Can Psychedelics Lead People to God?
Inside This Episode
The use of psychedelic drugs is on the rise with outspoken proponents like tech giant Elon Musk and popular podcaster Joe Rogan. On this episode, Maybe God guest host Justin Brierley talks to artist, writer, and former atheist Ashley Lande about her years-long journey seeking meaning and transcendence through psychedelics. Ashley describes a terrifying encounter with a being who she believes was Satan that eventually led her to Jesus.
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Transcript
Julie Mirlicourtois: On this episode of Maybe God, the use of psychedelic drugs is on the rise, with proponents like tech giant Elon Musk and popular podcaster Joe Rogan who's been open about his use of DMT and magic mushrooms.
There's a whole world out there that you're not seeing. It's like we're living life inside this very strange tent, this very thin membrane tent. And if you just unzip that tent and step out, the entire wilderness of the universe exists.
Today, Maybe God guest host Justin Brierley talks to artist, writer, and former atheist Ashley Lande about her years-long journey seeking meaning and transcendence through psychedelics.
Justin Brierley: What was it like kind of living in that kind of haze, if you like, that sort of world? What was it you were pursuing and experiencing?
Ashley Lande: I was pursuing some omega point of spiritual enlightenment, and I felt like I was being spurred on by something. I got to the point where I was doing it by myself probably at least once if not twice a week. I became increasingly disconnected with reality and the world around me.
Julie Mirlicourtois: In her interview, Ashley describes a terrifying encounter with a being who she believes was Satan that eventually led her to the foot of the cross.
Ashley Lande: That night really shook me up because I was not on drugs, and I was lying in my bed, and I saw an apparition in the corner of my room. It was just like a dark column of smoke that was kind of swirling around. I mean, it was substantial. And I thought to myself, "Okay, that's not really there. I'm just going to go back to sleep."
Then I had this little terrier mix, and he stood up, and he bristled, and he started barking straight at it. And that really freaked me out.
Julie Mirlicourtois: That's all today on Maybe God.
[00:01:57] <music>
Justin Brierley: Hello, and welcome to the Maybe God Podcast. I'm Justin Brierley, guest hosting this week's edition of the show. This show inspires doubtful believers and hopeful skeptics to seek answers to their most challenging faith questions through uplifting and powerful storytelling.
My guest today is Ashley Lande, author of the brand new book, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ. Ashley is an artist and writer whose journey of faith involved a long period trying to find meaning and transcendence through drug-induced psychedelic experiences.
But when the trips turned sour, she went on a journey that led from getting high to discovering the Most High, Jesus, the true source of transcendence and meaning.
Ashley, welcome along.
Ashley Lande: Thank you so much.
Justin Brierley: It's great to be talking to you again. This is an amazing book, so much that I want to cover in the short time we've got. But can you recall the first time that you tripped on psychedelic drugs and what you remember about that experience?
Ashley Lande: Sure. So the very first time would have been my senior year in college. I had a friend who had some psilocybin mushrooms. I really didn't know much about psychedelics. I remember that I decided to get dressed up in hippie garb, which I thought was appropriate for tripping.
We blended up the mushrooms in a blender with orange juice — there were four of us — and we each drank a portion and we just had a good time. We stayed in our apartment for the most part. We went outside a little bit. Like I said, it wasn't a revelatory experience.
There wasn't really a spiritual dimension to it so much for me at that point. But I did think that it was really fun and magical and I immediately wanted to do it again.
Justin Brierley: What was happening in that moment and future kind of experiences that you continue to have? Probably hard to put into language, though you do a great job in the book. What were some of the ways in which it hit you when you went on these trips?
Ashley Lande: I just thought it was so interesting that it was outside of any kind of consciousness that I had ever experienced. At that point, I was a pretty hardline atheist. So, like I said, even though that first trip wasn't necessarily spiritual, there was an aspect of the transcendent to it.
There were lots of visual distortions, lots of auditory distortions, and I just thought they were beautiful and interesting. As you said, I'm an artist, so I just found that really intriguing.
And I was really attracted to experiencing something that was outside of normal waking consciousness. I just thought it was intriguing and fascinating, and I wanted more of it.
Justin Brierley: I mean, you talk about in the book how you'd sort of had a sort of nominal kind of church experience growing up, but you'd kind of decided it wasn't true. You've been quite influenced actually by some of the new atheist writings, especially Christopher Hitchens.
So when you came to this, you'd kind of resigned yourself to the fact that this is a world without any ultimate meaning or purpose, I suppose. So tell us about that journey and why, I guess, the psychedelic experiences started to change that.
Ashley Lande: So I was raised in a Methodist church, and looking back, there are things I'm grateful about it now for. Methodists are very good at grace and loving people. So I am grateful that I had some kind of a foundation, but it wasn't a very... I wouldn't say it was a very strong foundation.
