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59. Psychedelic Theology with Kaleb Graves
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This week we have a super interesting conversation with self proclaimed “Psychedelic Theologist” Kaleb Graves. Kaleb is a Baptist Minister whose life was profoundly changed by the spiritual and metaphysical implications of his exploration with psychedelics. Disappointed by the lack of informed voices that sought to seriously address these substances and the experience that they induce within the context of the Christian faith, he attended and graduated from Duke Divinity School where he explored these implications for himself, and he continues to fill the gap between psychedelics and religion by studying the mind, theology, and altered states of consciousness. The result of his work, he calls Psychedelic Theology which is a resource for psychonauts who have religious experiences, and for religious folks who have mystical experiences as a result of psychedelic use and need assistance on how to connect their experience with their faith. Head on over to psychedelictheology.com to connect with Kaleb and digest the amazing work he is doing.
https://www.psychedelictheology.com/ https://www.instagram.com/psychedelic_theology/ https://www.instagram.com/jkalebgraves/
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Music By Nathan Willis RIP
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Transcript
Introduction to Pursuit of Infinity Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Pursuit of Infinity, a podcast where we explore the depths of human consciousness and delve into the fascinating world of psychedelics.
Caleb Graves' Journey with Psychedelics
00:00:08
Speaker
This week we have a super interesting conversation with self-proclaimed psychedelic theologist Caleb Graves.
00:00:16
Speaker
Caleb is a Baptist minister whose life was profoundly changed by the spiritual and metaphysical implications of his exploration with psychedelics. Disappointed by the lack of informed voices that sought to seriously address these substances and the experience that they induce within the context of the Christian faith, he attended and graduated from Duke Divinity School where he explored these implications for himself.
00:00:39
Speaker
and continues to fill the gap between psychedelics and religion by studying the mind, theology, and altered states of consciousness. The result of his work he calls Psychedelic Theology, which is a resource for psychonauts who have religious experiences and for religious folks who have mystical experiences as a result of psychedelic use and need assistance on how to connect their experiences with their faith.
00:01:03
Speaker
So head on over to psychedelictheology.com to connect with Caleb and to digest the amazing work he's doing. But before we get to it, as always, you can visit our website, pursuitofinfinity.com, where you can not only listen to the podcast through our integrated media player, but also find all the places you can follow us.
00:01:23
Speaker
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00:01:35
Speaker
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00:01:55
Speaker
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00:02:23
Speaker
Now with all that out of the way, thank you so much for listening and I hope you enjoy this week's discussion.
00:02:42
Speaker
Hey everyone. Welcome to Pursuit of Infinity. I'm Josh, your host. And you will have heard an intro to today's guest if you're listening to the audio only version. But if you're watching the video, welcome. Today we're here with Caleb Graves. Thank you so much, man, for joining me. Definitely. Really happy to be here. So you just graduated from Duke Divinity School. What were you studying and how did that all go?
00:03:09
Speaker
Yeah, so I just finished up a three year degree called a Masters of Divinity at Duke Divinity School. It was tough started during COVID. My first year was 2020. But it was it was at first just a year of trying to figure out what sort of field I should get into what brought all of my interests together.
00:03:32
Speaker
But after I tried magic mushrooms for the first time in 2021, I realized that I wanted to study this professionally and theologically.
Early Spiritual and Psychedelic Experiences
00:03:42
Speaker
So I took a lot of classes with psychology, took a couple of directed studies in about psychedelics and dreams and visions in the Christian Bible, but also in early Christian history.
00:03:56
Speaker
And focused a lot of my other work on psychedelics so that even if the class wasn't about it, the professors knew me well enough that they'd let me write about pretty much anything and everything as long as it was tangentially related to the topic at hand. Perfect. So were you theologically inclined or religious before 2021 when you took mushrooms for the first time or were the mushrooms the catalyst for your spiritual journey?
00:04:24
Speaker
No, I was pretty spiritual, um, long before, uh, taking magic mushrooms. Um, you know, I've thought about, I've gone to the doctor for it, actually tried to get some tests done about it. I've had really, really strong spiritual experiences that might even resemble seizures, uh, since I was seven, eight, nine years old, uh, where I just sort of disassociate for a while, forget the worlds around me, lose track of time for a bit.
00:04:52
Speaker
Um, and, uh, I had much more of a spiritual life leading into a seminary when, um, I had to work a minimum wage job. Couldn't really make end meet. Uh, for two years I lived below the poverty line. Uh, and, um, I had to have some sort of support to survive.
00:05:15
Speaker
So I created a really rich spiritual life for myself daily prayer daily self-care all of those things To really just keep me going at a job. I hated Constantly chronically sick couldn't afford a doctor, etc And honestly with magic mushrooms That first big trip wasn't spiritual for me
00:05:35
Speaker
It was powerful, absolutely incredible, but it wasn't really a spiritual experience. But nonetheless, when you have a powerful experience, you want to figure out what just happened to you. And as I started exploring LSD and particularly, that was more of a spiritual experience for me and made me realize that, oh, there could be some more overlap between my theological Christian studies and these substances more than I thought there was.
00:06:03
Speaker
So what was happening with these, like, were they spontaneous experiences that you were describing as seizure-like? What was the experience like and what was actually happening to you? It's not like I saw anything or anything like that. It was just this really, really deep sense of closeness to God.
00:06:23
Speaker
uh like my myself or my you know here in psychedelics a lot my ego sort of faded away and I remember one particular time outside of my church just looking up into the night sky and it was like for a few minutes there was no difference between me and the night sky there was just an utter connection between us
00:06:45
Speaker
And I've struggled with my mental health for years, had two suicide attempts as a young child, as a teenager. So it's been back and forth between pretty significant struggle with anxiety and depression, but also I think connected to those things, also these very strong, peaceful religious experiences as well.
