[DRAFT] 26 | Harvard Psychedelic Intersections Conference (Listening Is Psychedelic)

 

~14 MINS READ

I Just Left Harvard. I Need a Few Days.

PSYCHEDELICS. SPIRITUALITY. LAW. CONSCIOUSNESS. THE END OF SOMETHING. THE BEGINNING OF SOMETHING ELSE.

What happens when you walk into a room at Harvard Divinity School for the third year in a row and learn it will be the last time?

I am writing this from the road. Still processing. Still carrying the weight of two days in Cambridge that changed what I thought I knew about where this field is heading, where I am heading, and what happens when institutions build something extraordinary and then let it go.

Psychedelic Intersections 2026. The fourth annual conference on psychedelics, religion, and the humanities at Harvard Divinity School. Two days. Thirty-seven speakers from a dozen countries. Three co-hosting schools for the first time: the Divinity School, Harvard Law, and the Mahindra Humanities Center. Keynotes that rewired how I think about truth, consciousness, and what it means to be human in the age of AI.

This was not a science conference. This was not a business conference. This was the only major psychedelic event in the world built from the study of religion outward. And it just held its final gathering.

I have too much to say for one post. The full piece is coming. But here is what I walked through in those two days, and why it matters.

What the Law Is Building (Whether It Means To)

A scholar presented the case of Sacred Sanctuary, an ayahuasca church that formed after the collapse of Soul Quest, was raided by the DEA in 2024, suspended ceremonies for a year, and resumed in 2026 after the DEA declined to prosecute. His argument: the law does not merely constrain psychedelic religion. It produces it. Every raid, every court filing, every year of legal uncertainty refined their doctrine, their governance, their ethical protocols. Legal conflict is a productive force. Religion and law are not opposites. They are building each other.

In another room, six active psychedelic church leaders spoke openly about what they are building. A church in Oakland with one hundred and thirty-eight thousand members that was raided, reopened twenty-four hours later, and grew by one hundred and twenty thousand members because of the press. A former Mormon who described a before-and-after moment so total he calls it his own BC/AD. A church running an end-of-life initiative with a Sloan Kettering oncologist, serving a man with ALS whose soul showed him everything his brain had been protecting him from. A founder who went to court and watched a judge expand the legal definition of religion to include "existential humility": the recognition that not having all the answers is itself a form of sincerity.

Rick Doblin sat in the audience and asked about psychedelics as rites of passage for fourteen-year-olds. The church leaders described families journeying together, children seeing their parents as human for the first time, parents seeing their children the same way.

I will tell you more about all of this. What these churches are doing quietly, at scale, with real families and real legal stakes, is the most exciting development in American religion right now. Jeffrey Breau said so himself, in what turned out to be his farewell.

The Field's Blind Spot

Three papers. That is how many academic papers have been published on guruism and cultic dynamics in psychedelic organizations out of more than ten thousand psychedelic journal articles in the last decade. Jules Evans, director of the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, laid out the data. How psychedelics amplify transference and projection. How facilitators can become ego-inflated. How a Canadian philosopher did too much 5-MeO-DMT and started shouting "What's my name?" during sessions until participants called him the messiah.

He named the imprinting effect: people bond to whoever gives them the sacrament the way baby geese imprint on the first thing they see. Forty-six percent of survey respondents reported feeling awe at their facilitator's power. Nineteen percent said criticizing a ceremonial leader invites magical retaliation.

I have things to say about this that no one else at the conference said. About what protects ethical guides from false allegations. About what happens when the projection goes the other direction. About changing your name to Yeshua in a field already anxious about cult leaders. That part of the story is mine to tell, and I will.

Healing Without Repentance

Christine Diindiisi McCleave, an Anishinaabe scholar, called in from the Peruvian Andes to name the central moral contradiction of the psychedelic renaissance. Medicines once targeted for eradication when used by Native peoples are now celebrated when used predominantly by white populations. She told us about Wounded Knee. People killed for praying. Killed because they sang at night for the survival of their way of life, and singing was illegal, and they were not yet citizens, and they were not covered by the First Amendment. "We were enemies of the state."

