Beyond Belief: Psychedelics and the Post-Religious Spiritual Path
~12 MINS READ
For those who left one tradition, tried them all, or gave up entirely, and still can't stop looking.
“The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can’t be organized or regulated. It isn’t true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.”
Before We Begin
My name is Yeshua. Yes, really. And no, I don't have a messiah complex (which my ex may disagree), though I understand if you're already suspicious. I changed my name after a spontaneous spiritual awakening in Berlin in 2007. It felt true at the time, and it still does. But I'm aware of the irony: a guy named Yeshua working as a psychedelic guide, talking about the dangers of spiritual authority and the importance of not giving your power away. I promise you, I have no interest in starting a cult and telling others how to live their lives. At times, I barely manage my own laundry.
What I am interested in is the question that has organized my entire adult life: How do we stay connected to the sacred without losing ourselves?
I grew up inside fundamentalist Christianity. I knew the songs, the shame, the certainty, and eventually the exile that comes from asking too many questions. But leaving that tradition didn't end my search, it just widened it. I've lived in Buddhist monasteries and sat with Zen priests. I've danced and chanted with Hare Krishna communities until my voice gave out. I've done silent retreats, plant medicine ceremonies, sweat lodges, and more meditation intensives than I can count. The New Age movement, with its borrowing from Eastern traditions like yoga, tantra, nondual philosophy, and guru devotion, has been part of my landscape for decades. And through all of it, I've carried the same tension: the longing to bow, to surrender, to belong to something larger than myself, and the deep, stubborn refusal to abandon my own knowing. If that sounds like you, this post is for you.
When Devotion Met Resistance
Years ago, I traveled to France to see Amma, the "hugging saint," the Indian guru who has embraced millions of people around the world. I went because I was curious, because I wanted to feel what devotion felt like when it wasn't laced with the fear I'd known in Christianity, and because part of me genuinely wondered: What if she's the real deal?
I sat in the crowded hall with hundreds of devotees. I watched people weep as they approached her. I watched them bow. Some kissed her feet. The energy in the room was undeniable, and something was happening there. Something real. And when it was my turn to go up, I couldn't do it.
My legs wouldn't move. Or rather, something in me wouldn't let them. My pride, maybe. My trauma, probably. My discernment, I hope. I watched the line move forward, and I walked outside instead. I stood in the French night air and cried. Not because I was sad, exactly, but because I was split. Part of me desperately wanted what those people had: the surrender, the certainty, the permission to stop questioning and just belong. And part of me knew that if I bowed, I would be betraying something essential in myself, something I couldn't name but couldn't abandon.
I didn't get my hug from Amma. I got something else: a bone deep encounter with my own resistance. And I've been working with that resistance ever since.
Who This Is For
I want to be clear about who I'm speaking to. Maybe you left Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or the tradition of your family. Maybe you left a Buddhist sangha or a yoga community that turned out to have a shadow side. Possibly, you experienced harm from a mentor, teacher, or peer. It may have been within a psychedelic church community. Maybe you walked away from the New Age scene after one too many encounters with spiritual bypassing dressed up as enlightenment.
Or maybe you never had a tradition to leave. Maybe you've called yourself agnostic or atheist for years, and you're surprised to find yourself here, reading about spirituality, considering a guided psychedelic experience, wondering if there's something to all this after all. Maybe you still practice. You go to services, you meditate, you have a lineage, but something feels incomplete. The forms don't quite fit anymore. You're looking for something you can't name. All of you are welcome here.
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
What I've witnessed in my work as a psychedelic integration guide is this: people across this entire spectrum, believers, doubters, those who gave up on the question entirely, tend to arrive at a similar place after deep psychedelic passages. Not necessarily back to religion, but back to something. A felt sense of connection. A care for life that isn't performative. A desire to be good, to be kind, to live with integrity. Not because anyone told them to, but because they touched something that made it obvious.
The Seeker's Dilemma
I don't think I'm alone in this tension. In fact, I know I'm not. Twenty-two percent of Americans now identify as "spiritual but not religious," and another 28% check "none" for religious affiliation. But these numbers don't capture the complexity. Many of these people didn't leave because they stopped caring about transcendence. They left because the institutions couldn't hold what they experienced, or who they were becoming.
A researcher, Christian Greer, at Harvard Divinity School, put it this way: "There's a culture of seekership, and a lot of these seekers are created because the religious institutions in which they were raised were not providing them with the nourishment they needed. So they went out and became seekers."
And seekers, across Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the eclectic New Age synthesis, share certain wounds:
The guru who abused trust
The community that required conformity as the price of belonging
The doctrine that shamed the body, pathologized doubt, or demanded certainty
The spiritual bypassing that told them to "transcend" their trauma rather than feel it
Whether you left evangelical Christianity or a Tibetan Buddhist sangha, whether you're recovering from a prosperity gospel megachurch or an ayahuasca cult in Costa Rica, the pattern is similar. Religion, in all its forms, offers genuine gifts. And religion, in all its forms, can wound.