00:07:11
Speaker
And did you find that these experiences helped you to contextualize the suicidal ideation and suicide attempts? Not really. I grew up in a very fundamentalist, very abusive church environment, which strongly contributed to my suicide attempts. So instead of really having any sort of context to help me understand what was going on,
00:07:37
Speaker
I thought this was just the sort of spiritual experience that growing up in a Baptist church, everybody talks about feeling God in your heart, Jesus in your heart, feeling the movement of the Spirit, that sort of thing. But it wasn't until my 20s when I started to realize that these experiences were more than what most people had.
00:08:03
Speaker
I had them even when I didn't really intellectually believe in God, but I'd still have these very peaceful spiritual experiences. So yeah, it's really what got me into using substances at all. I remember smoking weed in college. I went to school in Colorado. That was pretty freely available.
00:08:24
Speaker
But one of the first things I did was when I started smoking a lot was smoke a ton of weed and read the Gnostic scriptures in the Nag Hammadi Codex, just to see if anything was there. So there's always been a seeker aspect in it for me.
Themes of Oneness in Psychedelic Experiences
00:08:40
Speaker
But I, again, with my first trip with Shrooms, didn't think of it as spiritual. It took a number of different experiences before I started to realize, oh, there's some overlap between the spiritual experiences I have more
00:08:55
Speaker
spontaneously, I guess, and these that can be induced by substances. Can you talk a little bit about the details of the overlap? Yeah, there's definitely a great sense of that sense of oneness or unity, or just lack of boundary between oneself and whatever else is out there.
00:09:22
Speaker
I've described it before, like, almost like the world in front of you is a veil. And you can just pinch it and pull it apart. And there's something right behind there. And that's that exact same sense of expectation, that there is something there that is it's coming, it's it's at the door. Has happened these spontaneous experiences, but has also happened during psychedelic experiences as well.
00:09:51
Speaker
Yeah, that interconnectedness is such a common theme. And not only is it common, but it is paradigm shifting, life-changing oftentimes, because in this culture, in this society, whether you're a religious person or an atheist, you're still sort of taught that you're separate from God, you're separate from the universe, you're separate from this and that, and you need an authority figure to solidify your connection, whether it be a scientist or a preacher or whatever it may be.
00:10:21
Speaker
But I had a question that I was, I was contemplating earlier today, actually. And is, are psychedelics in the Bible? This is a question that I get a lot. I have seen no good evidence of that. I think the first thing that we should do when we're looking at the scriptures, like I don't think a lot of what we see in the scriptures is historical.
00:10:46
Speaker
So there was no historical Moses or Abraham or Adam or stuff like that. A lot of the stories of Jesus were theological retellings about who early Christians believed Jesus should be. So I think it's always best to start with the historical archaeological. What can we know before we start hypothesizing about other things?
00:11:09
Speaker
And while I've heard theories about it being in psychedelics being used by Moses and having interactions like the burning bush, or manna wandering in the wilderness after the Exodus, or even the show bread with David in 1st or 2nd Samuel, don't remember right now. But I've never seen good evidence of this. I will say there is a
00:11:38
Speaker
believe it's eighth or ninth century altar in Judah BCE. That's the Tellarod altar. And on this particular altar that was being used by the predecessors to the Jewish people during this timeline, there was cannabis being used. So while not necessarily a psychedelic,
00:12:03
Speaker
It's clear that there was some substance use involved in early Israelite religion. But I really think what this question often brings up is that when you have these powerful experiences and you have that sense of interconnectedness, you want to find as many connections as possible. So, you know, I've heard people say that the lotus flower in Buddhism, that must be a psychedelic.
00:12:27
Speaker
or that looking at Judaism and similar overlap with the Bible, that some of the substances they use must have been psychedelics. But I don't see any historical evidence of that. It would make my life a lot easier. It would make my job a lot easier if there was some, but I haven't seen enough evidence to convince me of that.
00:12:50
Speaker
So I have a friend who is a fundamental Christian through and through and we always have like philosophical spiritual conversations because you know in his mind we are opposed because he's Christian and I am whatever I am you know with psychedelics and he often would tell me that in the Bible it is said that psychedelics other drugs of this nature are put here by the devil to test us like they're
00:13:18
Speaker
they're demonic in nature. And the reason that we think that they're spiritually enlightening is just because that's sort of built into the facade that they are in order to trick us into taking the devil's path.
Psychedelics in Religious Contexts
00:13:33
Speaker
Is that just like a misconception? Like where does that notion come from? Yeah, it's really interesting. This seems like it's off topic for a second. But when you look at the UN's condemnation of drugs,
00:13:47
Speaker
It uses the word evil. That's a very moral and very religious sort of language. It's not just harmful to society. It's not just dangerous. It's evil, moral condemnation. I think we see a long-standing taboo between substance use and Christianity.
00:14:13
Speaker
Things that are foreign or outside of everyone's daily conception of what religion is, is always scary. Coffee, chocolate, these things used to be questionable to the Christian mind because they were associated with Mesoamerican, Latin American religion and associated with Islam. So there was some back and forth about how these substances should be accepted.
00:14:41
Speaker
When you look at psychedelics, which aren't just associated with other religions, but can also induce very powerful experiences. Early missionaries, after colonialism began in Latin America, most of them condemned it as witchcraft or something similar. Most of them condemned it as a fake way of trying to approach God.
00:15:06
Speaker
But there were interesting two minorities of groups as well. One group said that psychedelics were preparing indigenous people for the Eucharist, for the Lord's Supper, the bread and the wine that Christians have at Mass, or in some other services. So in that way, God had specially given these medicines to indigenous people as a special sort of alternative Eucharist.
00:15:32
Speaker
The other side of that were people who believed that these substances, especially peyote and magic mushrooms, were the anti-Eucharist. So if the wafer and the juicer wine turns into the body of Christ, then the magic mushroom turns into the real body of Satan.