Her research found that Indigenous participants did not locate healing in the substance itself. Healing was relational. Grounded in community, ceremony, responsibility, and ancestral continuity. Many described the current psychedelic movement as déjà vu: extraction dressed as innovation.

Her phrase: "healing without repentance." If there is no accountability, no justice, no repair, it is not healing. It is perpetuation.

I am a predominantly white male practitioner working with plant sacraments. This paper speaks directly to me. I intend to engage it honestly in the full post. Not defensively. Not with guilt. With the kind of reckoning this work demands.

Women, Spirits, and the Feminization of Ayahuasca

A sociologist from Brazil who has been a Santo Daime member for over a decade presented research on how women are reshaping the globalization of ayahuasca through spirit possession. Interviewing nearly thirty female leaders across fourteen countries. Showing how women incorporate male spirits during ceremony, temporarily suspending gender norms and accessing forms of authority traditionally coded as masculine. She called it distributed, more-than-human agency: women, plants, and spirits co-producing experience, knowledge, and transformation.

Before colonization, ayahuasca was not used for healing. It was for war, for hunting, for other rituals entirely. Its contemporary association with care, with embodied sensory experience, with the maternal, is a feminization process driven significantly by women who will never hold formal institutional power but who have become the central healers and cosmological innovators of their communities.

What an Auschwitz Survivor Saw Under LSD

This was the story I cannot stop thinking about. Ka-Tzetnik 135633, the pen name of Yehiel De-Nur, an Auschwitz survivor who collapsed on the witness stand at the Eichmann trial in 1961. For thirty years after that, he suffered nightmares. Could not be asked questions. Could not appear in public.

In 1976, he underwent five LSD sessions at a clinic in the Netherlands. Under the influence, he was returned to Auschwitz. But this time he could see. He saw an SS man overseeing a transport to the crematorium, yawning in the cold. And then the terrible recognition: he could have been that man. His own face, wearing the death skull cap.

"Once you say Auschwitz was the other planet, once you say it was Satan, that is escape. That means you've learned nothing. I, a human being, people created Auschwitz."

His nightmares ended. He began speaking publicly. He wrote a book called Shiviti, in the first person for the first time. The LSD did not cure him. It restored his capacity to testify. Not to a court. To a community. In the language of a shared tradition.

This is the deepest argument I have ever encountered for why psychedelic chaplaincy matters. Healing that produces testimony. Testimony that serves community. I will write more.

Seven Objections from Christianity (And Why None of Them Hold)

An Oxford theologian working at the intersection of ecotheology and biomimicry presented the first systematic mapping of Christian theological objections to psilocybin. Seven of them: substance and self-control, spiritual dangers, demonic influence, the shortcut problem, the question of whether suffering is necessary for virtue, the biblical prohibition of pharmakeia, and worldliness.

She engaged each one seriously. None of them, she argued, categorically prohibit psychedelic therapy within Christianity. The one that will stay with me longest: "When suffering becomes so severe that it destroys the conditions under which virtue is cultivated, it is no longer functioning as a crucible. It becomes an obstacle to the life it was supposed to form."

And her image for psilocybin: "Less a bypass and more like a door. It requires that you still walk."

She also said something that connects to everything else: "The parts of psychedelic therapy that are expensive to deliver at scale are the parts that religious communities are structurally positioned to offer." Physical space. Trusted relationships. People willing to be trained. Long-term relational commitment without a billable hour attached to every conversation.

The Pursuit of Truth

Noah Feldman, Harvard Law School. Constitutional law scholar. Currently writing a book on AI and consciousness. He gave the talk I will be thinking about for years.

His thesis: universities exist for the pursuit of truth. Psychedelic experience is a means of pursuing truth. Therefore universities are natural homes for this work.