Being Methodist was kind of a tradition in my mother's family, and so I feel like it was based a little more in tradition. My dad was very conservative, and so he never liked the Methodist church, but he would allow himself to be dragged along a couple Sundays a month.
I don't remember really reading the Bible or really knowing what was even in the Bible, aside from some Sunday school lessons about Noah's Ark. I don't remember necessarily praying together, and I don't mean this as an indictment against my parents. I think they were just doing the best they could with what they were raised with.
And so when I was, I think about 14, it was just very easy... Because I had never genuinely had faith, it was pretty easy for me to scandalize my parents by declaring that I was an atheist, you know? I got into reading different things at that time, like the beat poets, Jack Kerouac, things like that. So the underground, you know, or the counterculture just seemed appealing and cool.
I was a very arrogant teenager, and it just seemed fascinating and interesting to pursue something outside of what I've been raised with. I think I discovered Christopher Hitchens maybe when I was in college. He just seemed very intelligent and clever to me.
I think looking back, I think the hard certainty of particularly the New Atheist really appealed to me. Like I said, I was a very arrogant teenager, just that hard certainty really appealed to me. I guess I'd say the rebelliousness of being an atheist appealed to me at that time.
Justin Brierley: What led you then in the direction in the end of these psychedelic experiences and looking into taking mushrooms, acid, LSD, and so on?
Ashley Lande: I think at that point by the near the end of my college experience, I was burnt out on alcohol, which had been a big part of the circle I ran in. Just getting drunk. I was really burnt out on that. And so I was just kind of open to whatever.
You know, and part of being open to whatever is I didn't necessarily have any moral boundaries or limitations like that. And so I was just, yeah, more or less open to anything. And so when my friend said he had psilocybin mushrooms, I thought, "Well, why not?"
As I said, I didn't have experience with or much knowledge about psychedelics. I don't even know that I had the awareness that you could have a bad experience, you could have a negative experience. I thought it was just more or less like any other drug. As I said, after that first psilocybin experience, I certainly wanted more.
Justin Brierley: And you did. You came back for more. I guess you found in it something that you hadn't been able to experience before with these revelatory experiences. I guess at one level, that did switch you on to the idea of transcendence, the spiritual. I think you kind of started to get interested in, you know, what you might call New Age kind of ways of looking at life, spirituality, and so on. How did you kind of change in terms of your view of life, the spirituality, the supernatural, that kind of thing?
Ashley Lande: Yeah, I did. I mean, on one hand, I look back and see the winding path that God took me through. I look at that now, though, through the lens of Romans 8:28, that God works all things for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.
It did open me up to the idea of the transcendent realm, the idea of spirituality. But the irony was that I became open to anything except for Christianity. Like I literally... like I talked about that moral boundlessness that I had embraced before through reading people like the Beat Poets, reading existentialists and nihilists. That kind of turned into spiritual boundarylessness, except for Jesus. I didn't want to hear about Jesus, if anybody talks about Jesus.
But yeah, I started reading different things, just different things from the 60s. My first... it was probably, gosh, six months to a year after that first psilocybin trip that I had my first LSD trip. And that was actually not what I would call a fun experience at all. It was devastating in many ways. It was existentially and spiritually shattering. But I just immediately wanted more of that.
In the end, I can see I was seeking something outside of myself. I knew that that hard certainty of new atheism, the idea of this closed dome of a world where there's nothing penetrating from the outside, there's no transcendence, there's no supernatural, it had become unsatisfying. Even that hard certainty of it and lack of mystery had become unsatisfying.
Justin Brierley: I mean, just take us through a little more of what you experienced as you went on this. You don't get addicted, I'm guessing, to psychedelics in the way, say, a heroin addict does. But I'm guessing there is something addictive about the experience, about living in that world and that mode.
So you were doing this on a very regular basis, occasionally saying, well, when you did have a bad trip, I'll only do this occasionally. But you found yourself going back to it before too long. What was it like living in that haze, if you like, that world, if you like, of these experiences? What was it you were pursuing and experiencing?
Ashley Lande: After that first LSD trip, I remember thinking, I don't know if I'll ever do that again. Then I think it was two weeks later that I was starting to call around and look for LSD. I got to the point where I was doing it by myself probably at least once, if not twice a week.
I became increasingly disconnected with reality and the world around me. I think what in my head I was pursuing, and when I look back on my writings from that time, which are strange to read, but I was pursuing some omega point of spiritual enlightenment, and I felt like I was being spurred on by something.
I look back and now I think it was a spirit or demon. But I just felt so compelled. I felt like it's just around the next corner. Like this elusive point of enlightenment. And the irony, of course, was that it kept shrinking away from me and receding into the horizon as I was pursuing it.