00:15:53
Speaker
So there was a strong, strong condemnation of these substances that they weren't just foreign or bad because they weren't Christian. They were almost like an anti-Christian substance. And even though even belief in the existence of magic mushrooms and peyote sort of faded away among some people, that this was sort of a mythological idea that the indigenous people had made up.
00:16:22
Speaker
When psychedelic use came back, a lot of those old hatreds and those old taboos were still somewhere present in our belief system. I don't think that that's true, that it's the body and blood of Satan or that it's put out to deceive us or tempt us. Some of the missionaries believed that peyote was still a medicine and that even if maybe it wasn't always the best thing to do, God had entrusted it to indigenous people.
00:16:52
Speaker
And like I said before, some people saw it as a positive thing that God had given to indigenous people so that they could be either prepared for the arrival of the Christian Eucharist or that there was a special gift given to these people that were not given to white people. So in that way, I just don't buy that this is an inherently bad thing or attempting thing.
00:17:17
Speaker
Matthew, the Gospel of Matthew, says that we should test the fruits of every tree to see if what is there is good and pure and true. And I think when we look at the fruits of psychedelics when taken in a good set and setting, good dosage, good education, good testing, all of these things, the fruits are therapeutic, the fruits are helpful, the fruits are good. So that's a strong reason why I accept psychedelics.
00:17:44
Speaker
And it's no different than the argument that Satan put dinosaur bones in the earth to test us that evolution is not true. But of course, I accept evolution is a historical fact, and I also accept that psychedelics can be a path for real healing.
00:18:00
Speaker
I'm with you, man. I'm with you. You bring up the Eucharist, which I think is a very interesting concept. Have you read the book or heard of The Immortality Key by Brian Mararescu? I have, yes. So what do you think about the Eleusinian mysteries and their supposed, like, being the foundation of the Christian religion and how the Eucharist itself sort of came to be? So I don't buy it. I'll just say that. I'll say that outright. I don't buy it.
00:18:29
Speaker
We see early on with Watson, who was a psychedelic investigator, brought magic mushrooms to the forefront of American consciousness with a Life Magazine article. And then Houston Smith as well wrote some things about this, a comparative religion scholar.
00:18:50
Speaker
A lot of the arguments that are made for connecting these ancient Greco-Roman or Near Eastern mystery religions to Christianity really fail in a lot of aspects. And it's not just this book. You see similar theories in a bunch of other publications as well. For instance, the Mithras cult and the substance use that seems to have gone on there.
00:19:18
Speaker
We know virtually nothing about it. We have very little written about it. We have a few broken lines from manuscripts that we have from Egypt. We have a lot of carvings that we know are of this cult, but we don't really know what they mean. We just sort of throwing our best interpretations out there.
00:19:40
Speaker
And while I think there's clearly a long history of substance use within Greco-Roman religion, within Egyptian religion, Near Eastern religion, like the Telluride altar that I was just telling you about, just because there are some aesthetic similarities between things doesn't mean there's a direct connection. So I'm much more strongly of the opinion, you know, bread and wine, that's just what you eat.
00:20:08
Speaker
If you look at what the historical Jesus did, he had a meal of bread and wine. And if you look at the simplest answer for things, he had a meal of bread and wine, and then he died. The man was probably sharp enough to know he wasn't making it out of this weekend. So, you know, he's telling them, remember us, remember this meal, remember what's about to happen. And they did. They ate the bread, they drank the wine.
00:20:32
Speaker
A lot of the theology of mysticism, the connection between Jesus and the bread and the wine, comes from slightly later tradition in the Gospel of John 90 to 110 CE, and then beyond that in the second century. So I think that there could be some overlap between some people converting into Christianity out of these mystery religions,
00:20:59
Speaker
But the fact that there is some parallel or people who might have brought aspects of their faith with them when converting into Christianity doesn't mean that there's an origination between these two separate rituals. And it also doesn't mean that the theology is in any way comparable either. The historical origins of the Christian Eucharist is just some dudes having bread and wine in the upper room before an execution.
00:21:25
Speaker
Gotcha, gotcha.
Psychedelics and Human Evolution
00:21:27
Speaker
Another interesting historical hypothesis I wanted to run by you was Terence and Dennis McKenna's stone dape theory. Have you heard about this? I have definitely. Yeah. Because you mentioned evolution before. Do you kind of buy into that? I know it's not really too much related to religion itself. But do you buy into like evolution sort of being in part fueled by the consumption of psilocybin mushrooms over millions of years?
00:21:51
Speaker
I don't know. One of the things people don't know about Terrence McKenna a lot of the times is how much this theory is connected to far more frankly a little closer to psychosis sort of thinking. His beliefs that magic mushrooms were an alien species who have come down to earth to coexist and bring the human race
00:22:18
Speaker
into this eventual Omega point where we all have knowledge of the truth and everything's great again. So in the context of that broader theory, I don't think his representation of how psychedelic drug use has worked in human evolution makes much sense at all.
00:22:40
Speaker
However, I do think it's possible that psychoactive drug use in general, we know that animals use psychoactive drugs. Whether it is picking poppy or going and eating fermented fruit, all sorts of things, animals engage in psychoactive drug consuming behavior.
00:23:03
Speaker
So I don't think it's impossible or even unlikely that if we did see psilocybin mushrooms existing in the same areas, Homo erectus or early Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, whatever, and they're consuming these substances, I don't think it's unlikely to think that that could have helped be a catalyst for human evolution with cognition and consciousness.
