a Brazilian ayahuasca tradition that blends Indigenous customs with Catholicism, had invited me for years to “sit in ceremony.” I declined, even as more friends told me they had taken ayahuasca and experienced a rebirth. That was a strange moment: only a few months after my father died and only a few months before the world shut down because of Covid. I intended to attend as an observer, sip the “magic tea,” and watch. Yet some part of me must have been longing for insight into my life or my father’s death.

Members arrived dressed in a version of church clothes: men in crisp button-down shirts and stringy black ties, women in long, flowing cotton skirts. It felt like a beatnik ’60s Jesus convention—or at least like my imagined version of one. I had chosen a full-length pink floral dress with a giant bow, partly to acknowledge the church setting, though perhaps without fully considering how ayahuasca works.

As we entered, people smiled and asked, “Are you ready for this?” before adding a whispered, “Remember to breathe.” We sat on green plastic chairs in an open room with exposed lightbulbs and ceiling fans. Beyond the dense jungle, we could hear waves striking the beach. After sunset, a low table at the center of the room held tropical flowers and a wooden cross. Someone distributed small, plastic-laminated hymnals. We began to sing. Men sat on one side and women on the other. A shaman, a compact, muscular Peruvian man with bleached hair, Buddy Holly glasses, and enormous eyes, presided over the ceremony.

He announced that it was time to drink the tea, and women lined up on one side while men gathered on the other. I was handed a small cup. “It’s my first time,” I said. The shaman laughed. “Well, you need to drink more.” He filled the cup to the top. It tasted terrible, like poison. The music began again, with men playing guitars. We sat flipping through the very long songbook, humming along to songs about Jesus, gratitude, forgiveness, salvation, and the coming end.

After that, it is difficult to say how much time passed or what happened when. My Oura ring later reported several long, intense naps, and an alert showed my heart rate dropping into the low 40s. The drowsy, hot atmosphere of the ceremony became trance-like—until it did not. Suddenly everything appeared bright, fluorescent, and grim. People clutched their stomachs and vomited into buckets. I politely avoided looking at them and instead stared at my hand, which had become that of a very old, very wrinkled, very round child. I wanted out. I slipped into the jungle. I felt sick and purged, then lay on a pile of gravel and wept while looking at the stars. I stared at the sparkling sky, alive and utterly indifferent to me down in the dirt. Instead of connecting with my father or a sublime being, I encountered a startling truth: utter meaninglessness.

Eventually I returned to the ceremony, where people looked ghastly pale, except for the red slaps of color on their cheeks. I sang, meditated, and let my sadness about death, my insignificance, and the apparent absurdity of caring about anything at all wash over me. Later, at a bonfire, I watched termites evacuate a burning log and a hermit crab wander into the flames and explode. I thought about my children at home and my ambitions. I vomited in the bushes. The night seemed endless. At some point there was a group dance, a side-to-side shuffle that continued without variation. I slipped away, made a 19-point turn with my car, and drove home. I cried myself to sleep.

Was that an encounter with ultimate truth? I want to say no, that it was an absurdly nihilistic experience with nothing to do with reality. Yet honesty requires a more complicated answer. That ayahuasca fever dream, in which I experienced my total insignificance in the universe, has changed the way I think and live in subtle ways. Was I a hidden nihilist whose Brazilian plant drink brought it to life in every cell of my body? Perhaps. Or perhaps it was simply a bad trip. “People do have bad trips that are nothing but deeply disturbing, if not traumatizing, and yield nothing,” says Dimitri Mugianis, a psychedelic facilitator who has worked with patients for more than two decades. He advises people not to change relationships, quit jobs, or get major tattoos for at least three months after a journey because the experience can make people volatile.

David Yaden, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins who studies psychedelic experiences and religious belief, has spent years examining these journeys. He is skeptical of the popular story in which an intense revelation turns an atheist into a believer. Yaden tells me the data suggest a less dramatic pattern. “A single experience will very rarely move [someone’s belief system] around,” he says. “We’re not seeing people shift from atheist to supernatural believer … we’re seeing quite small changes. Some people will lose their belief, some will gain it” — though he adds that both outcomes occur near the far ends of the distribution.

Even so, the hunger for transformation, awakening, and connection continues. People board planes, send payments, drink tea, and swallow pills in the hope of finding something larger than themselves: their souls, their loved ones, God, or the universe. That search is older than the United States. So are the substances.

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