What I Found Across Traditions
Here's what surprised me: the gifts were real, too. In every lineage I touched, I found something true. In Christian mysticism, I found the via negativa, the path of unknowing, where God is encountered precisely where concepts fail. In Zen, I found the direct pointing at reality, the refusal to mistake the finger for the moon. In the Hare Krishna tradition, I found the body as instrument of devotion: dancing, chanting, giving yourself over to sound and movement. In Buddhism, I found vipassana, the careful, patient attending to what actually arises, moment by moment. In ceremony with plant medicines, I found what indigenous traditions have known for millennia: that the sacred is not merely conceptual. It can be encountered. It can take you apart and put you back together.
The problem was never that these traditions were empty. The problem was that each one, in its institutional form, seemed to require something I wasn't willing to give: the abandonment of my own discernment in favor of someone else's authority.
The Mystical Experience: What the Research Shows
In the landmark Johns Hopkins psilocybin study, researchers found something that would not surprise any mystic from any tradition, but that startled the scientific establishment. Among healthy, spiritually inclined participants who had never tried psychedelics, 33% rated the psilocybin session as the single most spiritually significant experience of their entire lives, and an additional 38% rated it among their top five. Seventy nine percent reported increased well being and life satisfaction, and 61% met criteria for what researchers call a "complete mystical experience."
In a more recent study, religious leaders including rabbis, priests, Zen Buddhist roshis, and imams were given psilocybin in controlled settings. Ninety six percent rated the experience among the most spiritually significant of their lives. Participants reported feeling "more in love with the mystery of God," experiencing rituals as "lived practice" rather than going through the motions, and a "deepened sense of humility."
What does a mystical experience involve? Unity. Transcendence of time and space. A felt encounter with the sacred. Paradox. Ineffability, the sense that words can't capture what happened. These are not new phenomena. Meister Eckhart knew them. Rumi knew them. The Desert Fathers knew them. What's new is that they can be occasioned, reliably and safely, in a single guided psychedelic session, without decades of monastic practice.
Roland Griffiths, who led much of this research at Johns Hopkins, described it this way:
“The core feature of the mystical experience is this strong sense of the interconnectedness of all things, where there’s a rising sense of not only self confidence and clarity, but of communal responsibility, of altruism and social justice, a felt sense of the Golden Rule: to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And those kinds of sensibilities are at the core of all of the world’s religious, ethical, and spiritual traditions.”
For the wandering seeker, this is both liberation and danger. Liberation, because you don't need anyone's permission to encounter the sacred. Danger, because the experience can be so powerful that you hand your interpretation over to whoever is holding the space.
Redefining Spirituality: Beyond the Bling
I want to pause here and name something I see in the psychedelic and wellness spaces that troubles me. Spirituality has become, for some, another form of consumption, another way to perform identity, another metric for comparison. How many ceremonies have you done? Which retreat centers have you been to? Do you have a breathwork practice? A cold plunge routine? The right playlist? The vintage singing bowl? The shaman on speed dial?
I'm not mocking these things. I've done most of them. But I've also watched people collect spiritual experiences the way others collect watches or followers. The trappings change, but the energy is the same: more, better, shinier, deeper. This is not what I mean by spirituality.
What I've come to believe, through my own psychedelic passages and through sitting with hundreds of others in their integration, is that spirituality, at its core, is much simpler than the wellness industrial complex suggests. It's the felt sense that your life matters, that other lives matter, that you're connected to something larger than your own preferences and fears. It shows up as kindness when no one is watching, as integrity when it costs you something, as care for the earth, for your community, for the stranger. It shows up as the willingness to sit with discomfort rather than bypass it, and as showing up for the people in your life, not perfectly, but consistently.
You don't need an ice bath to be spiritual. You don't need to sage your apartment or attend another festival or add more tools to your practice. You might need to call your mother. You might need to apologize to someone you hurt. You might need to sit still and feel what you've been avoiding. The psychedelic experience can open a door, but what you do on the other side, how you treat people, how you live your days, that's where the real practice is.
The Second Naïveté: A Map for the Wanderer
French philosopher Paul Ricoeur offers a framework I've found genuinely useful. He describes three stages of spiritual development. The first is what he calls "First Naïveté," the uncritical faith of early formation where we accept the tradition's symbols as literal truth. The world is enchanted. God, dharma, guru: all are real in the way a chair is real.
Then comes the "Critical Stage," where doubt arrives. Through study, trauma, or simply growing up, we see the human fingerprints on the sacred text. We deconstruct. Many of us get stuck here, unable to return to innocent belief, unable to find what replaces it.
