Billy Horton and Kelsey Taylor

I have long been suspect of spiritual experiences induced by drugs but I have come to see they constitute a legitimate and possibly much faster and complete path to a sense of unity with all consciousness. I was gifted with greater insight into this topic by plant medicine healers, Kelsey Taylor and Billy Horton, from Detroit. They met at an ayahuasca experience and have worked together ever since. Kelsey and Billy take people on supervised, controlled psychedelic experiences as their professional work and address issues such as addiction and depression.  

Modern research on psychedelics took a hiatus after the 1970s. Then a landmark study at Johns Hopkins in 2006 showed that a single psychedelic experience could produce substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance. It was followed up by a 14-month study to better understand long term effects:  

• 67% of the volunteers rated the psilocybin experience as being among the five most personally meaningful and among the five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives1

• At the 14-month follow-up, 58% and 67% of volunteers, respectively, continued to rate the experience as among the top five most personally meaningful and spiritually significant life experiences2

I am deeply jealous of people who achieve the sense of oneness with all that is including a union with the Divine Presence. I have seen pictures of brain scans during a psychedelic trip that suggest people access much more of their brains during such experiences. That information is very compelling to this novice. And, yet, there are risks to psychedelic use. As someone who has benefited greatly from psychiatric medications, I am choosing to not go there…at least not yet.

I went to a session at the 2023 Parliament of the World’s Religions conference in Chicago and Richard Rohr was on a panel about the use of psychedelics for spiritual experiences. He said that if people are experiencing spiritual experiences this way then the church must be concerned with it, too. It is easy for me to imagine that in the coming decades we will know more about the mechanism of action and the biological/chemical nature of a spiritual transformation; the actual chemistry of a change in consciousness. And when that happens, I am sure that psychedelics and traditional spiritual transformation approaches will come together as one approach. So I honor the work of Kelsey and Billy and people like them who seek to provide healing with psychedelics in a safe, controlled environment.

Please note: Portraits in Faith does not endorse, support, or recommend psychedelics or the outcomes from experimenting with them. But we are grateful that legitimate scientific research on psychedelics is moving forward.