He invoked a medieval Islamic philosopher who described the imaginative faculty not as the capacity to picture something unreal, but as the opposite: the capacity to perceive truths not visible to superficial sense data.

He said something about AI that rearranged my thinking: "We made a machine that can speak as well as we can that is not conscious. The nature of consciousness is the single most pressing philosophical question we have. And it is the same question we have to ask about psychedelic experience."

And then: "The importance of being human is going to inhere in the value to us of having human experiences."

Professor Fawaz, from the audience, added what might be the single most important sentence of the entire conference: "We on the left have become so obsessed with deconstructing systems, we have forgotten that humans are psychological beings with deep psychic needs that existed millennia before any of those systems emerged. The question of preserving democracy and our planet cannot be answered until we psychically feel that we are valuable again."

I am building a technology platform at the intersection of psychedelics, AI, and consciousness. I have things to say about how Feldman's framework connects to that work. More in the full post.

The Plants Are Always Speaking

An anthropologist who spent twenty-seven months in the Amazon, completed a formal apprenticeship with a Kichwa maestro as his first female student, and participated in two hundred ayahuasca ceremonies, stood at the podium and said: "Eleven maestros from five indigenous groups told me a version of the same thing. It was the plants that told us."

She described dieta, the Amazonian practice of prolonged isolation with food and behavioral restrictions while consuming master plants. Not a metaphor for discipline. A method of becoming partially plant. Extended multispecies liminality, she calls it. A hybrid consciousness between human and plant that persists for the rest of the practitioner's life.

Thirty-four months after her dieta with chiric sanango, on a separate continent, the plant announced itself again through the same somatic signature. A whistle melody arose spontaneously. She whistled it into the microphone for us.

"The plants are always speaking. And through dieta, the sound starts coming from inside the house."

Her warning: what is disappearing is not the knowledge itself but the practice of apprenticeship. The discipline of years of isolation that the fast pace of modern life cannot accommodate. The rise of practitioners who specialize only in ayahuasca without the broader training. This is what leads to malpractice, coercion, and death.

In the Fourth Way tradition I practice, we call the equivalent "intentional suffering." You hold back from something so that when desire arises, you can redirect it toward your intention. It is dieta on a spectrum. The conference helped me see that connection more clearly than I ever had.

Sufism, Ego Death, and the Mosque as Psychedelic Architecture

A researcher from Harvard Medical School traced three stages of the Sufi spiritual journey: kashf, the sudden discovery of self; wajd, the ecstasy of spiritual power; and fana, annihilation, the dissolution of the separate self entirely. She read Rumi in Persian. She showed us mosque ceilings designed specifically to alter consciousness through geometry alone.

Gurdjieff, the founder of the Fourth Way tradition I have practiced for years, drew heavily from Sufi sources. Hearing these concepts articulated at Harvard, in a panel on consciousness alongside the MEQ critique and Amazonian plant apprenticeship, felt like watching three rivers converge that I had been walking along separately for decades.

Surveillance Science and Subliminal Science

Benjamin Breen, the closing keynote, traced two streams running through the entire history of psychedelic science. One he called surveillance science: Galtonian, quantitative, controlling, rooted in biometrics and the logic of mass data collection. The other he called subliminal science: Jamesian, singular, threshold-based, rooted in first-person experience and the crossing of boundaries.

He showed us William James's nitrous oxide writings from 1882. He told us about Margaret Mead's unpublished LSD memo from 1954, her entanglement with MKUltra, her comparison of psychedelic disruption to the disruption colonialism brought to Melanesian islanders, and her decision not to take LSD herself because the FBI was surveilling her.

He argued these two streams are not opposites. They are entangled. The same people participated in both. William James and the father of eugenics got drunk together on the Eiffel Tower in 1889 and co-designed both a eugenics questionnaire and a census of hallucinations. The tools are value-neutral. It is how they are wielded that matters.

