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#12467 What Does the Church Say About Psychedelics? - Steve Kramp
“What does the Church say about psychedelics?” This question opens a discussion on the Catholic perspective regarding the use of psychedelics, touching on their justification and the intriguing connection some claim exists between psychedelics and creativity. Additionally, the conversation delves into the nature of the entities encountered during such experiences. Join the Catholic Answers Live Club Newsletter Invite our apologists to speak at your parish! Visit Catholicanswersspeakers.com Questions Covered: 01:00 – What does the Catholic Church say about psychedelics? 35:50 – How can the use of psychedelics be justified? 37:57 – What’s the supposed link between creativity and taking psychedelics? 45:15 – Who are the entities we’re encountering?
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A
Buying or selling your home. Real Estate for Life can connect you with a pro life real estate agent. When Real Estate for Life receives a referral fee, they donate 65% to Catholic Answers. Learn more at realestateforlife.org. Hello and welcome to Catholic Answers Live. I am Cy Kellett, your host. Very happy to be back here, and I'm very grateful to I think it was Edgar and Thomas who covered for me while I was away. And I'm very grateful for that. Was in South Dakota with the folks at Real Presence Radio in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And I don't know if they had a good time, but I had an absolutely wonderful time. And there's no people nicer than people in South Dakota. I know that because the people in South Dakota told me that several times that they are the nicest people and they back it up. They have incredible hospitality. So thank you to everybody up there in Sioux Falls and everybody at Real Presence Radio. Just a great, great, great group of people making Catholic radio up there in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota. I'm starting to talk a little bit Canadian. My mouth is getting so cold talking about it. I'm starting to talk a little Canadian. But anyway, what I meant to say was thank you and also just to praise them for the magnificent work they do up there. And you can tell that, too by how many people call who are listeners on Real Presence Radio. Like it's not the most populated area of the country, north and South Dakota. But you'll notice maybe we'll get calls from Real Presence Radio today because we get them almost every day. The number here is 888-318-7884. And I'll tell you what, we're going to do something a little different first hour, but your calls are welcome. And this is a topic that lots of people are talking about, thinking about and in some cases, taking action on. And so we wanted to talk about it from a Catholic perspective, and that is the use of psychedelics. There are psychedelic drugs refers to this whole category of drugs. Most of us people my age know about lsd, some quite personal have quite personal experiences with lsd. Others of us read Tom Wolfe writing the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. And LSD was a big part of things when I was a kid. And it was the thing we were told to be afraid of. And I do think that that message got through. There was a certain point in the earlier part of the 60s where people thought it wasn't dangerous. And then it dawned on people that it was dangerous, that it was hurting people. But now we're talking about going back to the psychedelics. And can we use these as medicines, particularly in cases of trauma? And can these be a way of healing traumas of war, traumas of child abuse, other kinds of traumas that people live with, the trauma of life in the modern world? And we're joined today by Steve Cramp, longtime Catholic editor and writer. He taught at University of California in Merced, Franciscan University in Steubenville, and here, right near us, John Paul the Great Catholic University, where for seven years he was the chair of the Humanities department. He's a former rock musician and a poet. All right, this is not boding well for our conversation about psychedelics. Somebody should have told me this part of the bio before I started reading it. But he now lives with his family right here in the mountains of San Diego. He's got an article coming out tomorrow on our Catholic Answers magazine online, which you should be reading. Just go to catholic.com and you'll find it. And that'll come out tomorrow on psychedelics and Catholic faith. Steve Cramp, thank you very much for being with us.
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B
It's great to be here with you, sir.
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A
Rock musician and poet, huh?
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B
Yeah, yeah. A checkered past, as they say.
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A
I guess so. Two very disreputable professionals.
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B
Totally. And the more you learn about them, the more disreputable they become? No, it's as bad as you hear. Absolutely.
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A
Well, I'm glad to see that you have reformed your ways and you're a high class individual now. But tell me a little bit. Let's just start, if we can, with has the Catholic Church considered drugs, particularly these psychedelic drugs? And does it have anything to say about. Because we'd like to go back to what the Church actually says, not just the impression we have. So does she have anything to say about psychedelic drugs?
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B
Absolutely. Well, I say absolutely and then. Absolutely. Kinda. Right.
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A
Okay.
- [04:51]
B
So the Church has some things to say about drugs. And then the question is, how are we going to spread or cut up what the Church says about drugs? How are we going to understand the different categories? Because when we get something like the Catechism, we're not getting a full book here. I mean, this is a set of moral questions that could be unpacked at great length, but instead the catechism is giving us a paragraph, and then it leaves it up to the Church to develop. And it leaves us a lot of freedom to have conversations and to work this out in ways that ultimately not just make sense to us, but that also enable us to proclaim the gospel and to live the gospel.
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A
So that might change in time, though. We might get more clear and kind of distinctive teaching, but we at least have a general guide from the church.
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B
That's it. And that's why it's so important for us to have these conversations, which is why I was marveling about it six months a year ago, and I was realizing nobody in the Catholic sphere was stepping up to talk about something that's a future huge importance for the culture outside of the church.
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A
That's right.
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B
And a lot of people even to this day, are saying, what are they even talking about with these psychedelics? Or they're just thinking that, oh, it's just some benign thing alongside this whole other bunch of pharmaceuticals that are being offered. But they actually have a very intense history, very intense cultural importance for us. And it's good for us to at least be talking about them and figuring out how we can sift what's good from what's bad or how we can arrange for use of them. That's morally responsible and also helps us bring us closer to God.
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A
Yeah, that's the work we've got to do. And this is not something our society is good at. Steve, I think you would agree with that.
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B
I would agree.
