This article is kind of weird. If you are expecting a nice, normal discussion of faith, I would recommend a different article, or perhaps a different website. Additionally, these are mostly half-baked thoughts, I still hav much research to do regarding this.

In this article, I want to talk about my perspective on spiritual experiences in modern Christianity. First, I will explain what I mean. Second, I will attempt to communicate the nature of these spiritual experiences in words. Thirdly, and with great caution, I will propose a theory for how this sensation fits into the broader context of human experience. Fourthly, I will talk about the dangers of relying on this sensation.

I am going to step on a lot of toes in the writing of this article, so I want to make sure I am stepping on the toes I want to be stepping on, and no one else's. The term “spiritual experience” is very subjective, because as humans, we are always having experiences, and spiritual people may interpret any experience through the lens of spirituality. This is amplified if you happen to believe that everything happens for a reason. If you believe that, all experiences become meaningful.

No, in this article I am referring to a very specific type of experience. These experiences:

• Are outside of “normal” human experience.
• Are entirely personal, though an external event may trigger it.
• Manifest themselves in the form of intense emotions.

Note that I am not talking about a set of different experiences. I am talking about “the one” experience. This experience may be attributed to a movement of the Holy Spirit within a persons soul. It has been called by teenagers the “Camp High”, although church camps are hardly the only place where these experiences occur.

If the previous section didn't make any sense to you, it probably means you haven't experienced this. Christians will usually say that it is indescribable. Or, better yet, they will contextualize it within their belief system, which hardly does outsiders much good. This is fine, of course, unless you want to get to the bottom of what they are experiencing.

I have experienced this quite a bit in my life. And, I do have to say that it is very hard to explain, so your Christian friends aren't just being obtuse. It is a truly incredible feeling, and completely outside of normal emotional or mental experience. I would describe it as:

• Frission
• Enlightenment
• Love
• Peace

You may see where this is going.

This is the part of the article where things get weird.

I need to clarify that I have never done LSD. In fact, I have never done any drug. I have never entered into any chemically-induced altered state of consciousness for recreational purposes. This includes drunkenness, which, for some reason, gets a pass in everyone's book.

In 1962, a (possibly unethical) experiment was done on a congregation of churchgoers. Timothy Leary, a true wild child who was deemed by President Nixon as “the most dangerous man in America”, had the ingenious idea of giving LSD to a congregation at a Good Friday service. (Remember kids, the difference between science and messing around is writing down what happens.) This experiment came to be known as the Marsh Chapel Experiment.

The results were, to put it lightly, spectacular. Almost all of the people given LSD reported having a “profound religious experience”. The results were not temporal, either. The participants, 25 years after the fact, generally said it was one of the most profound spiritual experiences of their lives.

This experiment solidified LSD's membership in a category of drugs known as Entheogens. An entheogen is a drug that, for lack of better word, enhances a spiritual experience. Examples of entheogens include peyote, ayahuasca (DMT), and (probably) soma.

These drugs cause an altered state of consciousness known as ego dissolution, or ego death. If you are familiar with Freudian psychoanalytics, you may know that the “Ego” is the part of the psyche that restrains the “Id”, which is associated with instinct. Therefore, “Ego death” literally refers to a deconstruction of the Ego in service of experiencing the Id. It is a loss of the sense of self, which leads to transcendance of what Alan Watts calls “the skin-encapsulated ego”.

Meaningfully, Timothy Leary describes it as being “… complete transcendence − beyond words …”. So, to clarify, ego death is beyond words, gives a sense of enlightenment, and unlocks the id, leading to an extra-personal experience. This is why I draw the connection between ego death and the spiritual experience I was discussing above.

You might be wondering what LSD has to do with the Camp High. After all, the vast majority of Christians have never touched drugs in their lives. How could they experience a sensation that is induced by a drug they have never consumed? To answer that question I need to talk about the study of mysticism.

