I’ve thought about writing this article for a long time now.
I’ve hesitated.
I am sensitive to the range of possible reactions that might be provoked if I were to write openly about my experience with, interest in, and passion about psychedelics.
On the one hand, there are my already psychedelically-minded friends. For us this article is nothing more than just another reflection, one of many, and perhaps not even the deepest. For us to discuss this topic openly is no big deal. There’s almost no point even writing an article- we’ll just chat more about this stuff the next time we hang out or attend an event.
On the other hand, I have friends, associates or family members who might be shocked to learn that not only am I interested in, but I actually have extensive experience (spanning nearly a decade) with psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin mushrooms and LSD.
And it’s more than mere experience: I have a deep, abiding passion, bordering on reverence for the power of these substances.
So who am I actually writing this article for? I think the answer is threefold:
- First and foremost, this is written by me and for me. The experiences I’ve had were so transcendent that they still reverberate through time, compelling me to write about and honour them, and,
- This is written for the open-minded and curious reader. Knowledge is power, and knowledge about mind-manifesting substances doubly so. I share my story with you, simply, so that you might know, and do with that knowledge as you will.
- As for the ‘closed-minded’ reader, one who might already have many preconceived notions, dismissiveness or judgments about psychedelic drugs; consider this article as merely a gentle invitation- perhaps there is more for you to learn. Perhaps there is a ‘there’ there, that notwithstanding your many decades of life experience, may never have even crossed your imagination. If this invitation is unacceptable to you, then there may not be anything valuable for you here.
With that as preamble: over to my story.
The History
I was raised religious.
I was born into and raised as a member of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, otherwise known colloquially as “The Mormons”. I was raised by a devout family, conservative and dedicated. As such in my youth I was widely exposed to religious thoughts, beliefs, and most notably for the purposes of this article, religious experiences (in Mormonism often called “spiritual experiences”).
Mormonism is a religion deeply invested in the religious experience. From a young age we are taught that an almighty God communicates to us through “The Holy Ghost”- a member of the godhead whose role it is to liaise with us mortals through our subjective feelings. Feelings such as comfort, bliss, and an expansive warmth in the chest are often interpreted and framed as “coming from God” “through the power of the Holy Ghost”. They are taken as signs of personal worthiness and rewards for obedience and self-sacrifice.
In my youth and young adulthood, I experienced such positive sensations many times in the context of my religious worship, especially in relation to religious music and singing in choirs. When I went to the temple for a ceremony and felt peaceful, I took that to be the presence of the Holy Ghost. When I prayed and felt comforted from distress or anxiety, I took that to be the Holy Ghost. When I sought out greater wisdom in my life and found it, those experiences of clarity, insight and mental profundity were all further construed in light of, and in favour of, my religious worldview.
In short, from a very young age, I was interested in and had powerful spiritual experiences that were valuable and desirable.
In my late 20s, however, I experienced a faith crisis that was driven by intellectual growth. As the years went by, I had learned more about science, history, evolution, Mormon history, and so forth. After a lengthy intellectual deconstruction journey I came to no longer believe in Mormonism nor God (or least, the ‘God’ that Mormonism/Christianity conceptualises).
However, notwithstanding my new intellectual position as an atheist, I nonetheless knew that spiritual experiences were very real and valuable. This left me with a dilemma. What was that thing that I previously took to be God or “The Holy Ghost”?- I did not become dismissive of religious experiences, rather, I became dismissive towards my former interpretations of religious experiences. Furthermore my exodus from religion didn’t diminish my interest in spirituality, nor my memories of religious experiences throughout my life, on the contrary, I now became even more curious to understand and further explore the mind’s potential.
A key part of my deconstruction journey was becoming aware of the fact that people throughout the world and in a wide variety of religious settings and spiritual traditions have spiritual experiences in the context of their worship. Were my Mormon spiritual experiences attesting of the “truthfulness of the Book of Mormon” ‘real’ and ‘authentic’, while theirs were all ‘fake’ or misleading or partial somehow? Empathy persuaded me to be open-minded.
For a time I would watch videos like this one with deep fascination:
Halleluyah, you have won the victory. Hallelujah, you have won it all for me.
He’s alive! Jesus is alive! Jesus is alive!
What are these people feeling??
(And many others)
What is going on in the consciousness of these people? One needs no great imagination. You can see it on their faces; they are in rapture, bliss, peace, contentment, etc. but for and because of totally different doctrinal ideas and concepts, many of which are mutually incompatible.
When reviewing these and other content, I began to grasp the universality of religious experiences as a wonderful part of being human, and became interested in the underlying principles at play, that lie beyond this or that doctrine or ideology.
This interest led me down many roads. For a period of time I ran a podcast exploring different aspects of spirituality such as its relationship to music, its relationship to belief structures, how each person is unique, etc. I also read books on the subject, most notably, William James’s classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he alludes to the power of substances to shift conscious states:
“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness.” William James,The Varieties of Religious Experience
But the really transformational book I read was Waking Up, a Guide to Spirituality without Religion by Sam Harris. Sam Harris is a world-famous atheist, one of the “four horsemen of the non-apocalypse”. But unlike the other three, he’s deeply interested in the topic of spirituality and religious experiences. This intrigued me.
