Brain, Cognition and perception, Personality and self, Spirituality and religion

How I freed my mind: A quest for meaning and expansion

Michiel van Elk, Associate Professor in Cognitive Psychology at Leiden University, on a journey taking in religion and psychedelics.

30 April 2025

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'In the name of Jesus, I command you: release this woman! We free you in Jesus' name from all demonic powers! Demon of fear and addiction: you are going back to the caverns of darkness!' Crying, the woman falls to the ground. She screams loudly, 'No, no, no!', cringing and convulsing. Each exclamation of the healer is followed by another wave of bodily movements. But as time passes, the woman's shaking subsides somewhat and she remains on the floor, exhausted. After a while, she is helped back to her feet. A faint smile appears on the woman's face as she gently admits to the healer that she does feel a little better. The evening ends with an exuberant song: 'Hallelujah, Jesus Christ is alive! Now that He has left the grave And disarmed death, Jesus will reign forever; He's alive!'

This type of healing and deliverance nights are regularly organised in Pentecostal and Evangelical churches. Believers are prayed for to be cured from illness, addiction, depression and anxiety. As a child I grew up in one such church – in the middle of a provincial town in the Netherlands – and witnessed rituals that seemed to be borrowed directly from a movie such as The Exorcist. Through Christian books, I read about a world ruled by good and evil forces. On Walpurgis Night, April 30, the rest of the Netherlands built a party on King's Day – the most celebratory event of the year, where every town and city colour orange. Me and the other church members retreated to a basement, convinced that the Satanists would gather to attack Christian families. As believers, by praying, we could mobilise legions of angels to fight the dark demons.

The deliverance mania also extended to the sex life of church members: those who did masturbate occasionally needed to be delivered from the spirit of sex addiction. And those who had feelings for someone of the same sex could be freed from what was considered an 'abomination' in God's eyes. Christian self-help books such as The Broken Image, detailed the steps to 'restore the spiritual wounds' allegedly underlying homosexual feelings. The Christian student union of which I was a member, recently even became discredited when a leaked internal document revealed that members with 'other' sexual preferences were passed over as board members.

It took me a long time to distance myself from the beliefs of my youth. While most people drop out around puberty, I stayed with the club until I was well into my twenties. Faith was deeply engrained in my thinking and I took the spiritual reality I was led to believe in as real. I was brainwashed. If you are stuck in such a closed world view, there is no room for other perspectives. The psychologist Leon Festinger researched this kind of sectarian movement back in the 1950s, detailing in his book When Prophecy Fails how cognitive dissonance contributes to maintaining such a worldview.

Yet in time I broke free of my faith. I noted the date and time in my calendar: January 2005. I sat alone at home and suddenly I knew for sure: God does not exist!

In my studies, I had specialised in philosophy, religious psychology and neuroscience. Suddenly I saw clearly that all those religious rituals of my youth were psychologically explainable. It was all projection and mass hysteria, as Freud observed. My god experiences and endless prayers had been nothing more than an internal dialogue with my inner self. And the idea that there is life after death was no longer compatible with my knowledge of neuroscience, which states that when our brain stops functioning, so does our consciousness.

The insight felt like an enormous liberation, because I suddenly experienced a deep harmony in my worldview. The conflict between faith and science, which I had felt for a long time, was gone. But at the same time, letting go of faith also felt very frightening and oppressive. All my frameworks for meaning and significance had fallen away. My whole life was suddenly in question.

Crafting a new form of spirituality

I am not alone in my departure from faith. Fewer and fewer people consider themselves traditionally religious. The trend of increasing secularisation, which had already begun in the turbulent 1960s, is still continuing, and in Europe every year more people unsubscribe from the church than join, according to research by the Pew Foundation. The sociologist Max Weber predicted at the end of the 19th century that in a society with increasing prosperity and technology, the role of religion would increasingly decline. And he seems to have been proven right – statistics indicate that countries with the strongest welfare state, are the most atheistic (see, for example, the book Society Without God by sociology professor Paul Zuckerman).