But yeah, I really felt like I was on this epic cosmic journey, and I was going to reach ultimately this point that I thought I didn't know what it was. It got to the point where I almost didn't care if I lived or died. I just wanted to be absorbed into the all or be absorbed into it.
I think it's fascinating that Alan Watts, he's someone that I read a lot of back then, he was kind of a 60s countercultural guru of I guess you could call it psychedelic spirituality. And he taught things of this nature. Like, you know, the boundaries of our body are an illusion. We're just part of the all-in-all. You know, like, I am part of the sun. The sun is part of me. Like, this boundarylessness of personality, boundarylessness of the individual, that the individual is an illusion.
I read his biography written by one of his children and he was also an alcoholic and was very troubled, which is very sad. But on his deathbed... one of his children said, "Don't you want to live? Why are you destroying yourself through alcohol? Don't you want to live?" And he said something like, "It's not worth fighting for. It's not worth living for." That's not verbatim, but it was something of that nature. There's just this totally defeated, almost nihilistic statement.
I look back and I think that was where I was heading. I feel like that is the logical outworking of that worldview. You know, that ultimately, well, nothing really matters if I'm just part of the all-in-all and we just get absorbed back.
There was also some Hinduism light in there as well, like everything is just cyclical. We're constantly getting absorbed back into the wall and getting spit out again, you know, as some reincarnated being, and then we have to go through the cycle of karma again.
Yeah, when I look back at where it was psychologically, it was rather scary. It was like I no longer valued my life. I no longer valued living. But I really believed, as I said, I really believed that I was on this journey of cosmic proportions.
On one hand, it was extremely consequential, but on the other hand, it was of no consequence at all because it didn't really matter.
Justin Brierley: I mean, and that sense of kind of being enveloped by the oneness and everything being meaningful but meaningless at the same time and so on, I guess that is tied to what the trip often induces in people. I've often heard of people talking about sort of, you know, this ego death and being enveloped by the kind of oneness of everything as though you kind of lose your own self in the process. Was that where that kind of sense was coming from that really it's all about this kind of ego death and so on?
Ashley Lande: Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah. I experienced the so-called ego death many times. I mean, that becomes kind of a pursuit, I guess, or a goal of tripping. It's interesting because at first it can feel supremely liberating. And it's also very destabilizing because it can feel like all of your preconceptions about life and what reality is have just completely been obliterated and swept away by this cosmic tide of, I don't know what you call it, nothingness and beingness, like two sides of the same coin. And it can feel very, very liberating to people.
But like I said, ultimately for me, after a time, it became, I don't know if I would say a prison or it just led to led to nihilism, which I feel like is just the logical outworking of that kind of thinking. So yeah, I experienced that many times.
And I think I almost got to the point where... I remember I picked... I don't know where I picked this phrase up. My earth trip is what I called having to function in reality. Having to have a job, having to brush my teeth, I called my earth trip.
I got to the point where I was like, I don't want to be on my earth trip anymore. I just want to be absorbed in this other world.
Justin Brierley: And that dual kind of life almost that you were living in this kind of cosmic adventure versus the very mundane kind of challenges of normal life, you spell out so well in the story. I guess what's interesting to me is now your reflections. And we'll come to how you became a Christian in due course, but looking back on that, do you think of those as spiritual experiences or just chemical experiences?
Because you do obviously talk at one point in the book about being very aware, especially on one sort of in-between trips you had a kind of experience, which for you, you write, "I remember the night I finally saw him, the devil, Papa Diabolus." It sounds like you do think there was a spiritual thing going on there, even if you were tapping into something that was potentially quite dangerous.
Ashley Lande: Yes, I definitely did. And I still do. I think it's interesting that I had this almost like a pet name for the devil. And in my mind, there was this cosmic war going on between good and evil, whatever I perceived to be good.
That night really shook me up because I was not on drugs. I was lying in my bed and I saw an apparition in the corner of my room. It was just like a dark column of smoke that was kind of swirling around. But I mean, it was substantial. And I thought to myself, "Okay, that's not really there. I'm just going to go back to sleep. You know, my drug-addled brain is just producing this apparition. That's not really there." It was just interesting.
As much as I was enmeshed in this world and I loved it in a way, I couldn't really handle the idea that I was having visual hallucinations while I was not on drugs. So I told myself, it's not real. And then I had this little terrier mix. He stood up and he bristled and he started barking straight at it.
I was on the second floor of an apartment, so it was in the middle of the night. It's not like there was someone walking by. There wasn't any noise from the apartments above me or below me. That really freaked me out.