I know. An ‘atheist’ who is deeply interested in religious experiences? For a significant portion of the population of the world, this seems to be an oxymoron. Hence as Brené Brown puts it, I frequently found myself “in the wilderness”, “belonging everywhere and belonging nowhere” with my secular interest in religious experiences:
- On the one hand, my old religious friends are well acquainted with the idea of having spiritual feelings. Hearing of someone walking down the street and experiencing a transcendent love or compassion for all beings is within their everyday vernacular. Yet much critical thought on the meaning of these experiences is absent from the religious mind- they are interpreted in light of whatever framework of spiritual ideas were merely inherited from one’s parents or environment.
- On the other hand my atheist and secular friends are very clear on why there’s no God. But often, this clarity comes at the expense of being open to transcendent experiences.
This middle path that is both secular and spiritual needn’t be so tightly constricted. It’s a testament to the horse blinkers of both Western religion and atheism that it is so.
My avid interest in the book continued as I read it. Then, in the final chapter of Waking Up, Sam Harris explores the Spiritual Uses of Pharmacology. He goes into the uses of psychedelics such as psilocybin, LSD, MDMA and Ayahuasca. His leading words hit me and have stuck with me since:
“Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel love and avoid loneliness…. We read for the pleasure of thinking another person’s thoughts. Every waking moment, and even in our dreams, we struggle to direct the flow of sensation, emotion, and cognition towards states of consciousness that we value.”
Drugs are another means toward this end. Some are illegal; some are stigmatized; some are dangerous—though, perversely, these categories only partially intersect. Some drugs of extraordinary power and utility, such as psilocybin (the active compound in “magic mushrooms”) and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), pose no apparent risk of addiction and are physically well tolerated, and yet one can be sent to prison for their use—whereas drugs such as tobacco and alcohol, which have ruined countless lives, are enjoyed ad libitum in almost every society on earth.”
When I first read this chapter it blew my mind. My religious and conservative upbringing had closed my mind to anything remotely resembling a “drug” (in Mormon doctrine, there’s a belief that God forbids the use of certain harmful substances, including drugs, (but strangely excluding sugar!)). Hence I had never before contemplated that there were indeed different classes of drugs, having different properties, effects, and safety profiles. Or indeed that some drugs of extraordinary utility to the mind (psychedelics) might be illegal, not because they are necessarily harmful, but because of primarily political reasons (E.G they often result in intellectual subversiveness, which often results in deconstruction of cultural or political ideologies).
In my mind, LSD was in the same class as heroin or cocaine. They’re all illegal, so surely, all just as harmful? Such was my lack of knowledge at the time.
I simply wasn’t correct in this belief. As a UK-based study published by Nutt et al. in The Lancet finds, Alcohol is by far the most harmful drug in UK society, followed by heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, tobacco etc. with MDMA, LSD and Mushrooms right at the bottom of the list:
It turns out that psychedelics are an entire class of their own. They are the least harmful of all ‘drugs’, and unlike other drugs, they do not flood the brain’s reward system with dopamine, resulting in their not being physiologically addictive. The ‘highs’ they create are of an entirely different class to other drugs, instead of being deeply pleasurable and satisfying, they cultivate a profound sense of inner spaciousness and transcendence.
Of course at that stage I knew little about the 60s and the history of the prohibition of psychedelics. It was, simply put, ignorance all the way down for me.
After completing Sam Harris’s book and this chapter, I was intrigued. Could there be something worth discovering in psychedelics? My quest to make sense of spirituality encouraged me to look further into psychedelics. So I read more, and more. I read Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind (a wonderful book), James Fadiman’s The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide and many other books and articles. There was much within these books that intrigued and inspired me.
After a lengthy time of reading, eventually I made the decision to plan my first psychedelic journey in late 2017.
The First Experience
It took me about a year to fully prepare myself for my first experience, and make all of the necessary arrangements. I asked two of my closest friends to support me during my journey, so we rented a lodge up in the mountains with an absolutely beautiful set and setting.
I took what I estimate to be 300-400µg of LSD at noon on a Saturday. At the time I wasn’t aware that it would be such a high dose, but it turns out to have had its benefits. The onset was gradual, with the moments being filled more by nervous anticipation than actual effect. The first noticeable effect occurred about 40 minutes after taking it; I began to feel like a child again within my body, much of the anxiety and stress that usually sits on my shoulders, neck and back lightened dramatically. I dropped casually onto the couch, allowing my limbs to flop around the same way my three year old son did. I suddenly felt less ‘cares’ in my life, many everyday anxieties and burdens were being lifted, in a way that felt novel and unusual. The tenacious grip of stuff ‘mattering’ so much started to loosen.
What proceeded to unfold over the next 12 hours of my life (and beyond) was utterly life changing.
Beyond any exaggeration or metaphor, I went to heaven, where there was only music, no sense of self, and dwelt there for an eternity.
Subsequently a wide range of powerful experiences ensued, one by one, utterly and wonderfully transformational. It was no trivial “drug experience” journey that was “just in my head” (even though, of course, the experience was occasioned by the drug).
