Book review: Sacred Knowledge - the psychedelic search for transcendence

In 1963, William A Richards was a graduate student of psychology living in Germany when he volunteered to take part in an experiment with psychedelics. The result was transformative. He saw an “exquisitely beautiful, multidimensional network of intricate, neon-like patterns”. Then, as he tells us in his new book, Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences (Columbia University Press), he then felt fused with them until “my awareness was flooded with love, beauty, and peace beyond anything I ever had known or wildly imagined to be possible”.

Richards’ experience sparked a lifelong interest in psychedelics (which he calls “entheogens”), spirituality and the interconnection of the two. His book is part memoir, part philosophical treatise and part examination of the state of psychedelic research today, touching on Timothy Leary, the death of Richards’ wife, cross-cultural mystical traditions, and possible directions for medical research. Richards, a clinical psychologist, spoke to Noah Berlatsky about his book and entheogens.

What has led you to the conclusion that entheogens are linked to sacred experiences?

From the experience of hundreds of people, literally. And it’s important to make clear that even the word “entheogen”– all psychedelic experiences are not entheogenic experiences. If “entheogen” means a sacred experience of spiritual or religious meaning, only certain experiences approached the right way with the right dosage, etc, are likely to be of that profundity. I mean, a lot of people take psychedelics and see some pretty colours and giggle or get a little paranoid, and that’s not what we’re talking about.

So what makes an experience entheogenic in your view?

Well, in the book, I make the distinction between archetypal or visionary experiences, and then what we call the unitive/mystical consciousness. And people who have either or both usually view them as profoundly meaningful and personally transformative in some sense. The difference is that the visionary archetypal experiences, there still is the sense of yourself as the observer. So I’m here looking at something there – Moses’ burning bush, or a vision of the Christ, or of precious gemstones. It may be very awesome, but there still is the everyday personality, there is the observer. And in what we call mystical consciousness, it’s like that observer kind of melts into the experience. The Hindu image is of the drop of water merging with the ocean. So that when it’s over, there’s memory of the experience, but you don’t name it as your experience necessarily.