The Measurement Tool Is Broken

Two scholars presented a meticulous archaeology of Walter Pahnke's 1963 Harvard thesis, "Drugs and Mysticism," which created the Mystical Experience Questionnaire that remains the foundational measurement instrument of psychedelic science. Their finding: the experiment failed on its own terms. Nobody had a complete mystical experience by the framework's own criteria. Pahnke introduced an arbitrary grade bar at sixty percent to get anyone over it. When the MEQ was revived in 2006, that grade bar was carried forward with no methodological justification.

They have been trying to publish this paper for two years. "There is tremendous protectiveness about the MEQ still inside of science."

Their proposal: retire the fetishization of mysticism and return to Pahnke's own later, expanded typology, which included not just the mystical but the psychotic, the aesthetic, the cognitive, and the psychodynamic. A much richer, more honest framework for what actually happens when a human being takes a psychedelic.

The symmetry is not lost on me. Pahnke submitted that thesis at Harvard Divinity School in 1963. In 2026, at the same divinity school, scholars argued it is time to move beyond the framework he built. Sixty-three years. Same building complex. And the program that made it possible to have that conversation is closing next month.

The Shulgins Were Splitters, Not Lumpers

A professor of anthropology from the New School presented what he called pharmacosociality: the ways pharmaceuticals constitute, mediate, and transform human relationships. He contrasted Aldous Huxley's perennial philosophy, which lumps all psychedelic experiences together as paths to the same mystical union, with the Shulgins, who were splitters. Alexander Shulgin synthesized over two hundred novel compounds and attributed a unique character to each one. What you found with 2C-B was not what you found with ayahuasca. What Shulgin found was not what his wife found.

"The drug's personality emerges only in the encounter." Each encounter is singular. Each relationship between a person and a substance is its own event.

This is what I experience in ceremony. Every person, every sacrament, every night is its own world. No two are alike. Langlitz gave me the academic language for what I have been practicing.

What Integration Actually Looks Like

One of the most experienced church leaders in the room described how his community integrates psychedelic experiences. He learned from years of living with the Inga people in Putumayo, Colombia. Their method: "If someone has a big experience, you say, 'Would you like to go to breakfast?'"

No workbooks. No billable hours. No Instagram integration coaches. Just being with someone. Having an opportunity to emote, to explain, to speak without a clock ticking.

Another church described their integration as daily life itself. Monday community potluck. Yoga and qigong. A men's group on Thursdays. A women's group on Wednesdays where they make body products together: lotions, toothpaste, creams. Sovereignty over their own bodies as a form of integration.

"Integration: we are all integrating all the time whether you realize it or not."

The Comedian Who Surrendered

On Friday night, we watched Adam Strauss perform The Mushroom Cure at a theater in Watertown. The true story of a man trying to cure his debilitating OCD with psychedelics. No guide. No church. No protocol. Just a 2006 study he had read and whatever substances he could source during a Burning Man-induced national shortage.

It was hilarious. It was harrowing. Hamilton Morris and Rick Doblin joined him on stage afterward for a conversation on psychedelics, religion, and spirituality. The performance is being filmed as a feature film, executive-produced by Michael Pollan and Hamilton Morris.

But the moment that will stay with me was not a punchline. It was Adam standing with his hands spread open. Palms up. The posture of complete surrender. It is not about the substance. It is about the willingness to let go. To let something larger than your mind run the show for a while.

That is what a guide is there for. That is the moment where spiritual care is most needed and most absent in the current landscape. Adam found it alone. Hands open. Palms up. And that is exactly the gap that psychedelic chaplaincy exists to fill.

The Farewell

Jeffrey Breau built this from nothing. He and Paul Gillis-Smith were MDiv students who interned as ketamine chaplains at a hospital where half the patients were left to process their psychedelic experiences alone. They saw the gap. They built the conference. They built the chaplaincy workshops. They published two open-access anthologies. They helped secure a sixteen million dollar grant. They trained the first generation of psychedelic chaplains.

And now it is over.