00:23:27
Speaker
I'm not an evolutionary anthropologist so I can't say for sure, but I think the idea is plausible at least. Yeah, it's a cool theory and it feels cool when you're taking psychedelics and you have the experience of feeling as if your consciousness is evolving on its own itself and you think, oh, if humans were taking this back in history, then
00:23:50
Speaker
Maybe, you know, it helped us to evolve and, you know, the whole doubling of the human brain size thing. But I think a lot of it was based in his or related to Terence McKenna's theory, his time wave theory, which is like a theory of time, which kind of didn't span out to be anything plausible. So, yeah, I do understand the doubt in that for sure. Yeah. But going back to the relationship between psychedelics and religion.
Religion's Opposition to Psychedelics
00:24:18
Speaker
Let's talk about their opposition. Why are they so opposed within both ideologies? So we just mentioned Terence McKenna. So let's start there. Terence McKenna had a real apocalyptic view of the world, that there is a time in the near future, 2008, 2012, somewhere in that area where
00:24:45
Speaker
something was going to happen. Human consciousness would have its final eruption and the next stage of evolution would happen. McKenna's view of this was deeply attached to his mistrust of institutions, which rightfully had a mistrust of institutions. His life was filled with institutions failing him.
00:25:11
Speaker
But I think in the 90s and the 80s, that really put a concept into people's minds that Terence McKenna strongly supported the idea that organized religion was opposed to psychedelic drug use. And it created this animosity between psychedelic subculture, which they might not have even known where it came from, but this animosity between organized religion and psychedelic drug subculture.
00:25:39
Speaker
and it's something that still exists to this day. On religion's side of things, organized religion, it's really interesting. In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s with the psychedelic revolution that happened there, most of the people engaged in the study were deeply Christian.
00:26:00
Speaker
So we have a magic mushroom species that, like I said, Wasson, when he brought magic mushrooms to light in America with the Time Magazine article, one of the mushrooms he came across ended up being named after a Christian missionary because this missionary had found, you know, found and categorized that mushroom. Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD, was himself a devoted Christian.
00:26:27
Speaker
Houston Smith, who I previously mentioned, was a Methodist minister. The Good Friday experiment in 1962 at Marsh Chapel at Boston University, where the esteemed Howard Thurman civil rights leader and advocate was preaching that day. Psychedelics and Christianity and religion as a whole, Judaism, Islam, etc., had a pretty good relationship.
00:26:54
Speaker
Unfortunately, and I think this is part of where McKenna really actually hit home on something, we do see the rise of white Christian nationalism in the 80s, especially with Ronald Reagan, and the war on drugs goes into full effect. So at that point, the language was, if you're a good Christian,
00:27:18
Speaker
You don't just not use substances. You don't just not, just like you wouldn't just not drink. You have to engage in prohibition. You have to be a teetotaler for everyone. It's not enough that you don't take LSD or magic mushrooms. No one can. And to be a good Christian, you have to believe that and act on that.
00:27:40
Speaker
So I think that that political struggle really put people in a tough place where a lot of Christians in the 60s and 70s who loved psychedelics, who engaged in psychedelics, were put in a place where not only did they have to choose between their faith and psychedelics, they had to choose between their faith and jail.
00:28:01
Speaker
And that's not a great option. And so the voices that we heard about organized religion and psychedelics were reduced to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and the presidents that came after that.
00:28:17
Speaker
And so it's no surprise that psychedelic subculture in the 90s and early 2000s and late 80s too, with DMT being more popular, shifted towards the only Christian voices they're hearing are negative and oppressive. So of course they're going to believe that Christianity and religion as a whole must only be negative and oppressing towards them. It makes sense.
00:28:41
Speaker
And I've heard you say that psychedelics can help to deconstruct white Christian nationalism. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? Yeah. It's a fine line here. We've seen recently a number of examples of white supremacists, not even white Christian nationalism, all right, full far right fascist using psychedelic drugs in large quantities.
00:29:11
Speaker
Um, you go all the way, I mean, you go all the way back to the Manson family and their neo-Nazi beliefs and LSD was very prominent, very, very easy to condemn them. But especially since the Charlottesville riots, there have been numerous examples of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, KKK members, whatever, using psychedelic drugs to support their beliefs.
00:29:36
Speaker
I go on Stormfront, the white supremacist website, which probably has me on a list for that now. But I go and we'll just, every once in a while, just control fine in their website, LSD, DMT, magic mushrooms, psychedelics. And these white supremacists, violent white supremacists, are using a lot of drugs, a lot of psychedelics in particular.
00:30:01
Speaker
So all that to say, I urge caution with trying to look at psychedelics as this way that can just easily deconstruct. If you take LSD or magic mushrooms or DMT, it's going to be peace, love and understanding from now on. But I do think that it has the potential to break up a lot of the trauma and break up a lot of the negative aspects of one's worldview if they have cognitive dissonance.
00:30:29
Speaker
that can help them be more open to better beliefs about the world. But the thing is, the psychedelic experience is not just something that happens in the head. When we look at how psychedelics create healing, you have the pharmacological effect with anti-inflammation and things of that nature, neurological, psychological, and then at the top, social.
00:30:55
Speaker
It is incredibly important that psychedelic subculture, and this is why I think churches as a whole should be involved, should be there to help people integrate their experiences. If the context in which one is integrating the experience is a far right context, they're going to become more far right.
00:31:18
Speaker
But if it's your kind of annoying uncle who voted for Trump in 2020, and he is doing it in the context of a bunch of buddies who might not be like that, it might be a chance for him to have a little bit of self-reflection. So it's a mixed
Integrating Religion with Psychedelic Experiences
00:31:37
Speaker
bag. I don't think it is an inherent thing that psychedelics can do. In fact, psychedelics can do the opposite, ironically.
00:31:44
Speaker
But there is the potential to help break up the traumas and break up the negative paradoxical contradictory beliefs that people have that help make up white supremacy.
00:31:59
Speaker
This reminds me of like the Aztecs, you know, the Aztecs used to take psychedelic mushrooms and then sacrifice people. Um, the Vikings used to take psychedelic mushrooms and then go to war. So this really brings back the idea of set and setting set being so important. Like what you're bringing to it, what your intentions are, because they are, as Stan Groff would describe them, non-specific amplifiers of.
