Special Issue 01
Psychedelics, Contemplation, and Religion
Psychedelics are enjoying a popular and scientific resurgence of interest due to rigorous documentation of their therapeutic potential and experiences perceived to be profoundly spiritual. In this Special Issue, authors examine the role of psychedelics across a range of religious contexts and reflect on broad philosophical and interpretive frameworks utilized in research and practice. Articles contribute measured, nuanced, and accurate accounts of psychoactive substances in religion and contemplative practice. As a whole, the issue provides foundations for thinking critically and strategically about how scholarship on psychedelics can contribute to understandings of religious, therapeutic, and recreational applications of such substances in contemporary contexts.
Guest Editor(s)
Daniel A. Hirshberg, University of Colorado-Boulder
Stuart Ray Sarbacker, Oregon State University
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Articles
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A Study of Cheng Yi’s Quiet-Sitting Meditation and Other Contemplative Practices in the Confucian Context:
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Article Title: Article Subtitle
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Beyond Technical Fixes: Sufism, Contemplation, and Climate Change as Human Predicament
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Building on the works of the Sufi philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr and the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, this article argues that the climate crisis signals a deeper spiritual and existential crisis beyond technological solutions and carbon reduction strategies. Departing from conventional problem-solution narratives, it frames climate change as a crisis of human self-understanding and our relationship with the more-than-human world. The dominant mechanistic paradigm, which views nature as a resource for exploitation, has led to environmental degradation and alienation. Nasr critiques this objectification, emphasizing that nature must be seen as sacred rather than as a mere resource. In dialogue with Rosa, the article explores the concept of “resonance” and argues that Sufi contemplative practices cultivate a profound ecological consciousness. By integrating Sufi ontology with ethics, it advocates for an interconnected vision of life by treating everything in nature as alive and spiritually meaningful.July 7, 2025 | pp. 87 – 106
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Contemplative Life amidst Mass Extinction: Catholic Revisions of Spirituality, Law, and Multispecies Justice
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What happens to researchers interested in spirituality, as they engage with a large number of spiritual exemplars? This question is explored, based on the experience of 14 research collaborators in a qualitative phenomenological study of spiritual exemplars (individuals perceived by others as exemplifying the spiritual life) of different traditions, paths, and cultures. Over 5.5 months, two groups of research collaborators watched video recordings of interviews with 20 spiritual exemplars, analyzed their transcripts, wrote down their impressions of each exemplar, and discussed them in biweekly meetings. At the end of that period, the effects of the process on the collaborators were explored through individual interviews and group discussions. The data collected suggests that the collaborators both formed and experienced the process as holistic and self-transformative in different ways. Three main effects were described: “self-reflection and insight,” “opening and broadening,” and “fostering spiritual self-reliance.” In choosing their “most exemplary exemplars,” the collaborators relied mainly on their somatic-intuitive impressions—and there was great diversity in their choices. These findings suggest that spiritual exemplarity is determined by “sympathetic resonance” between the exemplar and the person perceiving them as such. The conditions that contributed to the effects of the process and the potential of its application to facilitate interreligious dialogue and personal growth are discussed.April 16, 2025 | pp. 1 – 25
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Editor’s Introduction (test)
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Test test testJuly 11, 2025 | pp. 112 – 107
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Hesychasm and Psychedelics: Altered States, Purgation, and the Question of Authentic Mysticism
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The purpose of this essay is to introduce the reader to the tradition of Hesychasm—a form of monastic asceticism rooted in the tradition of the Desert Fathers and given a systematic articulation by the Byzantine author Gregory Palamas (1296–1359)—and to consider how the mystical experiences described in Palamas’s Triads compare to the altered states at the center of contemporary psychedelic research. After reviewing the chief claims of the hesychastic tradition about the nature and purpose of ascetic practice, the essay will consider the methodological challenges psychedelic researchers face when assessing experiences induced by psychedelic substances. The last section will turn to the discipline of Comparative Theology as a helpful framework to bring into dialogue the hesychastic understanding of deification as a trajectory grounded in the reception of the sacraments and the therapeutic impact of psychedelic experiences. The essay will uncover different points of contact between hesychastic and psychedelic experience but will also foreground a number of irreducible differences between the two, reflecting the specific anthropological and soteriological claims of the hesychastic tradition. The conclusion will advocate for greater epistemic modesty—warning from overhasty identification of mystical states and psychedelic experiences—but also invite theologians and psychedelic researchers to greater reciprocal openness to each other’s insights.April 23, 2025 | pp. 33 – 47
