*This article, written by the Cedar Tree Director, was published in the Marquette Monthly December, 2018
Into the Mystic
Mushrooms, Priests, and Poets
“I was born before the wind, also younger than the sun…”
– Van Morrison
It’s late afternoon, the light is fading. Our town’s oldest saloon is mostly empty. Old photographs and 19th century maps of Marquette’s bustling harbor decorate the dark-wood walls. I’m sitting in a booth across from a friend of mine. A copy of Michael Pollan’s newest, much anticipated book “How to Change your Mind” is lying on the table between us. It carries a provocative, tongue-twisting subtitle: “What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.”
My friend and I are exchanging thoughts on Pollan’s decision to write about his personal experience ingesting psilocybin, a derivative from mushrooms. In the context of his highly readable, historical overview of the use of LSD and other psychedelics in the 1960s, Pollan reminds his readers that, in the 1950s, hallucinogens were studied by government agencies and became an important part of research efforts in our country’s most prestigious hospitals and university laboratories. Now, ironically in our own times, after fifty years of being morally and legally vilified, these same mind altering substances are being reintroduced as possible FDA-approved mental health interventions for depression and schizophrenia.
But the deeper conversation unfolding between my friend and myself, over our gyros sandwich and chicken salad, is how we have personally experienced the mystical. He shares with me a moment at a Grateful Dead Concert when he tasted his first hallucinogenic mushroom and felt his “brain come alive.” I describe a moment watching a disabled child being lifted up by a father, blessed, surrounded by candles at a baptism in a church sanctuary. Both moments in time brought each of us to an unexpected place. A state of consciousness where neither one of us had ever been before.
Mystical experiences are game-changers. Unpredictable, most frequently positive, always deeply felt, they are difficult to describe. They are, most of the time, overwhelming though not, always, transformative. One example, we both agreed for many, is the experience of first falling in love. A powerful dream, an unexpected encounter in the natural world, and a near-death experience were other experiences we identified. Toward the end of his self-revealing book, Pollan suggests under some conditions, ingesting certain types of mushrooms, can also bring you there.
Mystical experiences always blind-side us, like the New Testament’s Paul of Tarsus being knocked off a donkey. They hold a potential for changing lives. As one did for me, in the middle of a conversation with a seriously ill person at the end of life.
The mystical always lies waiting to surprise us. It can touch us anywhere, anytime. For some, we are shaken to our core listening to a particular musical score. Others of us find ourselves unexpectantly, suddenly, overwhelmed by a powerful, ineffable presence as we sit alone in a cathedral. I personally have talked with a hunter who experienced such a moment sitting in a deer blind, watching a November sun’s first light break upon a meadow’s morning frost.
During these festive December days, alongside concerts and family gatherings, many of us have been conditioned, by cultural norms and childhood expectations, to look for mystical experiences in the repetition of ancient prayers, the singing of hymns, and the pondering of symbolic language in centuries’ old religious rituals.
But here’s the trouble. The most respected of spiritual teachers and scholars remind us that any of those sets of circumstances, including religious activities, are incapable, in and by themselves, of producing real life-altering experience. Mystical moments, simply said, cannot be produced at will. We simply receive them. They are best regarded as gifts.
An additional issue, disturbing for some, is that mystical experience appears not to be equally distributed to everyone. For this very reason, accounts of such experiences are, for the most part, generally not welcomed. They are threatening just because they are so deeply personal and, even more importantly, not accessible to others. A wise call about such phenomena is that such consciousness-transforming moments always deserve respect and honor. But best be approached with a sense of humility. And a healthy touch of suspicion.
Having raised that cautionary word, history teaches us that mystical experiences carry immense power. Persons who have allowed themselves to be guided by such encounters have always threatened authorities, both religious and secular. Mystics, whether they be poets, priests, or prophets are dismissed or revered exactly because they speak with authority. But not the kind often appreciated by those who find themselves in roles of protecting and perpetuating institutional structures.
To further complicate things, there’s plenty of evidence to confirm that each of us is “wired” differently, both neurologically and temperamentally. A hospital chaplain once said to me with a gentle smile, quoting a respected woman theologian commenting on a popular celebrity religious leader, “He doesn’t have a mystical bone in his body.”
“Hark, now hear the sailor’s song, smell the sea and feel the skies, Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic”
As winter descends upon us in Northern Michigan, most of us gather close around wood stoves, prepare soups, wrap ourselves in blankets and light candles in preparation for the coming long and dark nights.