00:32:23
Speaker
Like psychic processes and if your psychic processes are that of a far-right fascist then there's a potential for that to just be Bubbled up right to the surface and be reinforced Yeah, and that's something that That's something that I've really tried to bring up with people a lot is
00:32:45
Speaker
When we look at the Good Friday experiment, where a ton of Christian seminarians and professors were given psychedelics, they unsurprisingly had very Christian psychedelic experiences. And I think there's also this idea with people who take psychedelics in a more new age setting,
00:33:08
Speaker
that it is inherent that the beliefs that somebody has must arrive at the New Age approach by taking psychedelics. But the fact of the matter is because so many psychedelics has been adopted so well by New Age beliefs, that is the setting and content that one is taking these drugs with. So they're more likely to interpret it in this way.
00:33:37
Speaker
It's interesting when you look at Diné, what we might call Navajo peyote use, that the Navajo or Diné tribal elders, when peyote use became more popular, condemned it. They condemned the use of peyote. This wasn't just something being done by white Christians, but also Diné people as well, because they said this is a foreign tradition to us.
00:34:07
Speaker
This is not something that we do. And it took a long time of indigenous people trying to show that peyote could actually help preserve their culture, help preserve their beliefs before they were willing to come around to it. Yeah, peyote is an interesting one too.
00:34:30
Speaker
And I know that there's a concerted effort to conserve the use of peyote because it's so hard to grow. It takes so long. Have you ever experimented with peyote or mescaline in general? I haven't. No, it's definitely on my list of interest. Uh, but no, I haven't used it before. Yeah. Nor have I, nor have I. I mean, I guess the San Pedro cactus would be the best way for us to, uh, to, to get it here in America.
00:34:56
Speaker
Um, but you know, speaking about sort of the differences of each religion, um, psychedelic use, how do you suggest people create synergy between them? Between their religious belief systems. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yep. So, um, I'm a strong believer, um, in the power of the power of uniqueness, the power of difference.
00:35:27
Speaker
that I think the neoliberal or some of the more pop spirituality way of coming to different religious traditions is to flatten them, to try to make them all say the exact same thing. But the fact of the matter is they don't all say the exact same thing. There is a founder of the, I believe it's the renewal movement in Judaism who experimented with LSD.
00:35:56
Speaker
And he said that there are aspects of Judaism and LSD and aspects of LSD and Judaism, but he could not say that the LSD experience was the same as the mystical or daily Jewish experience. So he allowed LSD to be its own thing. It is LSD and there's elements that are connected with Judaism, but then there's Judaism, which is its own thing.
00:36:25
Speaker
So instead of trying to force things to come together, we need to be okay with letting things be in its uniqueness. So something I run into with people a lot as well is that they are frequently unaware of how diverse their religious tradition is.
00:36:45
Speaker
Most religions out there, even, you know, LDS Mormonism at this point, I mean, it's 250 some years old coming up on. So there's a broad swath of different ways to interpret one's religion. So as a Baptist, it's very frequent that people imagine that Baptists are just one way, that it's Bible believing, hell or high water, my way or the highway sort of faith.
00:37:14
Speaker
But there are these Baptists all over the world. One example is the no-heller Baptists of Appalachia who believe that hell doesn't exist, that hell is on earth right now and we suffer because of our sins, but all people will be saved by God and all will go to heaven when they die. That is worlds away from the Southern Baptist Church you probably hear down the street from you.
00:37:41
Speaker
In the same way, there are so many different aspects of Christian faith that are less known in the Western world and less known to Protestant Christians here in America. Theosis is one becoming like becoming God in a real way, becoming divine, where our ego or our sense of self slowly disappears as we participate in the very energies of God, as we are united with the energies of God.
00:38:07
Speaker
as John the Baptist said in the Bible, he must increase and I must decrease. You can see where the overlaps there with psychedelics might come from. That is the sort of thing that I think we need to do more of. If you can't figure out how psychedelics connect with your faith, don't even either flatten psychedelics to make it fit in your faith or flatten your faith to make it fit in psychedelics.
00:38:34
Speaker
explore both in their uniqueness, and you will probably find many, many more ways to connect the two than you ever found possible before.
00:38:44
Speaker
I love that. That is such a refreshing point of view. That's perfect. So what really makes me contemplate the synergy as well of religions and psychedelics are some of the iconography that you see. For instance, for me, as I started my journey of psychedelics,
00:39:04
Speaker
I was a massive atheist, massive atheist. And then psychedelics changed that within the first 30 seconds of the first peak experience that I had. Um, but subsequently I've had experiences where for one on a DMT trip, um, I was confronted with mother Mary figure and I'm getting goosebumps just like saying it. It was the most beautiful, like beautiful experience I've ever had where mother Mary was right in my field of view and like.
00:39:32
Speaker
Obviously, I'm still I'm not moving or anything. Yeah, my consciousness felt as it was as if it was moving and she was right in the center of my awareness and she was guiding me through this beautiful landscape and just feeding me with all this love and Being someone who was not Christian
00:39:51
Speaker
I was never raised Christian. I never went to church as a kid. I was lucky. I consider myself lucky. My family didn't really impose any sort of ideological or political beliefs on me and my siblings. We were just sort of able to figure it out on our own.
00:40:08
Speaker
So, I mean, obviously these symbols are deeply embedded into our culture as well, but the fact that I am not a Christian yet, I was confronted with this Christian symbol. Now I have on my altar, I have, you know, the Virgin Mary. I have a little statue of her and I consider her like a, you know, one of my spirit guides now.