But I absolutely think there is a spiritual reality to it. It's not just chemicals assailing our brains. Although I think the fact that there is a chemical reality to it does not negate the spiritual reality. And I do think that makes it really dangerous because I feel like people always get more than they bargained for, that these drugs are taking us places that we're not intended to go to, at least not in our fallen state. So yeah, I absolutely think that they were real spiritual experiences in a sense.
Justin Brierley: I mean, those who do vouch for these experiences, obviously you're not one of them now, but those who do kind of pursue enlightenment, transcendence through this route, what do they think is happening? Is it some kind of breaking down of some barrier that is normally there?
Ashley Lande: I've heard different theories. That it somehow taps into our... it's serotonergic. Psychedelics are serotonergic, so somehow they break down our normal meaning-making filter, I guess. That they do in some sense sweep away our previous ways of understanding and filtering concepts and reality.
Of course, you know, I think about that and think like, are those really meant to be broken down in such a violent, sudden manner? I would really question that.
I think for those who believe that there's a genuine spiritual component, I think that they would probably believe that they're pulling back the veil on reality, that this idea of oneness and everything being one and everything being connected is the ultimate reality.
To be fair, some people do experience, and I experience at times, a feeling of oceanic love. But even those experiences of oceanic love, I look back and I feel like there was always an edge of... how can I describe it? An edge of danger to them or an edge of a lack of safety, of a lack of complete reassurance and rest even in those feelings of oceanic love.
I compare that, of course, to my experiences as a Christian of experiencing the presence of Jesus Christ. And there's the word I've used before, which it sounds a little strange, but it feels to me the appropriate word. There's a cleanness and a purity to the experiences of the presence of Jesus Christ that there never was to even the most, you know, bombastic oceanic experience of universal love that I would have experienced in psychedelics.
Justin Brierley: Yeah. So tell us about how things progressed to the point where I think you started to become somewhat jaded with these experiences. You were pursuing transcendence, but I think the returns were becoming less and less. You were getting more bad trips over good trips. And obviously, it was dominating your life to some extent. You ended up meeting your now husband and having your first child. How did that impact the journey as you went forward?
Ashley Lande: Profoundly. So my husband and I met at our acid dealer's house. He was just as into acid as I was. There's this dictum that floats around the psychedelic world. I still hear it today. I was just listening to a podcast interview a friend sent me yesterday. The title of the podcast was Psychedelic Saved My Life. And this woman used this language.
She said that the medicine only ever gives you what you need. And so that's a really interesting aspect of the whole psychedelic world. There's almost this deification, and I experience that too, like this deification of the drugs as kind of this god, this beneficent god that will only give you what you need and will only give you what's going to make you grow and what's going to make you progress. So I genuinely believe that.
And there's also... you might hear people say, there's really no such thing as a bad trip, because every trip is giving you what you need, whether you realize it or not, whether the experience itself is positive or not. And so there was absolutely vanishing returns, I guess you could call them, and I started...
Like I said, my first LSD trip could almost qualify as a bad trip, but I was not hindered by that. I did start having some really catastrophically bad trips, trips that were, I would say, traumatic and that it took me a few weeks to really ground myself back in reality from, at which then those points I was thankful for my earth trip or for reality.
Of course, in the annals of acid lore, you'll hear there are many people that never came back from... famous people that never came back from acid. Peter Green, who was Fleetwood Mac, Sid Barrett from Pink Floyd, There are many cases of these people that didn't ever fully come back. Sorry, that's enough of a story. I need to focus on the question you asked.
Justin Brierley: No, it's fine. Just while we're on this rabbit trail, these are brilliantly talented artists at one level who were obviously hugely influenced, as were the Beatles and everyone else, by psychedelia and so on. It is baptized with a kind of romanticism, the whole thing, in many people's minds.
Obviously, people assume it's one of those things that goes with being an artist. You can go back to the Romantic poets and others who also, there's been a strong link often between artistic types and seeking these kinds of experiences through drugs or whatever.
You yourself, obviously, are an artist and you were believing that this was kind of pushing your art forward and you were doing interesting, daring, provocative art when you were in these heightened states and so on. How do you put that all together, I suppose, is the question?
Ashley Lande: I've thought a lot about that too. On one hand, you have these prominent examples like the Beatles who claimed that their creativity was fueled by acid. But then if you start getting into the more obscure bands that were, quote-unquote, acid rock, a lot of it just isn't any good. A lot of it is just not good at all.
I would argue the Beatles were already immensely talented, but you look at the path that they took and how their relationships started breaking down, which again, you can't necessarily attribute that all to psychedelics.
But then another really prominent example is Brian Wilson. He has said in interviews that he thinks LSD is a really bad drug and that he doesn't think anyone should ever take it. And maybe he did have pre-existing mental illness before he took it.