His closing reflection wove together every panel through one word: listening. Listening to people. Listening to plants. Listening to fungi, to molecules, to experiences, to cultures, to texts, to the earth, to the gods. "These are all forms of relationship. Listening is the basis of community."

He said: "The study of psychedelics in society and culture is coming to an end at the CSWR. After five years, Paul and my time at Harvard will be wrapping up. But we believe that these programs are more urgent than ever. And we are committed to being in this community with you in the future."

Paul closed with the same quote they used at the very first conference three years ago. Lisa Bieberman, 1968:

"Without such intent, there may be drugs and drug effects, but there is no ayahuasca. For anything that can help us make this world a bit more sublime ought neither to be suppressed, nor squandered."

Then: "You're free to hang out in the building. We have nothing for you but each other."

What Comes Next

The mushrooms are withdrawing from the Sierra Mazateca. The sacred fungi retreating from the places they once grew abundantly. Not randomly. As communication. A response to extraction, disrespect, the speed at which the world metabolizes what it does not understand.

Harvard is withdrawing from psychedelic chaplaincy.

I am not withdrawing from anything.

I intend to apply to Harvard Divinity School this fall for the Master of Divinity. The psychedelics program will not be there when I arrive. But the cross-campus access to Harvard Law, Harvard Medical School, and the Mahindra Center remains. The chaplaincy training that was built here left a residue that has not fully evaporated. And the people who built it are still in the world, still listening, still committed.

I need a few days to sit with everything before I write the full post. It will be one of the most important things I have written. It will include my personal stakes in this work in ways I have not shared before. It will include what it costs to choose this path publicly. And it will include what remains when the institution withdraws but the calling does not.

If you are wondering whether this work might be part of your next step, I suggest starting with my free Ceremony Readiness Guide. If you want to sit with others who are navigating their own thresholds, our online Integration Circles meet monthly.

If this landed, share it with someone whose reset may already be underway.

From my Heart to yours,

Yeshua Adonai

Psychedelic Guide

aboutyeshua.com

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Yeshua is a traveling psychedelic guide currently based in Phoenix, Arizona. USMC combat veteran, former diplomat, and serial social entrepreneur devoted to mental health innovation, he has spent decades exploring contemplative traditions worldwide and learning to trust his own experience along the way.

Frequently Asked Questions

    • Neuroscience of Sleep: Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep. The most accessible and comprehensive book on why your brain requires nightly dissolution to function. Changed how I think about every reset that begins with closing your eyes.

    • Psychedelic neuroscience: Robin Carhart-Harris, REBUS model (the foundational paper on how psychedelics relax the brain's top-down predictions); Gül Dölen et al.'s critical period research (how psilocybin reopens developmental windows that normally close in childhood); Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind (the book that brought psychedelic science to mainstream conversation)

    • Psychology of transition: William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes (the definitive guide to navigating the neutral zone between who you were and who you are becoming)

    • Contemplative: Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (silence as the ground of all real growth); Thich Nhat Hanh, Silence (why the noise you carry inside is louder than any external distraction); Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart (the book I recommend most often to clients entering a reset they did not choose)

    • Science of emergence: Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos (the Nobel Prize-winning work on how systems reorganize at higher levels of complexity after disruption)

    • Sacred traditions: Black Elk, The Sacred Pipe (the Seven Sacred Rites of the Oglala Lakota, including the vision quest); Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath (a lyrical meditation on why sanctifying time is more important than sanctifying space)

    • Burnout: Jennifer Moss, The Burnout Epidemic (why rest without restructuring does not resolve burnout); Christina Maslach's three-dimensional model of emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and loss of meaning

    • Trauma and healing: Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal (how the culture that makes us sick is the one most in need of a reset); Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (why the body must be included in any meaningful dissolution and return)

    • On this blog: Thresholds (falling apart on purpose), Self-Remembering (the practice of witnessing your own life), Psychedelic Preparation (the work that begins before ceremony), and The Shame Addiction (what the body carries when it refuses to let go)

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