The Harvard University study took place on Good Friday in 1962 in the basement of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel. Twenty students from a local Protestant theological college took part in a double-blind investigation into the effects of psilocybin, the psychoactive alkaloid found in magic mushrooms. Walter Pahnke, who was supplementing his medical doctorate with a Ph.D. in Religion and Society at Harvard University, conducted the experiment for his final dissertation. Pahnke was interested in determining whether reverent, religious-minded individuals ingesting entheogens in a sacred setting would, in fact, experience a classically defined mystical experience similar to those described in the accounts of saints, mystics, and holy men.

… Not merely intriguing in their content, the personal narratives of the psilocybin-taking group did convincingly parallel mystical experience chronicled in religious lore. For example, “L.J.,” one member of the psilocybin group, describes having received guidance from an ancestor, tasting eternal life, and realizing the profound difference between having a gnostic experience and merely reading about one. All occurred within the confines of this single episode.

I was hearing my uncle who had died [several months before], the one who was a minister, saying, “I want you to die, I want you to die, I want you to die.” The more that I let go and sort of died, the more I felt this eternal life, saying to myself under my breath perhaps, “It has always been this way, it has always been this way… O, isn't it wonderful, there's nothing to fear, this is what it means to die, or to taste of eternal life…” And the more I died the more I appropriated this sense of eternal life… While the service went on I was caught up in this experience of eternal life and appreciating what the peyote Indians or the sacred mushroom Indians experienced with their imbibing of the drug. Just in that one session I think I gained experience I didn't have before and probably could never have gotten from a hundred hours of reading or a thousand hours of reading.³ 


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