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Love’s Deepest Abyss: A Contemplative Ecology of Darkness
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“Love’s deepest abyss is her most beautiful form,” so claims Hadewijch of Antwerp, the great medieval Flemish mystic. This strange and alluring idea, shared by many of the apophatic tradition, reflects the sense that the abyssal (sometimes conceived of as a void, a desert, or darkness) is essential to the work of love, and that love can only be known by relinquishing the narrow conception of the self and becoming lost in the depths. The idea of the abyss has reemerged in our own time as part of a painful grammar of loss: a way of engaging and responding to social, political, cultural, environmental, spiritual, and personal losses too deep to name but impossible to ignore. It has also become critical to the work of reimagining the immense value of what we are losing, rekindling our capacity to love what is most precious to us, and helping us recover a sense of a shared life with all sentient beings (something often referred to in the Christian mystical tradition simply as “the common life”). And it has become part of an emerging “contemplative ecology of darkness”—a radical spiritual practice that can help us learn again how to behold ourselves and other living beings as part of a larger whole.July 7, 2025 | pp. –
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No Attainment, Nothing to Attain: A Buddhist Reflection on Psychedelics
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The religious or spiritual value of contemplative practices and the use of psychedelics is not intrinsic to experiences obtained through them and is instead relational—a function of how they alter consciousness. In support of that claim, I first present a nonreductive, nondualist Buddhist account of consciousness that calls critically into question the merits of both physicalist and phenomenalist reductionism in exploring the meditative and psychedelic alterations of consciousness. I then make a Buddhist case for seeing that changes in subjective experience are at best provisional goals of these alterations, and not their ultimate aim: elaborating increasingly liberating and compassionately virtuosic relations. I turn finally to recent neuroscientific studies of psychedelics and meditation that combine first-person and third-person methodologies to draw some challenging inferences regarding the dynamics of contemplative practice, the reality of interpersonal realization, the merits of group practice, the liabilities of individualist conceptions of liberal autonomy, and the inadequacy of meditative techniques like mindfulness practice stripped of dharmic content and context.July 7, 2025 | pp. 52 – 71
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Portrait of a Poison: Datura in Buddhist Magic
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The psychoactive plant Datura metel appears across a range of traditions in premodern South Asia preserved in texts. Among those traditions is the form of tantric Buddhism (Vajrayāna) located in the yoginī tantras. In Vajrayāna works, the plant is most prominently used in instructions for bringing about one or more of the magical acts (ṣaṭkarman). This paper explores the possibility that datura was consumed for its hallucination-inducing potential by considering how the plant was viewed and used in premodern South Asia through an ethnobotanical approach to relevant texts. I argue that the material potency of the plant as a dangerous poison, well established in Sanskrit medical literature from an early period, gave it a magical potency that made it a favored ingredient in several hostile magic rites (abhicāra) found in the yoginī tantras. I suggest that the line between material and magical is an inappropriate distinction to draw when examining these tantras, and that the most responsible way to approach the use of psychotropic plants in a premodern culture is by examining what actors from that culture said about the plant rather than relying on our existing knowledge of the effect of that plant.April 1, 2025 | pp. 1 – 32
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Practicing the “Threefold Mystery”: Rethinking a Shingon Ritual from Dichotomy to Dialectic
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After a century and a half of focus on Buddhist doctrine, academic attention is increasingly being paid to practice. What remains undertheorized, however, is the relation between the two. An example of this is the idea that tantric practice is simply a ritual technology, separate and autonomous from doctrinal formulation. This is a persisting academic trope, one that conceptualizes doctrine and practice dichotomously. The effect that dichotomizing doctrine from practice has on the study of contemplative practices is considered in this essay, which first introduces the trope and then explores its supports in Western intellectual culture. Despite its prevalence, the dichotomous representation of doctrine and practice is methodologically dysfunctional. As an alternative, it is proposed that the relation between doctrine and practice is better understood as dialectical, sometimes represented in Buddhist literature by the image of “the two wings of a bird.” This relation is explored by examining a particular tantric ritual, a Shingon homa.July 7, 2025 | pp. –