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A
We tend to just rush in headlong. We get. We're very excitable society. And the news goes. You get one news report, and now all of a sudden, everybody's all in on whatever the. I remember legalizing marijuana was the thing, and now we're all going, oh, there's like 50 things we should have thought about before we did that, and we just didn't think about them.
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B
Yep.
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A
So, all right, so help us out with what the church says about psychedelics.
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B
Yeah. Well, so here we got. In the catechism, we got paragraph 2291, which has been important for me as I've been going into this, thinking it through, and I'll read it here. Okay. I think I've got it memorized, but I'm going to read it just to make sure I get it just right for your listeners.
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A
Thank you.
- [07:00]
B
Okay. So the use of drugs inflicts very grave damage on human health and life. Their use, except on strictly therapeutic grounds, is a grave offense. Clandestine production of and trafficking in drugs are scandalous practices. They constitute direct cooperation in evil, since they encourage people to practices gravely contrary to the moral law. Mm. So we've got grave or gravely appearing three times there, which has us in the realm of mortal sin talking about the use of drugs in general. And then we have this one carve out, except on strictly therapeutic grounds. So it's not just on any therapeutic grounds. It's not just because, hey, I feel like this maybe is gonna help me, you know, stop biting my nails. Right. It's when I hear strictly therapeutic, I'm thinking it's probably gonna mean that these drugs have to be done in conjunction with a medical professional, one with whom you have a relationship, and one who is present through the diagnosis and the prescription and the administration of the drugs.
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A
Right.
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B
That's my general set of guidelines in my own head.
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A
But even in states where, like I think here in California, you can just have marijuana, I don't really know what the rule is, but it seems. But some states you visit, they have like a medical marijuana.
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B
It depends where you are. Sometimes in the states, like a locality.
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A
But even in the medical marijuana states, a lot of times it's kind of a joke in a way. It's like you go to this doctor and you go, I have anxiety. And they go, oh, okay, here's a prescription for medical marijuana. And it's not really care so much as it's just like, oh, you have a reason, you have an excuse. Here's a prescription.
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B
Yeah. And that's one of my great concerns here because we're talking about some drugs that are quite a bit more powerful than marijuana. And like you said, marijuana wasn't even thought through very well. And marijuana has some profound cultural significance for us, and now it's having cultural effects. And also, like you were saying, we just didn't even think through the long term. Even the medical stuff, it doesn't get prescribed nearly as much as people thought because the dosage is really hard to manage. You know, like, is the doctor who really wants to help you with the condition going to prescribe you something that could have a huge range of different effects on you?
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A
Right, right.
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B
And then of course, the side effects, most people don't want to take medicine that keeps them from then driving responsibly for hours or whatever. So even with marijuana, it's been something. Psychedelics are much more powerful, much more significant and have the potential to alter our society in much more powerful ways. And yet, like you were saying, we're just rushing into them.
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A
It seems to me too, that the psychedelic drugs, and I have to say in my mind, because I'm of that era, I'm old enough to think lsd, that's like, I don't even. You could probably name. I'm not like a super Innocent or anything, but I just don't think I've kept up with what are the range of psychedelic drugs. So maybe you could go through the names of some of these things, but it seems to me that they can also have a permanent effect on the individual. There's a cultural effect, but you don't always come out on the other side of it the same person you went in.
- [09:53]
B
I think that's even the point. Personal transformation is often the point. And one of the things I've been thinking about as I work on all this, just think about on the level of a personal decision to take psychedelics. A lot of the time it's going to be somebody who does not have an especially strong attachment to themselves as they are. Maybe a low self esteem, somebody who probably doesn't have intense relationships and responsibilities that are going to be potentially threatened by the use of these drugs and maybe doesn't have a strong ambition for something in the future. Or maybe a strong sense of purpose. Because psychedelics can radically alter all of those things. And if you don't rate very high in those categories, you're going to be like, well, what's the problem? Maybe I'll come out on the far side and I will feel better about myself. Maybe I'll feel like, oh, you know, now I have a new set of relationships thanks to the people that I'm meeting or the subculture that I'm being drawn into through this. And maybe now I'll have a greater sense of purpose. And what you often see when people take psychedelics, it's funny, with studying psychedelics you could study a whole range of subjects because you've got social history and you've got psychopharmacology and you've got ethnobotany and anthropology and psychology, all these other things that you ideally would become a master of in order to fully understand this rather complicated subject. The people who actually get into psychedelics most intensely and think about the most are the people who take them and have a great experience and the whole rest of their lives is actually going off in a whole new direction. Like the world opens up and they say, wow, psychedelics are the key to understanding the purpose of my existence. And there are these amazing, basically conversion experiences, except they're not. It's not a Christian conversion, it's instead of being oriented towards Christ, it's instead oriented towards this drug and this experience. So it's an interesting thing to, to see how radically a person can change. And it was LSD back in the 60s, but there are all these other substances too. Now, LSD gets talked about a lot less because it has kind of some baggage, thanks to the 60s. So now most of the studies are done with psilocybin. So this is the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms, as they're called. And what happens with that's really only done because psilocybin just doesn't get the squint eye in the same way that LSD does.
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A
Right.
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B
And they're very similar in the way that they operate, although people who use them say that there are distinct differences between the experiences. And then we've got peyote, we've got ayahuasca, which is the kind of rather complicated chemical brew that gets made in the Amazon. We've got iboga coming from Africa, fly agaric mushrooms, or the Amanita muscaria. Those are grown up in basically Siberia, but all over northern Eurasia. And these all get used in different ways, and they've been used for centuries in most cases, and they have different effects. But at the same time, there's some commonalities between the experiences in those cultures and then the experiences of people who take them in our culture, where we don't have a framework for taking these things and then being integrated into some larger society, it ends up creating problems for those people spiritually and developmentally. But then it creates problems when people take them in the US and think, oh, well, therefore I can now be spiritual in the way that this person in the Amazon is spiritual. Well, you know, bad news, you're in Detroit. It doesn't translate.
