Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

by Steven Kotler

In 1962, attempting to settle this skin-bag debate, Walter Pahnke conducted one of the more famous psychedelic experiments12 in history. A graduate student in theology at Harvard Divinity School, Pahnke gathered a group of twenty seminary students at Boston University’s Marsh Chapel on Good Friday. To see if mind-altering drugs could produce “authentic” mystical experiences, he gave half the group psilocybin, the other half the active placebo niacin (which produces similar physiological changes without the cognitive effects), then everyone went into chapel to attend the Good Friday service. Afterward, subjects rated the service for a variety of mystical qualities: sacredness, ineffability, distortion of time and space, and a sense of oneness with the divine. “[Psilocybin] subjects ranked their experiences13 much higher in mystical qualities than members of the control group did,” explains John Horgan in his book Rational Mysticism. “Six months later, the psilocybin group reported persistent beneficial effects on their attitude and behavior; the experience had deepened their religious faith. . . . The experiment was widely hailed as proof that psychedelic drugs can generate life-enhancing mystical experiences.” So life-enhancing, in fact, that nine out of the ten seminary students who received psilocybin ended up becoming ministers, while none of the placebo group stayed on the path to ordination.