00:40:28
Speaker
yet still not Christian. So it's strange, you know, you even see this in like religious cultures in Egypt and stuff like that. You see hieroglyphs and all kinds of imagery. So my main question that I contemplate with myself is like, what came first? Did religions extract this and these iconography or these icons out of the psychedelic experience?
00:40:52
Speaker
Or are these experiences influenced by our sort of cultural foundation of religion? Yeah. Um, are you, are you familiar with the work of Carl Jung? Have you read into me? I, I, I have a copy of Jung's red book, a facsimile of it right next to me right now. Uh, gorgeous. Um, but, uh, I do think that there are symbols and ideas and, um,
00:41:22
Speaker
innate knowledge, I don't know how else to say it, that is built into our brains as human beings. That is pretty universal to us. And psychedelics and religion pool on those symbols. So it's not surprising to me when we would see a Mother Mary symbol in a DMT trip, even if one wasn't religious.
00:41:47
Speaker
Um, even if one had no concept of Christianity, I think we could see that. Um, one of the experiences I had, uh, was, uh, uh, the dancing Shiva, uh, where I took whoever got me these acid tabs, I think had taken a little too much of themselves and sort of double dipped. Uh, you ever had that experience? Um, and I took far more LSD than I thought I was taking. Um,
00:42:16
Speaker
And before me was the Dancing Shiva, but I didn't recognize that's what it was, doing the dance of creation and destruction, holding time and existence in its hands. Then I read William Richards' book, Sacred Knowledge, on psychedelics, and I read about somebody else who saw the Dancing Shiva in their dream, or in their psychedelic vision.
00:42:41
Speaker
I read of somebody else who also saw the same thing, and both of these people had no concept of Hinduism at all. I forgot I had a concept of Hinduism until I went to an art museum and saw an artistic depiction that was so similar that I realized I had to have seen it before, and that's what my brain was working with. But something I was just talking about with a friend last night,
00:43:09
Speaker
was when I take psychedelics or when I dream or when I daydream now, my mind and the images that go through my mind are doing this dance. And I can't quite see the dance. I can't quite make out the movement. But there is a movement of thought and imagery throughout my life now that is the dancing Shiva.
00:43:35
Speaker
I think Jung is probably right that that dance, that movement is something inbuilt in the human psyche, the idea of dancing and that it appears in different ways and different religions, different dreams, different visions, different psychedelic trips. So I don't think it's a matter of what came first, the psychedelic trip or the religion. I think they're both drawing on the same fundamental part of the human psyche that knows of
00:44:04
Speaker
difference, change, creation, destruction, movement, whether we like it or not. So is this like the collective unconscious that Jung speaks of?
Spiritual Views on God and Afterlife
00:44:13
Speaker
Yeah, something like that. I'm not sure if I buy his more overt version of it where it's an actual thing like God that connects all of conscious universe.
00:44:28
Speaker
But I definitely do buy the idea that there are some symbols and some ideas that are inherently indwell in the human psyche That pop up in different ways. Absolutely That leads me to a question also as well that I probably could have asked you right in the beginning But in your view, what is God? God is
00:44:59
Speaker
But at the end of the day, that's it. Human language would be, if you can describe God with language, you're not describing God. And so I think the only way that we can describe God is through image and symbol. So I, like I said, leaning into our differences so that we can learn from each other. I very much understand God as defined in the Nicene Creed and the Christian tradition.
00:45:28
Speaker
God is Jesus incarnate. God is the three people of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That is the way that I come to experience and interpret God most strongly. But I also recognize and need to have the humility to know other people might see this differently. And I might be wrong.
00:45:54
Speaker
This is simply how I have had God revealed to me, and I can't deny it anymore that I didn't ask a Jew to deny that they're a Jew, and that that's how they understand God. The way I've described it to people is that we've all heard that all paths lead to God, and this very well might be true, but we have to choose a path
00:46:17
Speaker
You can't wander through, if you're trying to reach the summit, you can't wander through the woods popping on one path and off another path and this way and that way. Whatever way has been revealed to us as a tradition that this is how God is being shown to us, we have to commit to it, work with it, sit with it, so that those symbols and images are most fully revealed in their fullness of God to us.
00:46:46
Speaker
Yeah, this brings to mind and I'm going to apologize to my listeners because I bring this up constantly. I've said this a million times.
00:46:55
Speaker
This concept that Ramdas has described, what's spirituality is like this massive mountain. And each person starts at a different position of around the big base of the mountain. And we're all going up to the summit. We're all taking our own different path. Like you said, we're finding our path, we're going up and we're reaching the same summit. And when you get to the top, you find that you're intermingling with Jews, Christians, you know, psychedelic people, Buddhists, you know, because the, the path that you took.
00:47:24
Speaker
doesn't necessarily matter. And at the top, when you get there, you actually can't really tell who took which path. And I really love that because it does really just bring home the point that like, we're all pointing to the same thing. That's this ineffable thing that we're trying to, to bring down into a duality, because ultimately,
00:47:48
Speaker
Well, you try to describe the, the absolute, you're, you're breaking it down into like the nature of the dual, because that's how you describe things with human language. And that's how, you know, we interpret information that comes in. So when we want to define something and sort of place it into a box, we're taking the unity of all things and we're placing it down into like a duality, which, I mean, you just really can't describe anything accurately doing that. It's just the only way we can sort of make sense of it here.
00:48:18
Speaker
Yeah, and yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that is frequently, but one of the things that's frequently missed in that I think is the need for true belief in something that we can at least grab onto. When we talk about these different symbols, I think a lot of people like to try to jump right to the summit.
00:48:48
Speaker
that we're just going to bop right on up there and everything's fine. But for many, many mystics, they didn't reach this sort of summit by shedding their religious differences. They reached the summit by dedicating themselves to it. So the Sufi Muslims, as they became more Muslim, they got closer to that ineffable truth.