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A
It's not all bad news to be in Detroit, but in this case, very.
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B
Quickly, Detroit isn't to say, I love Detroit. I'm saying it's different from the jungle of the Amazon.
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A
Yes, right. You're in a completely different cultural, social, historical milieu. So that's a fancy word, but so to think that this will have the same effect on you as somebody who is in the Amazon is crazy.
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B
In the Amazon, you would take. You would participate in the ayahuasca ceremony in order to be brought into that culture. Right. That would be your initiation. You would then be an adult and you'd be integrated into society because you would have an experience of meeting their gods, going to this holy realm that ayahuasca makes available to you. And then you'd come out on the far side and you would say, wow, I now believe all the stuff that my parents were telling me during, you know, my indigenous Sunday school. Basically, like the stuff they told me. I've now met those gods. I'm now confirmed in this. I'm now a participant in my society as an adult. Well, what happens when you take them in the US and you have nothing to graduate into? In fact, it just separates you from a society that says you should get a traditional job, you should have a family that's structured like this. So it actually here it serves as like an anti integration into society. It's like a disintegration of society, which is really tough for us because we get the spiritual longing that people have to draw us into these things. But it doesn't have a positive outcome. It really fragments us as a society. And then even individually on a spiritual level, where does it get you?
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A
Yeah. Okay, so a couple things before we go to the break. And then people you can call and talk with Steve if you'd like. 888-318-7884. If you want to talk about psychedelics and the Catholic faith, everybody's talking about it, so we thought we better talk about it. Psychedelics and the Catholic faith this hour. 888-318-7884. But I think I want to go off in two different directions hearing what you have to say. One of them is you just said they're meeting gods when they're taken. This sounds like there's one possibility with these psychedelics is that they're opening a spiritual door that might not actually be safe for you. So I want to talk about that. But on the other hand, I also, it seems by the measured way you're talking that you think that there might be some good use for these chemicals. Am I correct in both of these things?
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B
I say yes to both. Yep.
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A
Oh, you're freaking me out a little bit now. All right.
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B
I know it's tough.
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A
All right. Steve Kramp's our guest. So I want to talk to you about the I mean, am I opening a door, a spiritual door because our mind and our body can have access to the spiritual world? Am I. Is there that danger in addition to whatever other dangers that might just, you know, just physical harms I might do myself, for example? And then I'll ask you about if there really are good uses for psychedelics when we come back right after this on Catholic ANSWERS live. We're here for you. Call now Catholic Answers Live.
- [15:57]
C
Underwriting for Catholic Answers Live is provided by Real Estate for Life. Real Estate for Life connects home buyers and sellers to real estate agents while supporting pro life organizations. On the web@realestateforlife.org Underwriting for Catholic Answers Live is provided by Magnificat. Published monthly, Magnificat features texts of daily Mass, prayers, articles, meditations, art commentaries and more in step with the liturgical rhythm of the church. On the web@magnificat.com proclaiming the faith, changing.
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A
Lives the year was 1992. EWTN launches Wewn, the world's largest privately owned shortwave radio facility, to a potential worldwide listening audience of 600 million. To learn more about Mother Angelica's life and the history of EWTN, visit ewtn.com motherangelica. Welcome back to Catholic Answers Live. You can go to Catholic.com tomorrow for the article that is about to come out from Steve Cramp on the Catholic faith and psychedelics. There's been a lot of talk about the use of psychedelics to make us better. Some of it is clearly insane. Some of it may be more rooted in. What I mean by clearly insane is people who think that just the broad use of psychedelics by everyone is. Is gonna have a healing potential for society. That strikes me as you gotta be nuts to believe that.
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B
It's certainly something that a lot of people are putting a lot of hope in.
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A
I'm just saying it seems like a misplaced hope to me. But on the other hand, the person who has, I don't know, an intractable major depression or post traumatic stress disorder. I don't know, I'm agnostic on that. I'm willing to let you tell me what the potentials are there.
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B
Yeah, it's a. The way that I think about it. Cyan. I don't want to depress anybody who's listening to this, but the way I see it is I think it's a trap. We're in a trap of sorts. We've got all this suffering and the suffering is in part, I'm not saying it all is, but in part, at least because we've turned away from God without question.
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A
Yes.
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B
And then our way to relieve that suffering requires us to do things that, as you're saying, open doors. And the more I've thought about this in the course that I've been doing for the Archdiocese of San Francisco, we're really getting into how this ultimately brings us up in as a. It brings us up into some sort of conflict with the First Commandment because it's not so much.
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A
Ah, really?
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B
Yeah. At the end of the day, especially when you look at the way these things are used in their indigenous contexts and the history of them and so forth. And even if you look at what happened in the 60s, with this mass apostasy from the faith, basically, you've got a big turning away from God, you've got a big turning against God, and you've got an embrace of other gods. And that's. We can go into more detail about that if you're interested. But that's basically where we are. So we've got all this pain, we've got all this suffering. And as Catholics, we should have compassion for people who are suffering and we should want them to find some sort of relief from that.
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A
Yes. At the same time, healing. Healing from that.
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B
But now the thing that's being proposed as the. The best form of healing to come along in a very long time is in fact, something that would be a spiritual danger for people. And perhaps, and depending on the intention, so much of it isn't the intention. What's in the heart. Are you looking for relief in your pain? Are you looking to become more functional, more present to your family, more able to do something beautiful for the world? That's obviously very different than if you're just going to be taking one of these chemicals in order to feel some ecstatic relationship to a spiritual being you don't even know the identity of.
