No wonder psychedelics are threatening to an authoritarian religious hierarchy. You donโt need faith to benefit from a psychedelic experience, let alone a priest or even a shaman to interpret it. What you need is courageโcourage to drink the brew, eat the mushroom, or whatever it is, and then to pay attention, and make of it what you will. Suddenly, the tools for direct contact with the transcendent other (whether you call it God or something else) is taken from the hands of an anointed elite and given to the individual seeker.
Dennis McKennaAll experience is a drug experience. Whether it's mediated by our own [endogenous] drugs, or whether it's mediated by substances that we ingest that are found in plants, cognition, consciousness, the working of the brain, it's all a chemically mediated process. Life itself is a drug experience.
Dennis McKenna