I remember... I need to look this up to verify this, but someone told me that the first time he took acid, he laid on a bed and cried for six hours and then got up and wrote California Girls, which doesn't sound true at all. But he was really broken after. And he did have some things like he had a manager who was abusing him, you know, but he was really, really kind of psychologically broken by using psychedelics.
That's another example that people don't really talk about. And I feel like we have kind of lost the cultural lore of so-called acid casualties. It's interesting. Before I was on Unbelievable? with you, I talked to... I intentionally sought out as many old hippies that had turned Christian as I could. And I talked to, gosh, probably between 10 and 15 people like that, and every single one of them, without exception, every single one of them knew at least one or two people who had not come back psychologically from psychedelic use.
And I feel like now that we're experiencing this resurgence in years, people will say, oh, it was just like Nixon and the war on drugs. That's why it's all... that's what... you know, these killjoy bureaucratic killjoys. That's why everything got shut down.
But no, it's like they really did damage a lot of people. And a lot of people really didn't come back. And I feel like we've kind of lost that cultural knowledge.
Justin Brierley: I want to come back to talking about the modern resurgence of interest in psychedelics and all the claims around the health benefits and so on, and about people whose own Christian faith has gone on a similar trajectory to yours, but maybe in the 60s and 70s.
But let's come back to your own story, because as you said, LSD was functioning in the place of God for you. You actually write, "LSD was not just a person to me, it was a god. The thing that would make everything okay forever." So tell us about the journey of how LSD got replaced by Jesus. What was the trajectory you went on? I know this is a long story and I'm asking you to do it in a fairly short way, but what happened next in your journey?
Ashley Lande: It is a long story. I was definitely kicking against the goats for a very long time and kind of in a way dragged kicking and screaming to the foot of the cross. So we had our first child and I think that really made me start thinking about the logical outworkings of the philosophies that I was embracing.
We had a friend who gave us a children's book that was expressing, in a very fundamental childlike way, these different ideas about... and it said, "I am every person I meet. I am the puppy across the street." And I really started thinking about that.
And to hear it expressed, not being couched in this eloquent philosophical language, and to hear it just expressed in this really childlike tone, it seemed sinister. Especially when I looked at my own child and thought, I don't want him to just be reabsorbed into the all and have no retention of his individual himness because he was so precious to me. And so that really made me start kind of second-guessing, yeah, the philosophies and New Age beliefs that I had been embracing.
Another big part of it was I had a friend, a childhood friend who I kind of reconnected with, and she had remained a Christian through high school, college. She was talking about God did this and God did that and God... you know? And I was like, okay, whatever.
But we reconnected, and since we both had children now, we started having some playdates here and there. I remember when I was with her often I would go off on a tear about whatever random new-age idea that I was exploring at the moment. And sometimes I was reading some book, I don't even remember what it was now, that was like an alternative explanation of what was actually going on in the major Bible stories and I said something about the story of Abraham and Isaac.
And she would just always very gently counter what I was saying. She would say, "Well, the Bible says this. This is what the Bible says." And I would just kind of inwardly roll my eyes and move on. But I think that really had that really had an effect on me.
Looking back, she and her husband had a little precious two-year-old girl named Joella, and all of a sudden she started getting sick. She was running a fever for a couple weeks, and she ended up getting diagnosed with leukemia. And it was only three weeks from diagnosis to her passing. Horribly tragic, devastating event.
I remember going to her funeral service, and I was also newly pregnant at the time with my daughter, and just feeling like I can't find a way to shoehorn this into my philosophies. Like, "I can't believe that Joella has been reabsorbed into the all. I don't have a way to fit this. My worldview does not have a place for this level of tragedy and this level of sadness and this level of suffering." And so that kind of shook me up.
And it was also very moving to see Carrie and her husband not be completely destroyed. I think now of those contrasting pairs of adjectives that Paul uses in 2 Corinthians 4, like struck down but not destroyed. So that really had an effect on me because I thought, "If this happened to me, I would be just utterly annihilated. I don't know what I would do."
So those two things together really... and it was almost like... I almost felt like Carrie was comforting me at her own child's funeral. I think that really had an effect on me that I can't handle this, but for some reason, there's something that is sustaining her that can.
Justin Brierley: This obviously had quite a profound impact on you, this friendship and example. In tragic circumstances, obviously. You got to the point of actually trying church again with your husband. What fueled that particular decision?
Ashley Lande: So he started getting interested in Christianity. He had been seeing a psychologist for a season because he was just feeling like he was having trouble controlling his anger generally. The psychologist challenged him to quit smoking weed every day and to try going to church. And so he rose to the challenge.
And it's interesting, my husband will even say now, he never really had a bad trip, like a really bad trip. He never had one. But I think he also was getting to a point of just feeling burnt out on psychedelics and what they had to offer him. Like he felt like the well had run dry and he was looking for something more.