Mystical experiences, which bear several resemblances to ego death, are known be induced in a number of ways outside of drug usage, including chanting and meditation. I would argue that there are many more ways to induce these states of consciousness, and that research has been overly focused on pre-industrial societies.

The above picture is from the Passion conference. The Passion conference is an annual gathering of over 40,000 college students. There are so many of them that they need to hold it in a stadium. The production value is immense. There are tons of lasers, spotlights, giant screens, etc.

Passion is an intense emotional experience. It consistently produces this “Camp High”. But how does it do it? The last year that I went, 2019, I tried to get to the bottom of this. I made several observations, which I divide into three categories: Purposeful, Atmospheric, and Contextual.

• Purposeful: Things that are done with the express purpose of invoking spiritual thought which may lead to the sensation.
  • Making it personal. Although the people running these events can't address the specific circumstances in the audience's life, they can address common archetypes. For example, pain. Pain is something everyone experiences, but is, at the same time, deeply personal. Most people don't know how to deal with pain or to confront pain, and so acknowledging pain can instantly put an individual into a state of self-reflection, which is already an abnormal state of consciousness.
  • Epiphany. There are many sermons at Passion, and most of them share the same structure. First, the speaker presents a problem. Next, the speaker alludes to a solution, and provides textual (biblical) support for it. Finally, the speaker reveals the solution, tying up an hour-long talk into one powerful gut-punch of realization.
• Atmospheric: Things that do not purposefully contribute to the spiritual experience, but may cause an altered state of consciousness.
  • Repetition. A lot of the music is very repetitive. I don't mean this in a disparaging way, I mean it in a literal way. The singers will sing the same verse 10-15 times. If the individual is singing along, it can be easy to stop thinking about what is being sung and get swept away in the repetition.
  • Other People. There are thousands of people in the room, all of whom are experiencing the same thing you are. This may heighten the experience, as the brain attempts to mimic what is going on in the other people.
  • Darkness. When singing, the room is dark. All attention is focused on the stage. The body and self fades away in the dark.
  • Funky lighting. The lights are always all over the place, doing crazy light shows, etc. This may cause the individual to become disoriented.
• Contextual: Things that the organizers have no control over, but still may effect the audience's mind.
  • Exhaustion. Passion is a three day experience. As such, for two of those days, those who travel from out of town must stay in a hotel. Being college students, there is a good chance that at the hotel they will have below average sleep. Additionally, each session is many hours long, with a lot of standing.
  • Dehydration. On trips, it can be easy to forget to drink water. Dehydration has been known to impair critical thinking.
  • Expectation. Probably most importantly, the individual may expect to have the feeling, which may cause it to be so.

The experiences can be a good thing. They can be cathartic, and have the effect of giving a person new direction. In my list of potential causes, I mentioned that self-reflection is a possible cause. That is a good thing. It allows people to think about their problems from a different perspective.

On the other hand, what about people that don't feel those things? If we adopt a spiritualistic view of these experiences, that must mean that they are being left out by the spirit. Are they just a bad person? Or are they just the sort of person that is less emotional?

Additionally, can you actually achieve enlightenment from experiences that are localized entirely in the self? Richard King says this about mysticism and psychedelics:

The privatisation of mysticism – that is, the increasing tendency to locate the mystical in the psychological realm of personal experiences – serves to exclude it from political issues as social justice. Mysticism thus becomes seen as a personal matter of cultivating inner states of tranquility and equanimity, which, rather than seeking to transform the world, serve to accommodate the individual to the status quo through the alleviation of anxiety and stress.

If we apply this critique to Christianity, we see that the good work of helping the poor, spreading the gospel, etc could be interrupted by a chasing after these states of alleged enlightenment. However, a good rebuttal could be made from psychological egoism, that if we accept the fact that all ethical acts are selfish to some degree, prioritizing inner states makes a lot of sense, because those inner states could lead to more ethical actions.