It’s a good and appropriate time to reflect on how we are navigating our lives. WE can begin by remembering that all of us, in these peculiar times, are being lured into a “flat” one-dimensional universe, shaped by gods of modern economics where prosperity is defined by Gross National Product, not by qualities of life like beauty, relationships, compassion, and balance. We live in a time, politically, when there’s little encouragement to slow down, to deepen our sense of enchantment and mystery.
Religion, apart from its rightful purpose of building community across class lines, strengthening relationships, and promoting values of moral reflection, also needs to resist abandoning the mystical. Without it, rituals become rigid, cold, predictable. We pay a cost for this: A loss of humility, awe, and reverence. The mystical is a place where we find motivation to hope, work, and serve a higher purpose. It’s also a place where we can, for a moment, rest.
Pollan attributes the widespread use of hallucinogens and other mind-altering drugs as signs of modern culture’s hunger for the mystical. In his closing chapter of “How to Change Your Mind,” he raises a warning based on his own experience and his research over the last years. He quotes an insight from religious scholar Huston Smith, “A spiritual experience does not, by itself, make a spiritual life.
Huston is suggesting that mystical experiences need to be translated into specific actions of compassion and peace making that contribute to a larger good. Mystical experiences, Huston maintains, are dangerous and seductive when they are not being anchored in disciplines of personal and communal practices.
“And when the fog horn blows, I’ll be coming home
I don’t want to fear it, I just want to hear it”
I first heard the lyrics from “Into the Mystic” (quoted sequentially as part of this article) sung by a musician friend of mine during a memorial service held at the Presque Isle Park Pavilion here in Marquette. It was a small gathering and we included this song in the service for a specific reason. Upon the mother’s request, one of her two daughters softly sang verses of “Into the Mystic” to her as she lay dying in Ann Arbor after a difficult illness following a failed lung transplant. Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic” remains one of the classic songs of the last twenty-five years that has gained worldwide popularity. But not simply for its haunting melody, but the power of the lyrics.
The mystical world seems best witnessed to by poets, artists, and musicians like Morrison. And, once in a while, by an occasional priest. But there are exceptions. One example is the impact of hospice and palliative care as it changes the practice of modern medicine in incremental, extraordinary ways. Those in end-of-life care find themselves working in the trenches of the feared, cold, hard edge of mortality that ends human life. Most of us keep distance. At the same time, the on-the-ground experiences some of them share, hint at a larger story that we all might be living.
For eighteen years, I’ve assisted two local hospice medical directors from our community design and implement training seminars for hospice workers who provide home-based care for the dying. At a small cabin on the edge of Lake Superior, at the first of these events, I asked hospice staff, nurses, and volunteers who had gathered around a wood stove, how many of their experiences with the dying had been positive ones for the patient and family. I expected a response of, perhaps, 50 percent. They responded to my astonishment, “80-90 percent.” A few years later I asked this same question of hospice workers in a restaurant in Philadelphia, and again, most recently, here in Marquette County at a Palliative Care Conference workshop. The responses were the same. “80 – 90 percent.”
What might this mean for us left to live out what days are given to us? There’s a very personal response, of course, to that question, but a precious clue is offered up to us from those who work most closely with the dying. Are we part of a larger mystery that is benevolent and merciful? Are perceptions of fear and loss, success and failure, on some levels, ultimately an illusion? Are mystical experiences actually down payments on some larger unifying promise waiting to embrace us?
It probably is a wise thing for each of us to find a way to consider bowing down before something larger than ourselves these December days. We will be better for it. And so will Mother Earth who is suffering from an unprecedented collective lack of reverence and care as we strip her of fresh water sources, devastate her forests, pollute her air, and denigrate her oceans. There are only losers in the winner-takes-all one-dimensional world we so desperately seek to perpetuate.
The late afternoon conversation between my friend and myself draws to a close. The saloon’s bar stools are filling up, folks are arriving for an early dinner. I turn for a last glimpse of the old, faded photographs of Marquette’s harbor. They are reminders for me of the Celtic spiritual tradition of “Thin Places,” references to harsh landscapes where rock, wind, water, ice and snow invite us to turn inward.
No better time than now, perhaps, to take a chance, break the silence and our hesitation. To honor more of our mystical experiences, and to graciously listen, when the time is right, to those of others. To learn from poets, priests, and mushrooms, and be reminded by the best of our spiritual communities, that we were all born before the wind. And we’re all going home.
–
Jon Magnuson