He started attending a Christian church near where we lived, and I said, no, absolutely not. I'm not going to a Christian church. Like I said, I was kicking against the goats for a long time. And it's interesting, like I was at a point of spiritual despair and desperation, and yet I still resisted so hard.
I think it was in my eighth month of pregnancy with my daughter, I finally agreed to go to a church service with him. I insisted that we sit near the back. And I was thinking, "I might be here, but I'm not one of these people. I'm not really participating in this."
The emotion overcame me, and I started weeping during the worship. It was befuddling because I thought, "I don't even know what these lyrics mean." I didn't understand if someone had tried to explained to me what Jesus did for us. I didn't even know what it meant. It was so foreign to me. Despite having grown up with some of that container and some of that terminology, I just didn't understand it. But I just found myself overcome with emotion.
But even after that, it was somewhat easy to rationalize and say, Well, I'm pregnant. I'm hormonal. But I did agree to keep going with him. And after we had our daughter, I remember the people at that church were so kind to us.
They brought us food, they came and visited us, and I was really touched by that. That's something that I had not ever experienced in the New Age psychedelic community. Which, I mean, you'll find plenty of nice, generous people, but there just isn't that tight-knit sense of community in place and that sense of love and service.
I had never experienced that before in any community, new age yoga, psychedelic that I had been in. And so that really had an effect on me.
Justin Brierley: So this was all, I suppose, breaking down some of the barriers and preconceptions. I guess was there a point at which you recognized that what you were looking for on the psychedelics wasn't going to be found there? And what was the point at which you realized actually the thing you were looking for was in the last place you expected it, this story of Jesus?
Ashley Lande: I remember I had an experience. I remember I was sitting on our front porch, and I just felt a voice say to me, It's time to quit LSD. Like it's time to give up LSD. It's time to stop." I remember I started weeping because... and the thought that just naturally occurred to me was, but LSD is my friend. Like LSD is my teacher. LSD is my god.
I don't know that I thought it in those exact terms at the time, but LSD was my hod. I didn't trust my god, certainly not anymore, but LSD was certainly my god. But I knew the voice, and I recognize it now as the voice of God. Even then, I knew it was right and it was true. But like I said, I was still kicking against the ghost, and I thought, "Well, maybe the problem is that LSD is a chemical. LSE is a chemical. It's made in a laboratory. Maybe the problem is that I need to turn to natural psychedelics again.
And I had some psilocybin trips and had tried salvia, and I always came back to LSD because it was my favorite, but I thought, okay, I need to go back to natural, quote-unquote, plant medicines, which is a term you'll hear a lot in the psychedelic world.
So I decided I was going to grow my own mushrooms. And my husband was able to get some spores from someone he knew. And so I undertook... It was vigor. I undertook this process of growing mushrooms. And I thought, you know, I prayed over this. I don't know what my prayers would have been, some kind of Sanskrit thing I learned from yoga. But I prayed over them, and I thought, "I am infusing them with the right energy, and therefore, I'm going to have a good trip. This is going to be a great experience.
I remember finally, the harvest came, and my husband and I arranged for babysitting for our kids, and we took the mushrooms. As soon as they started coming on, and I remember it was really strong, I just had this feeling like, Oh no. Just this sinking feeling of like, here we go again. It's the same place. The same rut in the roads. I'm going downhill. It's a bad trip again.
I remember just laying on the floor. I laid down on the floor and I said to my husband, "I really am dying this time. I'm dying. I'm dying this time." And I said, "Does anything mean anything?" And he said, "Yes, everything has meaning." And I started crying.
That trip was... oh, it was up and down and up and down and all over the place. I remember at one point I felt like I was chasing after God. I was pacing around our house, and I felt like I was chasing after God, and I just kept missing Him. His robes were whisking around the corner, and there was such a sorrowful, sorrowful feeling in it. And there was a sorrow for me too, and this didn't work. My foolproof plan, it didn't work. I was devastated, but after that, I was fully ready to move on. I just knew that it was over.
Justin Brierley: As you left that world behind, how did you find your way to embracing Christian faith?
Ashley Lande: Yeah, for sure. After that experience of first attending a church, and then especially after that mushroom trip, I started thinking, you know, maybe there is something to this Jesus person. You know, maybe I should give Him a try.
At first, though, I was still thinking like, Okay, like this is a... Christianity is a lens through which I can understand this perennial philosophy. It is not the reality itself, but it's a lens through which it can be filtered. So it was really profound for me when I realized, oh no.
The claim here is that Jesus is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. This is not another in the grab bag of different religions that I can pick and choose from. The claim here is that the Trinity is the ground of reality. The Trinity has always existed. Jesus is how we know what love is at all.