- [19:48]
A
Or what about satisfy a curiosity? What do you think about that? As I just. I was. There's a big Hollywood producer. We were talking about him the other day on, I think, the Flannel panel, We were talking about him. And he's got a beautiful wife and children, and he goes off to South America and he takes this ayahuasca. And the purpose for the trip is a curiosity that he has to me. I find that as a father, that strikes me as I'm not judging the man. I'm saying, when you think about that act strikes me as a profoundly sinful act. You have people who you're responsible for, you have people who rely on you. And now you'll go risk your health and your mind and whatever else because you're curious. That strikes me as, don't do that, don't do that.
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B
And we want to be. We want to be as balanced as we can. And we want to say that most of the people who do these drugs have good experiences, and it can be destabilizing. And there's often going to be some sort of what they call an adverse effect, some element to it. Either moments of abject terror in the middle of the experience, but also in the aftermath, there can be some difficulty integrating it and making sense of it and then kind of moving forward with your life. And the way that your life has been structured. See, we want to be fair, and we want to say that it's not like you take these drugs and you lose your mind. And that's something that was emphasized in the 60s and 70s when people were really turning against this. And you can't blame society. There was this thing that came along that was really threatening to society, and people just started grabbing it whatever they could in order to deal with the threat. So that's not unreasonable or unexpected, but it did lead to an assumption that these things are just going to immediately fry your brain and you're going to become a vegetable or whatever. So we've got to look at the reality of it, which is that a lot of people do have good experiences with these drugs. And at the same time, that doesn't mean that they're spiritually beneficial, right? Yes. So we would say. So if you have some sort of diagnosis and you've got a medical professional who's going to be guiding you through this, if that is going to be the intention of your heart, is to become able to live a normal life, to be abused, to live up to those responsibilities that you mentioned. Absolutely. I can see there could be a use for it. But the problem is when that is a small minority of people who are actually in those conditions, able to use these drugs in those ways, and then you've got a whole bunch of other people who are really curious. And when you're curious enough, you can start coming up with some pretty good reasons. Well, I need to do this because I have social anxiety. Exactly.
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A
Yeah. Right. I have a hard time talking with people. We all have a hard time talking with people. You don't need ayahuasca or whatever it is. Okay. You know, it's funny, when I hear you talking about this as a violation of the first commandment, that tells me that there's a religious underpinning to this. Recently at our conference, Amy Hamilton, who's wonderful on the sexual revolution, a magnificent teacher on Christianity and the sexual revolution, said, look, the sexual revolution presented us with a different religion. We have to understand this is not just some kind of liberation movement. This is a different religion that sees the human being differently than Christianity does. And it's funny because it's in the 1960s, the same moment that it happens, the sexual revolution and the drug revolution.
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B
Are totally tied together. Buddies. Yeah, absolutely.
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A
And what is being proposed here is a religion that there are religious claims being made for what these drugs will do and for what sexual liberation will do for you. And these religious claims are lies. Am I correct to say that?
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B
Yep.
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A
Okay, so tell me about what's. Why would tell me about the religious claims that are behind much of this, or the religious ideation. Even if the person doesn't identify it as a religious claim, the person might say, I'm not saying anything religious. This is just a spiritual thing I believe in. Okay, whatever. What are we really dealing with here as far as religious claims?
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B
Well, those can be pretty varied. You know, obviously we're talking about this, like global use going way back. So in a modern context, it's going to mean a certain thing that maybe isn't exactly universal, but the universal claims, and now these are being shored up by scientists often during these studies. Roland Griffiths put out a famous paper in 2006 about, basically the title of which is asserting that psilocybin can induce these mystical type experiences that bring personal meaning to people's lives. And so from that point on, and that gave science a green light to begin pursuing these studies in which they're giving psychedelic drugs to people and then they're having them fill out questionnaires afterward. And when they get a sufficiently high score on their questionnaire, it's rubber stamped as being like, yes, you had a mystical experience. Well, that comes out of William James. That comes out of a very different model of kind of evaluating a mystical experience. As Catholics, we would say that doesn't necessarily mean that it was a mystical experience at all. There's a great article called the Psychedelic A Catholic perspective by Dr. Tom Carroll. And he goes into this, he says, well, here's a psychedelic mystical experience and here's a Catholic mystical experience. And there's some differences between the two. The most obvious one being that a Catholic mystical experience we would understand as being given by God. It's a grace. It's not something that you take a pill and then you just bring on. God doesn't say, oh, you took mushrooms, therefore I better reveal myself to you. So there's something about that that's a fundamental difference in the way that one is relating to God and using a chemical to do that. But you see the attraction of the chemical because the chemical gives you that power to access God supposedly in a way that years of prayer might not. Because you don't have to have mystical experiences to get to heaven. You can just live your faith. You can be kind of quietly in your lane, submitting yourself to the will of God. And if God's will is not to give you mystical experiences, you don't need them. Salvation is not dependent. We're not gnostic. You don't have to have some.
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A
That is completely right. Yeah. The mystical experience that's in God's providence. He knows why he gives them, but they are. What you need for salvation is believe the good news, repent, Believe the good news, be baptized.
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B
Yep. Exactly. Exactly.
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A
All right, we've got a wonderful guest, Steve Cramp, with us. I didn't talk about the work you're doing with the Archdiocese of San Francisco. Maybe we'll get into that. Quite a few people want to talk with you about this, so we'll get to calls when we come back. Psychedelics. We're going through what some people have called the sequel psychedelic revolution right now. What does the Catholic Church have to say about all this? Steve's a great guy to talk to about that. 888-318-7884 what is the Catholic Church? Everybody seems to have an opinion, but the church never quite fits into the boxes people try to make for it. In the Faith Unboxed, author Andrew Petiprin looks at some of the most common boxes people put the Catholic Church in and explains why they don't fit in. Doing so, he brings us closer to what the church really is, the institution founded by Christ. Order the Faith unbox today@shop.catholic.com or ask for it at a good Catholic bookstore near you.