00:49:14
Speaker
as the Christian mystics became more Christian, they got closer to that ineffable truth. Shamans, Hinduism, Buddhism, whatever you want to say with that. I love that image that Ram Dass uses, but I think some people have this idea of, all right, we made it, we can take off our cloaks, and here we are at God, so hey, everybody, glad we made it. But the mystics consistently give this image of
00:49:42
Speaker
God loves uniqueness. God loves difference. God loves all of this different diversity. And that by leaning into your particular form of diversity, you are able to more closely reach that top of the summit.
00:50:02
Speaker
Love that. And that's where the spiritual practice comes into play. Whatever your spiritual practice is, it needs to be or it should be at least consistent and you should dedicate yourself to it and you will find your path. And people's paths often converge, they change, but it's the way that you find your path is through spiritual practice. Absolutely, absolutely.
00:50:27
Speaker
I thought about converting to Buddhism halfway through my time in seminary, which was a rough time to be thinking about that. But instead of Buddhism, I came across Hezekastic meditation, which is an Eastern Orthodox tradition. And what I found was a lot of similarities between mantra meditation, mindfulness meditation, disconnection from desire, compassion for all living things,
00:50:56
Speaker
there were all of these grand similarities with Buddhism within my own tradition, my own Christian tradition. So yeah, I 100% agree with you that it needs to start with practice. But before you decide, I think it's also good that before you know what practice you're going to commit to, or you like that practice, so should you convert from the faith that you feel so strongly attached to.
00:51:21
Speaker
got to explore your own faith that more likely than not, there's millions of people that believe it, maybe even billions over history and a diversity, a beautiful carnival and circus of different options to be able to approach God with symbols with which you're familiar and practices that get you there closer. Definitely, definitely.
00:51:45
Speaker
Let's talk a little bit about death. What does, what do your studies and also your psychedelic experiences teach you? Um, or what light does it shed on death? That's a great question. Um, there's a study, there is one study that I saw that compared psychedelic experiences to near death experiences. And there were some great overlaps.
00:52:12
Speaker
but there are also some significant differences. So I can say pretty strongly that psychedelic experience and what it gives us even at those high dose levels is not the same experience that comes at death. The only way that we can experience death is to experience death. And if we're trying to tell ourselves that we're ready for death because we've taken psychedelics,
00:52:41
Speaker
then we're actually giving ourselves a crutch to avoid the reality of what death is. But some of those aspects that are similar to death are nonetheless useful for us to begin meditating on it. When I first took DMT, I was terrified. I had always had those hours for a come up with a drug, right? You have a lot of time to get ready for what's coming.
00:53:09
Speaker
And this was just there seconds later that I was going to die. Um, and I just had to let go because I realized I have no control over this thing. No control. I am going to have a DMT trip, whether I like it or not now, and I'm going to die whether I like it or not. So you can either resist the irresistible and have a terrible time.
00:53:36
Speaker
or you can just let it happen and appreciate the experience for what it is. So that experience taught me a lot about death and how to approach it. I take a rather agnostic view of what happens when you die. I do believe that the consciousness exists beyond death, but I don't have any idea what that looks like.
00:54:02
Speaker
And that's part of what the psychedelic experience teaches as well, that your concept of what consciousness means looks really different on five grams of magic mushrooms than it does on a Tuesday afternoon when you look out your window at work and wonder, God, is this all there is? Do we just work and die? So yeah, I do like the Christian idea of theosis, and that's what I lean into when I think about death.
00:54:31
Speaker
that when you die, and this is something that can happen throughout your life as well, the goal of the Christian faith is for oneself to begin to disappear and to be filled with the energies of God. This is something that can happen right now through spiritual practice, through participation in Mass, or the Holy Mystery in the Orthodox Church, or going to whatever tradition you're a part of.
00:54:56
Speaker
It could happen in your daily meditation and prayer through time spent in nature, through time with your family, the slow dissolution of your desires to be filled with the humility, the love, the joy of God. When you die, that is not the beginning of that journey into theosis becoming one with God. It is just a big step.
00:55:22
Speaker
And if you spend your whole life starting to lean into that process of theosis of leaning into God's energies, it's not going to be nearly as scary when the time comes. And you're just taking a really big step into something you've practiced for all your life.
00:55:39
Speaker
Very, very beautifully said. And I do think that psychedelics are a very good tool to practice that transition of death and to practice like curbing the anxiety of death. You know, as you see in a lot of these research clinics where I think it was Johns Hopkins University did one where they were giving psilocybin to end of life patients who had stage four cancer and things like that. And a lot of them were becoming a lot more
00:56:09
Speaker
open to the transition of death. And I think one of them actually said that, which was really cool, he said, I learned more about what it means to live. So as a result, my fear of death has been greatly diminished.
00:56:26
Speaker
And you see these cultures, like if you read the Tibetan book of the dead, they describe the Bartos. And these are obviously just hypotheses, you know, theories of, you know, what it means to transition, what kinds of things you're going to be going through during transition. But I do think psychedelics are a great way to practice because of that, that ego disillusion, you know, because one thing that you are going to lose when you die, at least in my opinion, is probably your sense of
00:56:56
Speaker
Josh, Caleb, my preferences, who I think I am, my family, all these things that you define yourself as pretty safe to say that stuff is probably going to be shed and whatever exists beyond that. I'm kind of with you there. I do think that consciousness does move on or it goes somewhere or does something, but.
00:57:17
Speaker
Even saying like, I think your consciousness moves on or go somewhere, it feels dirty because again, I'm bringing this powerful, absolute concept down into a dualistic way. And it's just, it doesn't describe it. Yeah, absolutely. Well, and, and one of the, one of the things that's powerful for me with, uh, we talked about before with the Eucharist in this idea is, um,
00:57:43
Speaker
You know, when you eat the bread and the wine, this is Jesus crucified that you are eating. In a very real way, Jesus is right here. And I've meditated on that with the concept of death and sort of consciousness or substance before. And it's a very powerful idea that when you sit there and look at this bread and this wine
00:58:10
Speaker
And this isn't just supposed to be the man, Jesus Christ. This is supposed to be God of the universe. And if you are, as I am a panentheist, that all in God, this is the universe in a wafer and a little sip of wine. You really think about that, the unification that creates. And that there, this is a person. This is a person and God. This is a person and God and the universe here in my hands.