For so long, I had just had this kind of bespoke pick-and-choose religion where it was like whatever suited me at the time, and just realizing like, No, this is not subject to me. I am subject to Christ. Like I am subject to God. And that was really, really profound.
I also remember Carrie, my friend who had lost her daughter, she shared a hymn with me, It Is Well With My Soul. Obviously a very well-known hymn. I don't think I had ever heard it before though. And she said that it really ministered to them while they were grieving Joella.
At least in the most intense period, the aftermath... I don't think you ever stop grieving a child, but just in the intense aftermath of her death, it had really ministered to them. I put it on a playlist and kind of forgot about it.
There was one spring afternoon I was playing outside with my children on the porch. I had that playlist on and that song came on. And there was something that just grabbed me and captured my attention. And I started really listening to what it was saying.
All of a sudden, I just felt like something clicked into place as far as understanding what Jesus had done and what Jesus had done for me, and also the weight of my sin that He completely took it away. I also fully understood for the first time the weight of my sin.
You know, there's this idea in the New Age world that we've all just been damaged by life and reality. A yoga teacher I had would compare it... she would say we're all born like this perfect pristine crystal and then we get damaged and we get fingerprints and dirt on us from all the people that handle us.
I remember really thinking about that and thinking like, well, but like, where does the dirt come from? There has to be some kind of genesis of the damage that can occur. And there's this idea, too, in the New Age world that you can reach this enlightenment point of wholeness and perfect wholeness and perfect integrity and where you won't be damaged and broken anymore.
But anyway, I think it was that day sitting on the porch, it was just so profound for me. It was like I could acknowledge that yes, I am fundamentally, foundationally broken in some way. I am sinful. And reality is too. Like I didn't have to keep pretending that I just needed to do more yoga poses or meditate more or whatever to reach this point of wholeness. That I could feel deep down inside was not attainable.
It was also a profound relief to realize that not only did I not have to save myself through yoga, through meditation, through doing psychedelics, that I literally could not save myself. It was not possible. I utterly needed Jesus.
And so that night when my husband got home from work, we still had some new-age kish floating around our house and religious icons from Hinduism and Buddhism. I remember when he got home that night, I said, "All this needs to go. I'm done with all of it." And I didn't know how he would react to that. And he just said, "Yes, yeah, you're right, it does need to go."
Justin Brierley: Wow.
Ashley Lande: And so, yeah, we put it all in a trash bag and got rid of it.
Justin Brierley: There's much more that could be added to this story, but I will let people go to the book to read more. By the way, the book is really worth getting hold of, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ.
Just as we start to round out the interview though, Ashley, you're an example of a generation that is searching for meaning and purpose, and transcendence. I feel myself like actually that promise of the new atheist utopia of science and reason hasn't materialized for a lot of people. And even a well-known new atheist like Sam Harris has really gone back to trying to find people's sense of transcendent through meditation.
And I think he and others, Joe Rogan and others, have started to popularize the possibility that this might be the way in, a chemical way of finding transcendence through a psychedelic drug. So there's been, as you say, this new popularity there. What do you think of that?
Because I guess in a way, a lot of people see it as a kind of, well, it's a shortcut to this sense of meaning and purpose and transcendence. You at one time certainly, I guess, felt like that. So I guess what's your worry about it being kind of used in that way?
Ashley Lande: That it's really not that. I think I certainly believed it was that, but it really wasn't. And I feel like people almost always get more than they bargained for with psychedelics, and people can be seriously damaged. I feel like at best, it's a dead end, and at worst, it's people are seriously psychologically damaged from it, or it becomes an idol that's very hard to let go of.
It's really interesting that you mentioned Joe Rogan because I don't know if you've seen the clip floating around of him talking to, I think, Aaron Rodgers, who is also a huge proponent of psychedelics. He used to be the quarterback for the Green Bay Packers here in the US.
There's this clip I saw of Joe Rogan saying that he thinks what we need right now is Jesus. And if Jesus wanted to come back now, that would be great.
Joe Rogan: Unfortunately, the problem with living in a secular society and living in a society that has a lot of people that are atheists, that have no belief system at all, is you find a belief system. And that's a lot of these people that call themselves atheists, or they've subscribed to the religion of woke. You know, their God is equity and inclusiveness. Their God is this ideology that they think that you have to subscribe to. And that's why it's spooky.
Because human beings seem to have a very strong desire for some sort of order and form and some sort of pattern that they can follow that seems to be the right way to go. And they can be led. They can be led by cults. They can be led by groups of people. They can be led by intolerant governments and evil armies and corrupt politicians. They can be led.
But I think as time rolls on, people are going to understand the need to have some sort of divine structure to things, some sort of belief in the sanctity of love and of truth. And a lot of that comes from religion. A lot of people's moral compass and the guidelines that they've used to follow, to live a just and righteous life has come from religion.