- [26:46]
C
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- [27:15]
A
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- [27:45]
C
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- [28:18]
A
Matt Swaim here. Tomorrow on the Sunrise Morning show, we'll celebrate the feast of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mar. Plus news, weather, sports and a whole lot more. Now back to CATHOLIC ANSWERS Live. Welcome back, CATHOLIC ANSWERS live. I am Cy Kellett, your host. Our guest is Steve Cramp. He's been doing education around psychedelics for the Archdiocese of San Francisco. And we've asked them here because psychedelics is a big deal. And actually we don't want to be merely prudish about things. Jesus himself is certainly not a prude. We want to be responsible about these things. So what does the revelation of God and the faith given to us by Jesus tell us that we or how does it prepare us to make proper distinctions and come to a good understanding about the morality of the use of psychedelics? And that's what we're here talking about. I'm gonna get to the phones in a second. I do have a question for you, Steve. It does seem to me that, like, you do stress there's many people who just have a positive experience. They take the pill or eat the dirt or I don't know how you get the stuff in you, but whatever they do and you get the high and all of that. But because an experience is positive does not mean that the experience is good. And I think we can easily see that when we talk about, say, hookup culture. Well, lots of people experience the stuff they do in hookup culture as positive. We don't turn around and go, that's good for you. But it does seem that people want to say, oh, well, I had a positive drug trip. It really opened my mind, therefore it's good. What would be the argument to say, well, actually, that might not be good?
- [30:23]
B
Yeah, well, it's obviously a challenging thing, especially because people feel this intense attachment to their experiences. And those experiences aren't only good in that they're pleasurable. And often there's kind of this been this long standing caricature of like the drug trip. Oh, you just wanted to go off and see some pretty things, kind of like like in Dumbo when he gets drunk and sees the pink elephants or whatever it is, he's hallucinating there. So we've got this idea that it's only done for pleasure. But for a lot of people, there is profound meaning that comes out of the experience or even like a spiritual opening. And they come out of it and they want to make a change in their lives. And for so many people, especially if you don't have the structure of a traditional religious faith, that's going to be enough to say, this is way better than what I had going on before.
- [31:05]
A
You're not talking me out of it right now, so help me out.
- [31:09]
B
Well, remember, the devil can appear as an angel of light first off.
- [31:12]
A
Amen to that. Yes.
- [31:13]
B
And then we have what happens if you have a great experience? And there's a great book by a journalist, William Braden, called the Private Sea. He wrote it back in 1967 in the middle of the LSD craze. And he said maybe the good trip is actually more dangerous than the bad trip, because what happens with the good trip is you say, I just experienced something great. I'm going to go out and share this with other people. I'm going to go off and I'm going to live my life according to what I've just learned here and experienced and seen. And perhaps the spiritual insights that I've received, even though those spiritual insights often sound totally dumb in the light of day, after the trip's over, when it's happening, they come with an authority that makes it feel like this is coming from on high. And I just need to live my life according to this. Like, the love binds the universe together. We've all heard that before. And when you don't even define what love is, it's pretty much meaningless. And yet a lot of people, they have that kind of feeling, and they.
- [32:01]
A
Say and they feel it's a very profound thing.
- [32:03]
B
So you're living your life in at least a state of uncertainty about where that experience came from afterward. And especially if you don't have any spiritual discernment. And a lot of people, they meet entities when they're. Especially on ayahuasca. But even with psilocybin and lsd, a lot of entity encounters. Well, people don't know how to even figure out who these entities are. So when you're getting a message from an entity, and some of the entities are even saying things like worship me, you look at the studies and what messages are that come from the energies, and you see some stuff that's very, very alarming from a Catholic perspective. And yet people get into it and they say, look, I met this beautiful entity and I learned this thing that was useful, and I want to go through the rest of my life living in the light of this experience. Well, Then you're living the rest of your life clinging to an experience that isn't of God. And you're hoping that that's in fact going to get you through some sort of beautiful passage at the end of your life into salvation. And to me, seems a lot better not to have the experience to grapple with God in the way that God intends for us to here. Because in the Garden of Eden in the background here. Right? Yeah, right. God says, don't do this thing. And our reason might not always get us to a place of like really understanding the rejection, but if you get it from God or if you get it from a religious authority appointed by God, Jesus tells the apostles, he who listens to you listens to me. Well, the church is speaking, you know, the apostles are speaking there in the catechism.
- [33:19]
A
In the catechism, yeah.
- [33:21]
B
So are we just going to blow that off and are we going to then cling to it for the rest of our lives? To me, that's very dangerous. So the good can actually be worse than the bad. The bad, you maybe just run away from that. Right.
- [33:30]
A
And so you might in a certain sense climb the mountain without ever developing virtues and things that are an actual help to you. You just got a kind of a nice view.
- [33:41]
B
And it can happen, but it's rare that somebody takes a psychedelic and immediately runs for the confessional and desires entrance into the Catholic Church. It almost always goes the other way. It almost always goes towards an eastern religion. There can be exceptions for sure. And there are people on all sides in the 60s who just acknowledge that that was the general movement.
- [34:00]
A
I'd like to get you some calls. Would you willing to take some calls?
- [34:03]
B
Yeah, that'd be great.
- [34:04]
A
We're talking with Steve Cramp about psychedelics and you can go to the website of the Archdiocese of San Francisco if you want to see some of what Steve does.
- [34:15]
B
The School of Pastoral Ministry is the subset there at the archdiocese. And yeah, the videos are getting posted and they'll be on YouTube eventually.
- [34:23]
A
The John in Oklahoma. John, welcome. I'm glad you're here. I'm going to ask you to go right to a question. We'll get everybody on then right to your question for Steve. John.