Finally, there is what Ricoeur calls the "Second Naïveté," a return to symbolic meaning making through criticism, not despite it. We hold the tradition's images lightly, no longer as literal truths, but as vessels pointing toward something real. We can pray without believing in a bearded man in the sky. We can bow without abandoning our discernment.
Ricoeur wrote: "If we can no longer live the great symbolisms of the sacred in accordance with the original belief in them, we can… aim at a second naïveté in and through criticism."
This is the path I walk. And I believe psychedelics, held carefully with proper support, can help.
Integration Without Conversion
If you've been burned by religion, any religion, or if you've spent years as an atheist or agnostic and are now reconsidering the territory, here's my integration stance:
Honor the experience. Whatever showed up for you, whether Christ, Buddha, Shiva, your dead grandmother, formless light, or just a profound sense of ‘okayness,’ honor it. You don't have to interpret it through anyone else's framework, but don't dismiss it just because it looks like something you once rejected.
Hold interpretations lightly. The experience is real. The theology you wrap around it is optional.
Protect your agency. You are the final authority on your own spiritual life. Be especially wary of anyone, including me, who seems too certain about what your vision means.
Let the body lead. Religious trauma lives in the nervous system. Integration is somatic. Let your body tell you when something is safe and when it isn't.
Reclaim what serves you. You can light a candle without rejoining a church. You can chant without bowing to a guru. You can build a practice that draws from every tradition you've touched, without belonging to any of them.
Redefine spirituality for yourself. Maybe it's not about transcendence or altered states at all. Maybe it's about how you show up for your kids, how you handle conflict, whether you can sit with someone in pain without trying to fix them. Let your definition emerge from your experience, not from what the culture tells you spirituality should look like.
A Note on My Own Contradictions
I still feel the pull toward devotion, and I still feel the pressure to belong. What I’ve learned to trust is a quieter signal beneath both. Not distrust of people or leadership, but a felt sense of coherence in the relational field.
I’m often perceived as confident or charismatic, and I’ve felt how that can invite projection or judgment, especially when stepping into leadership. Part of my work has been learning how to lead without grasping, and how to belong without performing.
Across traditions, one thing has remained consistent. The heart has an intelligence of its own. The body knows when something is aligned. When I listen there, the path doesn’t become rigid or ideological, but it does become trustworthy.
The night I walked into that hall in France, something in me said no. At the time, I thought it meant I was broken or confused. Now I see it differently. It was an early act of listening. Not a rejection of the sacred, but a return to it. A return to the heart, and the guidance that has been there all along.
Questions to Sit With
What did the tradition(s) you've touched give you that you still want?
What did they take that you're still recovering?
When does spiritual surrender feel like freedom, and when does it feel like collapse?
What would a practice look like that honored your longing and your wariness?
How do you define spirituality now, not how you were taught to define it, but what it actually means in your lived experience?
The Path Forward
You don't have to choose between the sacred and your integrity. You don't have to abandon the mystical because institutions failed you. You also don't have to bow to anyone who asks. There's a third way. It requires discernment. It requires patience. It requires building practices and finding people who can hold both your hunger and your skepticism without trying to resolve the tension prematurely.
“I looked in temples, churches, and mosques. But I found the Divine within my heart.”
The mystics were always a little suspect within their own traditions. They had direct encounters and then had to figure out what to do with institutions that couldn't hold what they'd seen. You're in that lineage now. Even if you never planned to be.
From my Heart to yours,
Yeshua Adonai
Psychedelic Guide
aboutyeshua.com
Yeshua is a psychedelic guide and integration coach based in Maine and Arizona. A former Marine and diplomat, I have spent two decades exploring contemplative traditions across the world and learning to trust my own experience along the way.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Both. The experiences meet validated criteria for mystical states, and those states have measurable effects on well being and meaning. Whether they're "real" encounters with the sacred or neurochemical events revealing something true about consciousness is philosophy, not pharmacology. What's certain is that these experiences matter to the people who have them.
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Maybe. Maybe not. Psychedelic spaces can replicate every dysfunction you've seen in religion, charisma, hierarchy, spiritual bypassing, boundary violations. They can also be genuinely healing. The key is vetting carefully, trusting your body, and working with a psychedelic guide who welcomes your skepticism rather than pathologizing it.
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Absolutely. Many people have profound experiences that don't require any theological interpretation. You might encounter a sense of interconnection, of compassion, of awe at the sheer fact of existence, without needing to call it God or spirit. The invitation is to stay curious about what arises, without forcing it into a framework that doesn't fit.
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It might. The psyche brings what it brings. You can hold it lightly, explore what it means to you now, not what you were told it meant. Many people find traditional symbols take on new meaning in psychedelic space. Others find those images fade as the psyche heals.
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This is real and worth holding carefully. I try to engage with lineages through teachers who carry them authentically, to learn the context and not just the techniques, and to stay humble about what I'm borrowing. That said, the human encounter with transcendence is universal. The forms vary. The longing is the same.
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