But appearances are deceptive. Under the surface, our world 'shimmers and crackles with religiosity', as a group of theologians and religious scholars observed in the late 1990s. According to writer and researcher Koert van der Velde, even without religious faith you can still flirt with 'God' in all kinds of forms, ranging from practicing Zen meditation and doing 'breath work' to having your chakras read or jumping into ice cold water under the guidance of Wim Hoff. Joep de Hart, sociologist has dubbed this group as 'floating believers', people who sometimes affiliate with one spiritual movement and next with another. For this group, the journey is more important than the final destination. Elements from different traditions are combined with each other: a traditional cocoa ceremony from Peru can go well with a Buddhist meditation or a prayer from one of the Christian desert fathers.

The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss already described this process of creatively recombining existing elements with the term 'bricolage', creating a new form of crafted spirituality each time. According to the theologian and philosopher Gerko Tempelman, man is 'incurably religious': no matter how you look at it, the concept of 'God' always pops up in discussions about ethics, meaning, spirituality, but also in contemporary discussions, e.g., about forgiveness and retaliation. However, more often than not, 'God' is typically given a non-religious interpretation, instead considered as 'whatever people may understand by the divine' – as William James, the founder of American psychology, noted at the end of the 19th century in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Looking for a horizon of meaning

After my turning away from religion, I also noticed still a deeply felt need for meaning. I distanced myself from the fixed anchors of the faith of my youth, but in crucial moments in my life – at so-called 'rites de passages', according to the French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep – I missed a horizon of meaning that helped me to orient myself. The birth of my first child; a change of job; loss of a close friend. I felt fascinated while reading Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, in which, as a psychiatrist and as a survivor of three death camps, Frankl observes that as human beings we cannot live without a glimmer of hope for something greater than ourselves.

At the time I worked in science and found satisfaction in my academic work for a long time: I published, won grants, attended conferences and worked abroad for a while. But where science provides very good insight into how reality works, it ultimately does not answer the big questions of life, such as: 'How do I lead a meaningful life?' and 'On what do I base my morality?'.

Fascinated by the experiences of my religious youth, I conducted psychological and neuroscientific research on religion and spirituality. Together with my colleagues, I tried to understand how it is that some people are more sensitive to having supernatural experiences than others. We discovered that some people have a particular 'talent' for this: they have a vivid imagination and can become completely absorbed in what they experience. These people, who score high on the personality trait 'absorption', can be greatly moved by a beautiful poem, experience an altered state of consciousness when they meditate, and feel enchanted in an overwhelming landscape. These experiences of self-transcendence, where one momentarily rises above oneself, can occur in many different places: from a music festival to a visit to a museum; in a church or just when you are alone and meditating all by yourself. And these experiences also turn out to be beneficial: people who have regular self-transcendental experiences feel better about themselves and are physically and mentally healthier. Psychologist Abraham Maslow placed intense peak experiences, whereby people transcend themselves and feel a connection to something bigger or larger than themselves, at the top of his pyramid of human needs.

Psychedelics

I knew certain types of drugs were guaranteed to induce these kinds of experiences, yet I never felt drawn to try them. I was occasionally offered an Ecstasy pill at a festival, but I preferred the intoxication of a couple of beers. Someone invited me to participate in a psychedelic ceremony once, but I felt no need to undergo an ancient ritual under the guidance of a shadowy shaman together with people I didn't know. My resistance to trying psychedelics, such as LSD, ayahuasca or psilocybin, partly had to do with my stereotypical associations of drugs users stemming from my religious youth. I was also just afraid of losing control, and I tended to lump all drugs together: lighting up a joint fell into the same category as putting a syringe in your arm.

Still, I somehow came across the topic of psychedelics more and more often. Scientific research on psychedelics was and is on the rise and offered fascinating insight into what happens in our brain under the influence of LSD or psilocybin. During a psychedelic experience, our brain reverts to a primitive state similar to the way children perceive the world, according to British researcher Robin Carhart-Harris, who is researching this now at the University of California, San Francisco. Other research, from a Swiss research group led by Franz Vollenweider, shows that under the influence of psychedelics the filters of perception fall away, making everything seem more overwhelming and intense. These effects, in turn, contribute to less focus on the self and less rumination. In this way, psychedelics could also free us from ingrained thinking and behavioural patterns.