- [34:34]
D
Okay, yeah. You know, when I was brought up Protestant, it was drilled into us first Peter 5:8, about being sober minded and being watchful. And that was one of the reasons why I grew up with my life, you know, not getting drunk, stuff like that. Did I dabble in drugs? I had that one period in my life When I was, like, 18, 19, when I did it for a couple months, and then it wasn't my cup of tea and, you know, got away from it. But I see the things when it comes to psychedelics that, yes, there. There could be some, and I'll say this in air quotes, temporary benefits to it. Because if there was true benefits to it, you could use it once and not have to use it again. But use the psychedelic to help with a mental issue, well, you're gonna have to continue to keep using that psychedelic pretty much for the rest of your life. Because if not, then, you know, that mental issue still come back. And I think it's a very slippery slope that a lot of the medical fields starting to go down because they think, I mean, San Francisco alone, I mean, look at the, you know, psychedelic and drug abuse problems in San Francisco alone with the homeless population, you know, and even as a Christian and even more now as a Catholic Christian, okay, that, you know, for me to be able to have a good relationship with Christ and a relationship that he could be talking to me at any time, and I'm not getting confused whether it's, wow, this cool, trippy dream that I'm having, or if it actually is Christ, I got to have my mind clean all the time in order to be able to discern whether that's Christ or whether it's just a type of thing. Am I wrong in thinking of that?
- [36:17]
B
No, no, I think you're absolutely right. And it's not just. It's all over scripture, this idea that we should view our reason as a great gift of God and that we should cultivate it and protect it and so forth. So, no, I think you're absolutely right about that. One thing to point out is that people who are advocating for a widespread adoption of psychedelics, they would be saying that, you know, first off, you do not need to take psychedelics for the rest of your life in order to deal with some sort of mental health issue. Usually it's about two or three accompanied trips, and then after that, you can see some pretty remarkable improvement in people. So again, that allowance in the catechism for strictly therapeutic use, we want to keep that open out of compassion for people who are suffering. But there is also, basically what the psychedelics do is they allow for a rewiring of the neurons in the brain so that somebody who's stuck in certain patterns of thought or behavior, they might find their brain to be operating in a different way than it had before. And that doesn't require lifelong use and A lot of people who are on the streets because of drugs, a lot of times it's fentanyl and other things, too. So people who are champions of psychedelics would not find those particular reasons super convincing. But you're absolutely right that generally sobriety is encouraged all over the New Testament, but even in the Old Testament, right. We have. We've got a real conscious awareness within both Judaism and Christianity of the value and dignity of the human person and the way that reason is a part of that.
- [37:43]
A
John, thank you. I appreciate that. I'll tell you what, we got time. We'll get Patrick here from New York City. New York City watching on Facebook. Glad to have you. Patrick, go ahead with your question.
- [37:55]
D
Sure, we associate criminals and losers with drugs, but when it comes to psychedelics, there's sort of a glamour to it. We've got all these celebrities and, and successful creative people saying, I take psychedelics and it helps me get the writer's block. It helps me with my creativity. So it's an entirely different thing. We've got the endorsement of the most successful people in society saying, take psychedelics. I don't know how you can answer that. So that's my question, Steve.
- [38:24]
B
Yeah, no, they. They have champions at every level of society. And, you know, it's not, it's not just celebrities, as I was saying, it's scientists of very high reputation who are putting out studies recommending these to people. And that's one of the reasons it's so important for us to think through these things from a spiritual perspective. Because what the celebrities are not doing is they're not grappling with the commandments. They're not grappling with the Old Testament witness to covenant holiness in God's people. They're not thinking about Christ and his own apostles. Christ tells his apostles, become as little children. He never says, become as a superstar. He never says, become as a wise man. Right now, there are other ways, of course. We need to be striving after wisdom and so forth. But what psychedelics offer is not what God wants for us. And they can lead to this massive inflation of the ego. What does the serpent do when he's tempting Eve in the garden? God didn't say that. He's basically worried you will be as gods. Well, don't psychedelics offer something very similar? Hey, we don't have to worry about what our culture has told us. We don't need to worry about what Scripture tells us. We don't need to worry about what the church tells us here in the Catechism we can decide for ourselves and we can be autonomous and we can become great by our own lights. We can be cured of the things that are holding us back, and we can embrace this new highly technological life that's creating so many mental health problems, because now we will have psychedelics to help us to cope. It's a very dark spiritual path, but it's very tempting to people. And that's why whenever we get into this stuff, I'm not talking about policy proposals. I'm not talking about this on a political level. I'm talking about this from a spiritual perspective. And that's where we need to start as Catholics, because otherwise our prophetic witness is going to get dragged down into these little squabbles and it's not going to be nearly as effective.
- [40:04]
A
Patrick, wonderful question. Thank you so much. And John, thank you. I'm going to take a quick break, and when we come back, I want to talk to you about who might be some of these spiritual entities that people encounter and who are we actually getting involved in or with when we open ourselves to. And maybe even the Bible has something to say about that. Maybe temple worship from the ancient days. Maybe God has something to say about that in the Bible. So we'll find out. Our guest is Steve Cramp. He's been doing wonderful work with the Archdiocese of San Francisco. He's got an article tomorrow coming out on our website, Catholic.com, look for it about psychedelics and the Catholic faith. We'll continue the conversation and you're welcome to get in on it. 888-318-7884.
- [40:55]
D
Hello, this is Archbishop Salvatore Cordiglione of San Francisco. Keep your dial tuned to Catholic answers live.
- [41:04]
A
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- [42:26]
C
The holy sacrifice of the Mass. Live from the EWTN Chapel every morning, 8 Easter Eastern on EWTN radio and television.