00:58:41
Speaker
That meditation has been incredibly powerful for the opposite with me. This is my body, and this is Caleb Graves, and I'm also dissolving into the being of God. And when I take this wafer in this juice, I somehow take in God as well. The boundaries between oneself and God and those around us
00:59:07
Speaker
begin to fade away substantially in that moment. And I think that a lot of the Christian practices, that's also a way of preparing for death and that sort of transitionary period too. Yeah, for sure, for sure. So how do you think of heaven and hell within this?
00:59:28
Speaker
So one of the misunderstandings with Christianity, I think, is that the goal is that you either go to heaven or you go to hell. And that's, those are your options. But it's what we see in the Christian scriptures and most of Christian history is the belief that in the resurrection of the dead, that eventually everyone will be resurrected into this spirit body, this alternative means of existence. It's not totally clear.
00:59:55
Speaker
You're going to be genderless according to Paul. You're not going to want the same things. You won't need to eat or drink, but you can eat and drink. It's describing this very, very different mode of existence. Like we said before, the dissolution of what it meant to be us is it's over. It's something totally new has begun. And that is the goal of the Christian faith, is participation in that resurrection.
01:00:23
Speaker
Again, leaning into our differences, these are the symbols I use to understand what happens when one dies. So I do believe in hell, which might be shocking for people, but I don't think it's permanent. We see in the Psalms this idea where King David is crying out
01:00:46
Speaker
And he's being oppressed. He's being defeated, tortured, family is being massacred, et cetera. Just his enemies are overtaking him. And as he asks for salvation, for help, for liberation from his oppressors, you see that he's asking for pain to be cost to his oppressors. If you are the one who is standing on another man's neck,
01:01:12
Speaker
and you have to be tackled to get off his neck, it's going to hurt. Liberation for the oppressed frequently looks quite painful for the oppressor. So I also think about this in very psychedelic terms, frankly, where if theosis, if God's wrath and love are one and the same,
01:01:37
Speaker
It is the burning away that has come before so that we can experience God directly, the energies of God directly. If we have committed heinous things throughout our lives, or even not that heinous things, but we've participated in a structure, an institutional system, a society that crushes the weakest and poorest among us, and we did that knowingly and did very little to help,
01:02:06
Speaker
We might experience quite a bit of suffering being before a God who is pure love and justice. But I think the difference comes in with repentance. The same way with psychedelics when we have that overwhelming anxiety, fear, terror, pain during a difficult trip where there is something we're not willing to face. That I think is a decent conception of such a hell.
01:02:32
Speaker
But when you have repentance, when you say, yes, I did not love my neighbor as myself. Yes, I did not give to the poor and needy as I should have. Yes, I willfully took advantage of the most vulnerable among us. And you face that. It's not going to hurt any less, but now you are welcoming that like a necessary surgery or the setting of a bone.
01:02:57
Speaker
It is painful, it is horrible, but you know it's necessary to continue your journey. But if you're someone who's having a psychedelic trip, right, and you refuse to look at these things, you refuse to look at this, you're just going to keep suffering. The trip might end and you're just riddled with anxiety and fear. Same way that I see heaven and hell in a lot of ways. We are going to face the exact same energies of God
01:03:25
Speaker
And it's either going to feel like great joy and love, great wrath and suffering, or as many times happens in psychedelics, both at the same time. And we can choose repentance to say, I'm sorry, show me love, show me justice, and lean into that. That's heaven. Or.
01:03:47
Speaker
It is the refusal to look at that, the refusal to repent, the refusal to acknowledge you've done wrong and the continuation of suffering. Amazing. Reminds me of the hero's journey a bit, you know, uh, the refusal of the call being, you know, the, uh, the, the roadway to hell and, uh, possible, uh, unforeseen consequences to not only you, but your entire community from refusing the call. That's a good idea. I hadn't thought of that before.
01:04:17
Speaker
Yeah. And Caleb, as we're approaching an hour here, we're a bit above and I want to be respectful of your time.
Promoting Psychedelic Theology
01:04:25
Speaker
As we wrap up here, can you just share where people can find you and let's talk a little bit about psychedelic theology or psychedelic education ministry. Sure. So I'm on Facebook, Instagram. I've got a Patreon that's coming up pretty soon on and a website of psychedelic theology.
01:04:44
Speaker
So if you just search that on Facebook, Instagram, Patreon, YouTube, that should come up. Or go to psychedelictheology.com. This is what I'm hoping to do full time at some point in the future, slowly building it up over time, is creating spaces where, one, people who have Christian experiences like yourself but aren't Christians have a safe Christian to talk to about such experiences where I'm not trying to convert you.
01:05:14
Speaker
But also simultaneously, people who are a Christian who takes psychedelic substances therapeutically or recreationally and need to figure out how to integrate this into their spiritual lives, the symbols they already hold dear, will also have a place to understand that. So a lot of this work is going to be wonderful conversations like this, where I recognize I'm one of the only Baptists in the world who is interested in both topics at the same time.
01:05:41
Speaker
Uh, but also consulting for churches, making articles. I've got a couple of informational, uh, really nice YouTube videos I'm making coming up. So it's going to be everything all at once, really. Yeah. This is something that I really think the world needs and I'm so happy to, uh, to promote it. And I'm so happy that we got to have this conversation today, Caleb. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Definitely. Thank you very much.
01:07:13
Speaker
you