An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

Drugs and Trips
Aldous Huxley famously experimented with mescaline, taking four-tenths 
of a gram as part of a piece of research. He was looking at an ordinary 
vase containing a rose, a carnation and an iris.
At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of 
its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at 
an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on 
the morning of his creation – the miracle, moment by moment, of 
naked existence.
‘Is it agreeable’ somebody asked. . .. Neither agreeable nor disagree-
able,’ I answered. ‘It just 
is
.’
Istigkeit
– wasn’t that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? ‘Is-ness.’ 
The Being of Platonic philosophy – except that Plato seems to have made 
the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming, 
and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. . . .
I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed 
to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing – but of a breathing 
without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a 
repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever 
deeper meaning. Words like Grace and Transfiguration came to my 
mind, and this of course was what, among other things, they stood for. 
My eyes travelled from the rose to the carnation, and from that feath-
ery incandescence to the smooth scrolls of sentient amethyst which 
were the iris. The Beatific Vision, 
Sat, Chit Ananda
, Being-Awareness-
Bliss – for the first time I understood, not on the verbal level, not by 
inchoate hints or at a distance, but precisely and completely what those 
prodigious syllables referred to.

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Religious and Spiritual Experience
132
Huxley felt that he was beyond time and space and being given a 
sacramental vision of reality . . . where everything shone with an Inner 
Light, and was infinite in its significance.
110
Drug-induced trips are not uncommon, but not often discussed. This, 
however, is an experience which was related to a drug but in an unusual 
way, as no substance was taken:
In 1998: I attended a conference run by the Religious Studies Depart-
ment of Newcastle University. One of the speakers was giving a talk on 
ayahuasca, a hallucinogen made from an Amazonian vine Banisteriop-
sis caapi. I sat listening at the back of the hall. I had never taken the 
drug, and didn’t even drink alcohol, but while he spoke, I ‘saw’ the devic 
spirit of the vine rise in front of me in the hall. She smiled benignly, then 
faded away. An hour later I became aware that I’d spontaneously devel-
oped a heightened state of awareness, went back to my room, lay on my 
bed under the duvet for several hours, while streams of hallucinations ran 
through my mind, like a continuous film. Artefacts, sacred drawings, ritu-
als, practices and paintings from all over the world streamed in front of 
my closed eyes. The stream of information was culture bound, depending 
on whether the ‘channel’ was on Africa, Central Europe, South America, 
or Siberia. This continued for several hours. I was aware of what was 
happening but couldn’t stop it, so I just witnessed it. Later that evening, 
once it stopped, I talked to my colleagues: they suggested I’d had the ‘gift’ 
of the full stages of an ayahuasca ‘trip’ with none of the discomforts 
experienced by people who consume the actual substance. [100057] 
An account of a real ayahusca trip is given by the Chilean novelist 
Isabel Allende in 
The Sum of our Days
. She took the substance to deal 
with writer’s block, and found herself reliving incidents from her child-
hood and then seemed to undergo death.