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(Short portions of the following article are excerpted from the new booklet, Psychedelic Seduction: Drugging the Church, by Richard and Linda Nathan, coming fall 2021 through Lighthouse Trails Publishing.)

A “psychedelic renaissance” is exploding across America. 

Why is it happening? What does that mean? Is it helpful or harmful?

The psychedelic movement began in 1938 when Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann discovered LSD. Within a short time, therapists were using it on their patients and the CIA was using it in mind control experiments in the Cold War. When Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary popularized his LSD experiments in the early ‘60s, it launched the American counterculture revolution. By 1970, its dangers were apparent, and the Federal Drug Administration labeled LSD a dangerous Schedule I drug, along with heroin, marijuana, Ecstasy, methaqualone, and peyote. (This means these drugs have "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”) 

That didn’t stop efforts to legalize these drugs though, which went underground for decades. But now with the War on Drugs fading and marijuana legalization breaking old barriers, those efforts are bearing fruit. Powerful interests in our society are releasing them on a massive scale at breakneck speed, and they likely will be reclassified soon. Meantime, huge paradigm shifts are occurring in major areas like medicine, psychiatry, business, and politics. 

What does psychedelic mean?

The term refers to drugs “capable of producing abnormal psychic effects (such as hallucinations) and sometimes psychotic states.” (Merriam-Webster, online) It includes LSD, Mescaline, Peyote, and high-THC concentrate marijuana and its dangerous imitations, Spice, K2, and Kratom, as well as the “magic mushroom” (psilocybin), Ayahuasca/DMT, and designer drugs like MDMA (Ecstasy) and RAVE. 

Psychedelics manipulate ordinary consciousness by affecting the senses, altering thinking, time sense, and emotions, and changing perception, mood, and cognition. They can (and often do) produce hallucinations, deceptive mystical states, and psychosis. 

The goal of this “renaissance”

"The ultimate goal is the legalization of psychedelic drugs. … social transformation and spirituality and liberation."[2]

Once we become Christians, God begins transforming us from a pagan (rebellious, anti-God) mind to a Bible-based, Holy Spirit-led mind (Ephesians 2; Romans 1–14, 12:2). Psychedelics can create terrible turmoil by unleashing powerful imagery that can blur or erase the lines between fantasy and reality, and imagination and truth. The underlying spiritual nature and foundation of the psychedelic experience is paganism, which rejects the Divine creator God and deifies creation (Romans 1:21–23), eventually seducing users with the idea that we are all gods.

Therefore, this so-called renaissance is not liberation at all but basically a return to paganism for these drugs unlock the portals of sorcery (witchcraft). The New Testament word for sorcery is the Greek term pharmakeia, which is the root of our word pharmacy—a dispensary of drugs. Deuteronomy 18:9–12 shows that God hates sorcery.

”Aliens and god-like entities.” 

Another dangerous aspect of psychedelics involves the encounters users frequently have with what psychedelic therapist Daniel McQueen calls ”aliens and god-like entities.” The Bible calls these entities demons and warns about this warfare in Ephesians chapter 6:10-18. 

Psychiatrist Rick Strassman studied DMT research subjects extensively and found at least half had encountered an entity after taking DMT. He reports,

"I was neither intellectually nor emotionally prepared for the frequency with which contact with beings occurred in our studies, nor the often utterly bizarre nature of these experiences…. Their business appeared to be testing, examining, probing, and even modifying the volunteer’s mind and body. One patient described it this way: 'It’s more like being possessed. During the experience there is a sense of someone or something else there taking control. It’s like you have to defend yourself against them, whoever they are, but they certainly are there. I’m aware of them, and they’re aware of me. It’s like they have an agenda.'''[3]

Author Carl Teichrib perfectly sums up their deceptive agenda: 

We can become as gods. It's the same messaging all the way through, isn't it? Doesn't matter if you read the writings of channeled UFO entities, if you take a look at what the New Age teaches, what Eastern spirituality gives us, or what the messages that come through the psychedelic experience show us. It always points back to Genesis 3: ‘We will be as gods.’ This is a gateway… a form of forbidden fruit."[3]

While psychedelics may at times seem to provide captivating mystical experiences and insights or some mental or physical improvement, at the bottom, they are a portal to great instability and spiritual deception and danger. Expecting a hallucinogen ultimately to heal is like expecting a poisonous snake not to bite. 

Only Jesus Christ can save, set free, and truly transform.

Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." John 14:6 

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Ephesians 6:12

Read a fictionalized version of our escape in our novel The Glittering Web, Book 1 of the Omega Point Series here. Listen to the prequel free. Also read “Why We Wrote the Omega Point Series” here.

Take our one-minute survey: View of Psychedelics here. 

More:
-   The Cross & the Marijuana Leaf by Linda Nathan (2017). 20-page booklet. $1.95. Lighthouse Trails Publishing here. 
-    Linda answers questions about marijuana on the Parker J Cole Show here.
-    Richard & Linda discuss drugs, deception, and the spiritual realm on the Parker J Cole Show here. 

[1] Opening quotes from Changing Our Minds: Psychedelic Sacraments and the New Psychotherapy by Don Lattin, Synergetic Press, 2017.
[2] Ibid.
[3] https://bit.ly/2W2FLs8

About the Authors

Richard and Linda Nathan ?entered the psychedelic drug culture in San Francisco in 1962 and spent 14 years in its deceptions, including serving in a New Age spiritualist church. In 1976, Jesus Christ healed Linda of cancer and saved them both. Since then, they’ve spent almost half a century assessing those experiences while observing that culture’s rapid transformation of American life. Praise to Jesus Christ, who delivers from that dark, fallen realm. 

Richard has a B.S. in Biology and an M.A. in Christian History. Since 1992, he has observed massive derangement from psychedelic drugs in his work with thousands of psychiatric patients. Linda is a editor with a B.A. and master’s level work in Psychology.