- [42:49]
A
Welcome back. CATHOLIC ANSWERS live. Everybody's talking about psychedelics. It seemed like there was this period where, you know, tune in and turn on and drop out or I don't even know if I got the order of that right. But you were supposed to do that back in the 60s. And then basically we lost our society and so we took a break from encouraging psychedelics. But now there's this new kind of wave of enthusiasm because people are thinking they might have healing powers. And some people are thinking maybe something beyond healing powers, that is the power to bring our own conscience, our personal consciousness and the consciousness of the world to a higher plane. Or something along those lines. What does the Catholic Church have to say about that? That's what we're talking about. If you want to get in on that conversation, whether you're Catholic or not, whether you're Christian or not. 888-3187-848831-87884. Steve Cramp is our guest. I have to read this ad and then we'll go back to talking about psychedelics. The ultimate BOGO flash sale we've been having this week may be one of our most popular promotions to date. It's your chance to cash in and take advantage of what is truly a tremendous deal. How tremendous, you ask? We are literally giving resources away. Just Visit the ultimate BOGO category. There are over 450 resources from which to choose books, eBooks, MP3s, digital videos, and all of our online school of apologetics courses. What you do is you shop around and you find two items, place them in your cart, and you get the lower price item for free. No promo code, nothing needed. You buy two things, you get the lower price. One free. Buy four items, you get two of them for free, and on and on. Buy 100 items and you're gonna get 50 of them for free. I just ad libbed that, so I hope it's true. For every two items you choose, you get One for free. This special won't last for long. Today through Thursday. Well, today is Thursday, so today until midnight Honolulu time, the special offer is available only to products in the ultimate Bogo category, and only until midnight today Honolulu time. Shop.catholic.com Steve, I'm not one of those people who thinks it's always demons. Everything is demons, but it's not never demons.
- [45:10]
B
So somewhere in the middle. Yeah.
- [45:13]
A
Was that poetic? I know you're a poet. Was that poet poetic the way it sounds?
- [45:16]
B
Yeah.
- [45:17]
A
I thought that came out a little bit like poetry.
- [45:19]
B
It's profound.
- [45:20]
A
So tell me about, like, we've talked a bit about the spiritual harm this might do us, just because it might send us in the wrong direction spiritually. It might send us in a direction where we don't think morals matters as much, where we don't think the person of Jesus Christ matters, that just a general kind of love in an undefined way matters. Okay, so that's a genuine spiritual danger.
- [45:42]
B
But.
- [45:42]
A
But is there danger that we might also, in the state that's induced by these psychedelics, be doing business with creatures we should not be doing business with, namely demons?
- [45:56]
B
Absolutely. I mean, it's a hard thing for us sometimes in the west to grapple with because we've for so long not been thinking about demons as being a factor or an influence in our judgment, in our behavior, in the workings of our society, even on a much larger scale. But anybody who was there in the 60s knows that things felt like they were pretty haywire.
- [46:16]
A
Yeah, right.
- [46:17]
B
And that was a haywire sense of optimism. And, hey, anything is possible now, and we're going to make a whole new world and there's never going to be war again and so forth. So it could be kind of an unhinged, or at least a whole new version of optimism, the whole new level of American optimism. And then you see that spread around the world because then LSD is going everywhere at the same time. There were a lot of people who looked at what was happening in the 60s and with a sense of the world is really becoming unhinged and we can look back on it now and we can feel like our own world is unhinged in a way, and we're not as freaked out by it. But for those who are living through the 60s for the first time, from the Kennedy assassination on, there was a lot of stuff happening that was really disquieting. So, of course, people who do psychedelics, they can be opening up, as we say, they can be opening up doors for these Encounters with entities that are not Christian and that don't have their best interests in mind. However, those entities know how to play the game and they will often give people beautiful experiences. They will give people reason to continue this relationship. They will at least feign care. They will pretend to have some of the attributes of God, that holy wisdom, that truth, beauty and goodness at the same time, in the long run, those entities tend to turn on people. People online you can find all sorts of discussion forums and so forth where people are confused because their entities are turning mean. Right. They're shocked. They thought the entities were going to continue being their friends and then their entities are now mocking them and they don't get why. So as Catholics, we would step back and we would look at first John about discerning the spirits. Right. Is the spirit confessing Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. And obviously they're not. And so as a result, we should be very wary. But the psychedelics also leave us very vulnerable. They leave us suggestible and they create these beautiful experiences that we can then become attached to or that we can be open to, which. Yeah. Which is very dangerous for us spiritually. Of course, there are many people who just have negative spiritual experiences in these encounters where they're convinced they actually met demons. We've got the Ibok occult in Gabon in Africa. The Mbiri section of that cult at least is commonly becoming possessed very intentionally. The women especially will lead the way in being possessed by spirits. And now we've got Ibilga being recommended as a medicine for people suffering from PTSD and from addiction and so forth. So we've got lots of people who are now be taking the substance that is associated with demonic possession in another culture. They don't even bat an eye. They're like, of course that's what it does. And then here we're going to try to take it in America as if it's just an aspirin. So that's what the intention does matter. But it also, it's doing something to the mind that does leave somebody vulnerable. And it's concerning at least.
- [48:49]
A
And if your intention is vague, I just would like a kid spiritual enlightenment. And you're not speaking to God about that. You're willing to talk to whoever comes. Well, you might get spiritual enlightenment, but it won't be healthy for you. It won't be good for you.
- [49:05]
B
We can do it the easy way or the hard way.
- [49:06]
A
Yeah, Louise in Ohio on the line. Louise, thank you for your call. Go ahead with your question for Steve.
- [49:15]
D
Thank you. I just wondered with the drugs.
- [49:19]
B
That.
- [49:20]
D
The Bible doesn't really talk about that.
- [49:22]
A
As much, I guess.
- [49:23]
D
But what about alcohol?
- [49:25]
B
I know, because Jesus drank wine and.