Consequently, research focuses on the use of psychedelics for psychopathologies in which rigidity in thinking or acting is a central feature. These include depression, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder and death anxiety. Treatment with psychedelic psychotherapy may well provide a solution for patients suffering from these conditions. The explanation for these positive effects is suggested to lie the altered state of consciousness that psychedelics evoke: during a psychedelic-induced mystical experience, people view their lives from a different perspective and gain important new insights. Psychedelics this way break psychological barriers; can change existing habits; and can challenge everything you took for granted.

Other studies show that psychedelics can have positive effects, even if you already feel good about yourself. People who use psychedelics are more mindful, more social, feel more connected with their fellow man, take more care of their environment and are more climate conscious (see further reading, below). Also, psychedelics could help people think of more out-of-the-box solutions, be more open-minded in life and have a greater appreciation for the fine arts.

Of course, there are also dangers and risks: if you are gloomy or anxious, psychedelics can actually amplify negative emotions. Using psychedelics unprepared without an appropriate set and setting is a guaranteed recipe for a bad trip. And if you are already prone to delusions and psychosis, psychedelics can push you over the edge. Quite a few people also experience after-effects, including feelings of dissociation, derealisation, flashbacks and recurring hallucinations.

Despite these dangers, the media has been reporting quite positively about psychedelics and their alleged benefits. In his book How to change your Mind, Michael Pollan describes how, as a baby boomer, he felt he had missed out on the first psychedelic wave in the 1960s. While he had never used drugs before, in the book he documents his immersion in all sorts of psychedelic sessions. I read about his exotic experiences, in which he felt himself becoming one with the universe. It felt like reading a travel guide to a distant destination.

The psychedelic experience is so different and strange, that it can hardly be put into words. There is an argument that you must have experienced psychedelics to understand them. This argument dates back to a long tradition of scientists' self-experimentation, including Albert Hofmann – the inventor of LSD who first tried this substance himself. In philosophy, a distinction is made between 'having knowledge about' and 'having knowledge through experience'. One type of knowledge cannot be reduced to the other. And hence: my knowledge about the neuroscience and psychology of psychedelic experiences, could not be equated with a true understanding of the nature of the psychedelic experience.

For me, a relationship crisis finally prompted me to finally decide to take the step and become a 'psychonaut'. I felt a strong need to break the final last ties with my religious past. At the same time, I felt an almost religious need to seek new answers and directions by engaging in a psychedelic ceremony. And my experiences with psychedelics turned out to be overwhelming.

Be welcome

At home, together with a group of friends I conducted a small self-experiment with a large portion of 'magic truffles' – the part of the psilocybin-mushroom that grows underground and that is sold legally in Smartshops in the Netherlands. After about half an hour, I began to notice the first effects. I felt vibrations going through my body. The clouds in the sky seemed to shoot through the air like patches of fog. The treetops stretched out like arms coming to life. When I closed my eyes I saw the most spectacular visuals: vivid geometric patterns that seemed to unfold like fractals and a bizarre succession of colorful images. The sounds of the music enhanced these images: I had turned on a trippy playlist. The music sounded distorted and full of echoes, and never before had I noticed so many layers, depth and meaning. Each song led to a new vista: from quiet introspective moments, to ecstatic highs where I moved through the living room dancing. There were also more emotional insights: I realised I needed more focus and contemplation in my daily life.

I was still feeling the warm glow of that experience as I cycled through the rain a few days later, past a church whose doors were open. 'Be welcome!' a sign read. While normally I would have kept going, I now felt the need to take a look inside. Dripping, I walked into the church, lit a candle and sat down behind the piano. I already knew for certain what I would play: a meditative song by Taizé – a monastic community in France, Nada te turba – let nothing disturb your peace. I knew the song by heart but hadn't played it in a long time. A few volunteers from the church came up to the music and stood at an appropriate distance to listen. A little musical comfort in times of depression, war and international turmoil. Slowly I felt how I merged into the music. While improvising, I felt the chills running down my body.

It was as if psychedelics had closed the loop. From where I started as a teenager, growing up in that highly religious community; to where I found myself now: an academic scholar, with a sincere openness to spirituality and finding meaning in things that are ineffable.

- Michiel van Elk works as Associate Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Leiden University and is head of the PRiSM lab, where he researches the effects of psychedelics on the brain and on our well-being. In September 2021, the book A sober look at psychedelics: what science can teach us about mind enhancement was published by Das Mag Publishers.