I experienced eternity in an afternoon. Quite literally, from that time forth my brain’s reckoning of time was that there was my life before the psychedelic, then an eternity spent under its influence, and then a new life born afterwards. Most notably, I experienced a complete and utter loss of my sense of self, the persistent sense of there being an “I” or a “me” appropriating experience moment to moment. Allusions to being “born again” within Christianity now made total sense to me, while also making me aware of the fact that the real meaning of that phrase has been profoundly lost within Christianity.
Try to imagine, for a minute, an apparent egoless eternity has just passed, and now one is beginning to remember the general circumstances of one’s life- the grand story, the self. One presently remembers one’s loved ones: wife and children. Then a feeling of burning, overflowing love wells up and bursts forth from the chest: “Saffi, Jasper, Annie, I love you”. Tears well up, and then are shed, and they start dripping down the sides of one’s cheeks. In their coolness they feel like octopus tentacles gently reaching over the whole face. All of this happening within a blindingly open and clear consciousnesses. This was just one of many moments and experiences that have happened to me while spending time in the sacred space of psychedelic journeys.
This experience left me with an afterglow that lasted for weeks and months. 48 hours after beginning the experience I went for a walk during lunchtime at work, recording a journal entry:
“I’m struggling to get any productive work done because the experience is so powerful, I feel compelled to write. It was so powerful that I’m still repeatedly struck now about how magnificent it was… So-called ‘spiritual experiences’ [from my past Mormon upbringing] are merely a subset of this thing… What I experienced [during the psychedelic journey] was like the ‘Holy Ghost’ but magnified by a factor of many thousands of times, to the point that now that it’s diminished significantly [48 hours later], it feels similar in magnitude to what I used to call ‘The Holy Ghost’…
…It’s like I’ve been asleep my entire life. That’s how powerful it is. It’s like I’ve had a headache my entire life, been asleep for every moment…
All is well.”
It would take me about 12 months to process the journey to a point where it no longer came up so regularly, and years later I would still be writing about and exploring it. To this day I still cherish and reflect on the insights gained then, even as it is approaching a decade since that journey.
There’s not enough room in this article to discuss what happened in detail. I wrote about it extensively afterwards, filling pages and pages of Word documents with reflections, questions and insights. That experience, and subsequent ones with both LSD and psilocybin would go on to become one of the foundations for my newfound relationship with “spirituality”.
After this blog post I intend to publish a short form podcast series called psychedelic short stories, which aims to explore, bit by bit, some of the experiences I’ve had. I will send it to the same mailing list that received this blog post.
The Path of Meditation
Coming back to Sam Harris’ book, among the many things I learned during that journey was the skill of nondual meditation.
Quoting again from his chapter about psychedelics:
“There is no getting around the role of luck here. If you are lucky, and you take the right drug, you will know what it is to be enlightened (or to be close enough to persuade you that enlightenment is possible).”
This quote resonated deeply with me after my first experience with LSD. After the experience, I knew with great clarity that the answer to many of the questions I’d been exploring was contained within the nondual insight. It was as though a special and very precise key had been fitted snugly into a lock somewhere deep in my mind, and turned until unlocked. Now that the door had been opened, a profound relief from psychological suffering had been discovered within the practice of mindfulness, or more specifically, nondual mindfulness.
From that moment onwards, the way had been shown to me (how to meditate or practice with this style), and all subsequent meditation was now about stabilising, practicing and re-experiencing an experiential insight, not necessarily learning some new skill.
This journey fuelled my interest in meditation, which continues to this day. As of this moment I have spent far, far more time gently meditating on the cushion than under the influence of psychedelics, to the tune of over 750 hours of my life, and as of the past 4 years, averaging about 30 minutes a day.
Joining the Psychedelic Chorus
Around the world, right now, the psychedelic movement is re-gaining momentum. In countless discussion boards, social media communities, offline communities, university research labs, psychiatrist and psychologists conversations, and “spiritual circles”, a chorus is taking place. Many humans are awakening to the power of mind-manifesting substances, and having their lives transformed as a result. I hear their stories often, because socially I dwell in some of these circles.
I wrote this post to disclose and express my participation in the psychedelic chorus. In the last decade since discovering psychedelics I have encountered “the initiated” far and wide. Whether it be my discovery on a recent business trip to Sydney that one of my high-end clients had exceptional awareness and experience with psychedelics (we had dinner and discussed the topic for hours), or the fact that several universities, even over here in here in far-flung Perth, are running psychedelic research, or that Australia rescheduled MDMA and psilocybin almost 3 years ago, or a local psychologist clinic in Perth that has “dosing days” twice a week on Tuesday and Friday, or Will Smith’s biography where he openly shares about his 10+ experiences on Ayahuasca, or (even more recently), the Trump executive order to speed up FDA review of psychedelics, or the Netflix documentary How To Change Your Mind based on Pollan’s book- it’s clear, and many of us are raising our voices: something significant is happening, I know about it:
and I raise my voice as a part of it.
Shawn 10-05-2026