- [49:27]
A
Talk about that more.
- [49:30]
D
What's the difference?
- [49:32]
A
Yeah, thank you, Louise.
- [49:33]
B
That's a great question, Luis. We have alcohol and then there are other things like tobacco. Right. Tobacco is used ritually in various indigenous cultures, and yet people have been smoking cigarettes and treating tobacco casually for a long time. I mean, some of the Native Americans say that tobacco used like that angers the spirits or whatever, but for the most part, it's something that we've accommodated. So we've got alcohol, we've got tobacco, and then a whole bunch of other things that our society has frameworks for dealing with them. Yes, you're right to say that Scripture makes allowance for the use of alcohol. And in the Old Testament, it is in fact spoken of very positively. It is wine that makes man's heart glad. There can be warnings for the Levites, especially not to become drunk and so forth, but it still is allowed. That wine is going to have a major part in Jewish society. And then the Christians inherit that. We've got our Lord, of course, turning water into wine at Cana, and then we've got the Last Supper. So wine doesn't seem to be an issue. And then as a result of it not being an issue in scripture, it's then just part and parcel of Christian society going forward. It was part of pagan society, in fact. And so we just thought, you know, wine gets served at weddings. People have a drink with dinner. It's, you know, while people who champion psychedelics will say alcohol is much more dangerous than psychedelics. And some, like Rick Doblin, who's the founder of this huge organization called maps, he suggests that people should, in fact, have a license to buy alcohol because alcohol is so dangerous. And it does cause more deaths overall, of course, than psychedelic drugs every year. But for most of us, we would say alcohol is a part of Western society. We figured out ways to live with it. It's seen as being a positive augmentation of life as long as it's not abused, as long as someone isn't an alcoholic because of that. It just doesn't seem to have any of the aura or stigma that psychedelics have. Psychedelics, it's worth mentioning, we've been talking about their individual impact, but the social impact, if you start to tease this out, that's a whole other character can of worms. And it has the potential to really transform our society in some ways that I think are profoundly negative, but that don't really get talked about.
- [51:36]
A
Okay, Louise.
- [51:38]
D
Okay, thank you.
- [51:39]
A
Thank you very much. I do want to ask you because just in our conversations off the air, you mentioned Our lady of Guadalupe. And I'm not saying that taking psychedelics will turn you into a devil worshipping death culture, but it did for the Aztecs. I'm not saying it'll do it for you, but the Aztecs were a devil worshipping death cult, and Our lady of Guadalupe was the answer to that. Will you talk about her and the use of drugs?
- [52:09]
B
Sure. It's hard because we of course want to be able to contribute in a positive way to the conversation and we want to stay on the stay looking at the bright side and creating these avenues of conversation for. For people who don't agree with us. But I think at the end of the day, we have to say that we do not want a society that resembles the Aztec society, specifically the Mexica. Within the Aztec society, who are the rulers there in Tenochtitlan?
- [52:33]
A
Nobody wanted the Aztecs, only the Aztecs.
- [52:38]
B
It's a pretty tough thing. And then of course, the conquistadors, at this point, their reputation is pretty low. But when they were showing up, they were seeing some awful stuff going on and it was assumed that they were making things up and they were just these deceptive Spaniards who couldn't handle the beauty of the new culture that they'd come across. But no thanks to archaeological finds and so forth. The skull racks are there.
- [52:58]
A
I was gonna say archaeology, meaning thousands and thousands.
- [53:01]
B
Yeah, thousands of skulls. And, you know, it was thought that they just made all this stuff up. And more and more they're finding out that they actually weren't making it up and that things were as bloody, as repellent as they claimed. And then you think about the gods that they were worshiping. And by any Christian yardstick, those gods are looking pretty demonic.
- [53:18]
A
So tell me about Our lady of Guadalupe.
- [53:19]
B
So Our lady of Guadalupe, she, you know, she comes in 1531, she appears to St. Juan Diego. And here I just think it's worth mentioning, this is the one saint I've been able to kind of pinpoint who I think we can reasonably conclude to use psychedelics because they were used all over Aztec society. So we actually would have someone who, as someone growing up in that society, St. Juan Diego would have taken them. He converted later in life, and then he's hopefully refusing them as soon as he's baptized. I don't know. We don't know very much about his life. But then when Our lady appears, she appears. When he, I think he converted in his 40s, and I think when she appeared to him, he was in his 50s, he was already a widower and so forth. She appears there in 1531, and she appears in a society that's not only a psychedelic taking drug cult, as you put it, and specifically, they were taking mushrooms, they were taking the teona nicotl, which means flesh of the gods, and they thought that that was actually superior to the Eucharist. And they laughed at the bread of the missionaries. They were like, that doesn't do anything. Yeah, look at these. These give me direct access to my gods. And your bread doesn't do anything. So we've got Our lady appearing and Our lady appears in the middle of that, and she puts an end to the human sacrifice and she puts an end to the psychedelic cult.
- [54:27]
A
And that tells you a lot about the Catholic relationship with these psychedelics. I think so, yeah. And where true healing is fantastic. Found and not getting caught into. While something might have a therapeutic use, its general acceptance means a life of enslavement for many people and being trapped rather than liberated, at least trapped by their worldview. Steve Cramp. Hey, tomorrow, check it out on Catholic.com the article will be out about psychedelics and the Catholic faith. And you can go to the Archdiocese of San Diego Institute.
- [55:00]
B
What was it called? School of Pastoral Ministry.
- [55:02]
A
School of Pastoral Ministry, and see the videos there. Steve, thanks for coming in and talking with us about this.
- [55:06]
B
So great to be here, Zach.
- [55:07]
A
All right, we'll be right back. Tim Staples. I think we're doing Ask Me Anything with Tim right after this on Catholic Answers Live.