Unfortunately, a lot of very intelligent people, they dismiss all the positive aspects of religion because they think that the stories are mere superstitious fairy tales that, you know, they have no place in this modern world and, we're inherently good and your ethics are based on your own moral compass and we all have one. That's not necessarily true. We need Jesus. I think for real. Like if He came back now, it'd be great. Jesus, if you're thinking about coming back-
Man: Right now...
Joe Rogan: Now's a good time.
Man: Pretty soon. Yeah, now's a good time. Well, there's a lot of people think that might be coming.
Joe Rogan: Well, it might be. Mark of the beast. If there is the Christianity part and Jesus wants to come back and save everything, it'd be good right around now. Yeah, like don't wait till the election.
Ashley Lande: I was really startled by it and I thought that was really fascinating because I don't listen to a lot of Joe Rogan because he loves the F word and my kids are always with me because we homeschool. But I've seen things here and there and I know in the past he was more into atheism and had his different shallow new atheist talking points. But yeah, I just thought that was really fascinating.
Sam Harris, it was interesting to me back in the day that he had taken psychedelics and yet was still a hard new atheist. I think the famous people who are promoting it, I think that's really dangerous, honestly. Someone like Joe Rogan is hugely influential. But anyway, I guess I was encouraged by seeing that and I thought it was very fascinating.
Justin Brierley: Obviously, you feel anyone who goes down that route is going to go down a dead end, like the one you found yourself stuck in the rut. But I guess what it does show is that people are still looking, and I guess they're looking in the wrong place. What can the Church learn, I suppose?
Because I sometimes wonder whether the Western Protestant Christianity sometimes can maybe feel a bit too rational or tame or theoretical. People are looking for something exciting, a kind of an experience. How can the church kind of, in a positive way, engage with the fact that evidently there is still this great hunger among people when it comes to looking into spiritual matters, transcendence, psychedelics, and so on?
Ashley Lande: Yeah, for sure. And I think there is part of me that's very much attracted to charismatic Christianity because it is more enchanted and it does acknowledge more that there is a spiritual realm and that there is spiritual warfare.
I think that there are branches of Christianity that, like you said, are too rational and are too quick to dismiss supernatural experiences and are too quick to say things like, well, you know, emotional experiences don't really matter. What matters is the Word of God, which I absolutely agree with that on some level, but I don't think that's to completely discount supernatural experiences or to discount emotional experiences of the presence of God.
I'm really hopeful because like you said, I think people are looking. I think people are burnt out on new atheism and the hard certainty of it. I think people are looking for mystery and enchantment. I think we all in our heart, like we want an experience of the presence of God. We want a transcendent experience.
I'm hopeful that there will be, like there was in the 60s with the Jesus people, like this great harvest of people for whom the promises of psychedelics did not deliver, who will be looking for, capital T, Truth, Jesus Christ, the way, the truth, and the life.
And so I think it's really important for church people who may have never apostatized, you know, and may have never left and who don't have any familiarity with drug experiences to not completely delegitimize those experiences or to say like, Oh, well, it was completely hallucinatory. There was no spiritual element to it because I really think that there is.
And I think the church should be ready to lovingly receive those people and also to recognize maybe that they'll come along slowly. Like I said, when I first became a Christian, I wasn't speaking Christianese yet, you know. My language was still couched in all these new-age terms that I was kind of trying to apply to Christianity.
But I think that there will also be many people who get burned out on psychedelics and are looking for truth. And I think the church should be ready to receive them.
Justin Brierley: I'm glad that you found your home and are able to be a guide for those who are perhaps, you know, looking to reach out to people, but also people who maybe are walking a similar path to you, Ashley. It's been fascinating hearing your story. Thank you so much for guiding us through it.
Ashley Lande: Thank you.
Justin Brierley: If you're watching, listening, please do get hold of this new book, The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ. It's just the most fascinating read. Extremely well written.
Ashley Lande: Oh, I'm sorry, I should add that it's not out yet. It comes out in October, but you can't pre-order it. So yeah.
Justin Brierley: Absolutely. This is pre-order. So we're getting in there really early with this interview with Ashley, but I really appreciate you kind of giving us an early peek at the book. So we'll make sure there are links to where people can pre-order.
Ashley Lande: Thank you so much.
Justin Brierley: For now, thank you so much for being with me and my guest on the Maybe God podcast.
Ashley Lande: Thank you.
Julie Mirlicourtois: This episode of Maybe God was produced by Julie Mirlicourtois, Adira Polite, and Eric and Geovanna Huffman. Our editor is Justin Mayer, and Donald Kilgore is the director of Maybe God's full-length YouTube videos. Please help more listeners find Maybe God by rating and reviewing us wherever you're listening today. Thanks for tuning in.
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