I must confess something to you right at the start, so that there is honesty between us: I have read this study three times, and after each reading I sat still longer than is becoming for a reasonable man. Not because the numbers are so astonishing. Numbers astonish only accountants. But because behind the numbers stands something that looks at us. Something we locked in the cellar two hundred years ago, and which now, in the questionnaires of four thousand strangers, is quietly knocking at the door.
The study I speak of appeared in 2019 in PLOS ONE. Roland Griffiths and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University surveyed 4,285 people who claimed to have encountered a thing for which our language has only embarrassed words: God, the Higher Power, Ultimate Reality. Some of these people had the encounter sober, in prayer, in crisis, in sleep, in the middle of ordinary life. The others under psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, or DMT.
And now I ask you, dear reader, and I do not ask it rhetorically, I ask it the way one asks a man one meets at night on a bridge: What do you expect? That the sober ones speak of angels, and the intoxicated ones of storms of color and nothing more? That is how the enlightened century would like it. That way the world would be tidy.
But the world is not tidy. It never was.
What the Four Thousand Said
The reports resembled one another. Not in their details, details always lie, but in their core. An overwhelming majority in every group described what they encountered as conscious, as benevolent, as intelligent, as sacred, as existing in a reality that seemed more real than this one, the one in which you are reading this text and I am writing it. More real than real. Do you understand what a monstrous sentence that is? A man sits in his room, something happens, and afterward he says: that, over there, was more real than my entire life before it.
One difference remained, and it is delicious in its irony. The sober ones most often called what they met God. The others, the ones with the substances, preferred the term Ultimate Reality. As if modern man, even face to face with the unspeakable, still took care not to compromise himself. God, that sounds like grandmother and incense. Ultimate Reality, that sounds like a seminar. But what both described was the same thing. The mask changes; the face behind it remains.
And then the essential point, the reason I am writing to you at all. Roughly two thirds of those who called themselves atheists before the experience no longer called themselves atheists afterward. Two thirds! No argument convinced them, no priest, no book, no fear of death. A single hour was enough. The majority of all respondents, across every group, counted the encounter among the five most meaningful experiences of their entire lives, and years later, decades in some cases, they reported lasting positive changes: in life satisfaction, in meaning, in their relationship to their own dying.
The Objection of the Reasonable Man
I can hear you already, the reasonable reader, and I love you for your objection, for I have raised it a thousand times myself. You say: this proves nothing. An online survey, self-reports, collected in retrospect, a sample of mostly white men who volunteered in response to an advertisement. The brain simply produces such states, and whoever has once been overwhelmed reinterprets his life afterward. Full stop.
You are right. Entirely right. The study does not prove the existence of God, and Griffiths himself never claimed it did. It measures reports, not metaphysics.
But now permit me to turn the tables, just for a moment, it will cost you nothing. If the brain produces this experience, why does it always produce the same one? Why does the banker from Frankfurt meet the same benevolent consciousness as the nurse from Ohio and the student from São Paulo? Why does each not meet his own private ghost, assembled from childhood and cinema? The hallucination, we are told, is the most private thing there is. This one, however, is strangely public. It has a structure, a grammar, it repeats itself across cultures, centuries, and chemical doorways, as if there were something there that can be visited.
I do not claim that it is so. I claim only that the comfortable answer is exactly as unproven as the uncomfortable one, and that the man who calls the one faith and the other science is deceiving himself.
What Remains
Ivan Karamazov says somewhere that the astonishing thing is not that God exists, but that such an idea could enter the head of that wild and wicked animal, man, at all. The study from Baltimore adds a twist Ivan would have enjoyed: the idea does not merely enter the head. It arrives as an experience, uninvited, overwhelming, and it leaves the person changed. Not destroyed. Changed for the better, if the four thousand are to be believed, and why should four thousand people lie who have nothing to gain from it.
So what do we do with this, we who work in clinics, in laboratories, at desks? I will tell you what we should not do. We should not pretend that all this is a curiosity for the back pages of the journals. If a single experience can lastingly reduce a person's fear of death, raise his satisfaction with life, deepen his sense of meaning, then that is no footnote. Then that is one of the great unanswered questions of medicine, and it lies open before us, and we walk past it the way we walk past a beggar whose eyes we avoid, because we suspect he would have something to tell us.
Science has opened the cellar door. What sits there, one man calls God and another calls Ultimate Reality, and perhaps it smiles at both names. But it sits there. Four thousand witnesses have signed.
And you, dear reader? Sleep well tonight. Or perhaps not.
Source: Griffiths RR, Hurwitz ES, Davis AK, Johnson MW, Jesse R (2019). Survey of subjective "God encounter experiences": Comparisons among naturally occurring experiences and those occasioned by the classic psychedelics psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, or DMT. PLOS ONE 14(4): e0214377. Open access at journals.plos.org.