Episode 7: The God Molecule
Orthodox Christian Psychedelic Sojourner
In Episode 6, I began building a temporary framework for understanding conscious experiences that go beyond normal everyday reality. Based on my Toad (5-MeO-DMT) encounter but also referring to my Peyote, LSD, and psilocybin journeys, I’m documenting what happens when the usual constraints on consciousness are loosened.
Similar experiences can also be had through other means such as meditation, breathwork, shamanic dance, drumming, fasting, and religious experiences. In fact, religious or sacred language is often what people use to link all of these types of experiences together.
Understanding consciousness is, for me, the most important frontier in human expedition. This is why I chose a secular framework to "map the territory" of psychedelic experience, and what is revealed through altered states of consciousness. It's immediately more accessible and avoids the confusion and contention that comes with theology.
The Door Was Left Open
That said, my experiences have not only felt deeply sacred, but they have accelerated my movement into my religious life. Far from creating doubt, psychedelics have, for me, affirmed my religious interior. God has thundered His way into my heart, the door being left open by the Toad.
So I want to put to words what this means for me before embarking on further encounters beyond the boundaries of normal conscious states.
And hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. (Romans 5:5)
My experience of cosmic love, of the healing heart of the universe, has been told through the ages in churches and temples across the world. The experience of union. The melting of grief and loss, the deep relief from anxiety. These are not just psychological or philosophical, they are deeply sacred experiences.
For me, they can be approached and understood through Orthodox Christianity which is why I converted in July 2025, only a few months after my Toad encounter (I’ll come back to this in a moment). Others may find similar truths through different paths, I’m not here to proclaim there is only one way to the divine.
If you haven’t read it yet I recommend taking a few minutes to understand what 5-MeO-DMT is like.
The truth is it matters not which path you take, what matters is what you bring back.
Bringing the divine into the physical. The spiritual into the material. I believe this is the meaning of existence. This is how we progress as a species, how we become stewards of our Mother Earth, and how we live as family and not enemies.
And that’s what I had a taste of. Unity, peace, love, contact with the sacred. But how do I bring this back to everyday life?
The Hopi elders say, “Will it grow corn for the people?”
It’s all very well having “a religious experience” but unless this is distilled into inner wisdom it becomes just another ego trip - a distraction from the work of being a better human.
So is this changing my life or am I fooling myself?
This is Grace
There are a few things that I can measure. I’m physically healthier and stronger, I’ve lost body fat, improved PB’s in the gym, and I eat much healthier and sleep better.
I’m emotionally more robust and I’m psychologically more coherent (my wife is a psychotherapist and has been monitoring my emotional/psychological health on this journey).
And I’m spiritually more enriched - less easy to measure I know - but I care for people in a different way. I care for the world in a different way. I can feel it as I walk down the street or sit on the train. Less frustration, more curiosity and compassion - people smile at me more - the world feels like a better place to be in.
It’s changing me in ways I always hoped for. When I look inwards I'm increasingly happy with who I am.
This is Grace.
You might have other words for this, like healing, growth or development - and these all work well - but direct experience with higher conscious, the Grace of God, brings deep and lasting effects.
I’d like you to pause for a moment.
Ask yourself, “what would bring you happiness? what would make your being alive, moment-to-moment, more fulfilling?”
Material things like wealth, security, physical health, are of course important, but what about your inner experience? When you are sitting alone, quietly, and there are no distractions, you are just present with yourself? What then?
I suspect that things like love, physical health, emotional balance, meaning, fulfilment, inner peace and connection come to mind. But also less anxiety, less stress, less exhaustion, less isolation, less depression, less anger, less fear.
To wish for less of what grinds us down, and more of what validates our presence in this world as a blessing.
The kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17:21)
The answers are within us, hidden under layers of conditioned belief as to who we are and how the world is. Psychedelics and religion have shown themselves to be two of the most powerful paths to discover these answers. Combined they are incredibly effective.
Orthodox Christian Psychedelic Sojourner
So why Eastern Orthodox Christianity? EOC is more mythical, less rational, a more direct communion with God. There is no single authority in the Church. The nature of Jesus is held as both divine and human, offering a clearer connection between us and the image and likeness of God. There is no doctrine of being born guilty of original sin and no purgatory.
EOC holds that God’s love is the core of all experience. His uncreated energy and presence can be perceived as heaven or hell. For those who have cultivated love and are receptive to God's love, this presence is experienced as joy and bliss. For those who have hardened their hearts and rejected God's love, it is experienced as torment and anguish.
Psychedelics can feel very much the same. People’s reports of “bad trips” and hellish experiences are almost always connected to not being able to “let go” and receive the medicine. The unconstrained experience of consciousness, the transcendent expansion beyond everyday reality can be perceived as heaven or hell depending on your faith in the medicine.
In terms of my Christian faith, what 5-MeO-DMT has given me is a direct experience of God’s love - an undeniability of its existence - and a point of experiential reference for what that actually is.
Every day when I pray, I can turn back to that and know who I’m praying to.
One of the key things I’m beginning to recognise about these expanded states of consciousness, especially through Toad, is that the qualities of experience itself changes in profound ways. I don’t just mean emotions or sensations. I mean the very fabric of reality, the very mode through which reality is known, feels different.
There are several recurring qualities that define these experiences for me:
The Infinite: A sense of vastness that has no beginning and no end. Boundless. Limitless.
The Eternal: An experience outside of time where past, present, and future dissolve, and all that remains is now, endlessly present.
Outside Time-Space: The ordinary rules that govern physical life such as linear time, location, and separation no longer apply. Something else, something much larger, frames the moment.
Cosmic Love: The scale of the experience feels galactic, universal, not confined to the small self but opening into something unimaginably vast, and filled with unconditional love.
Super-Intelligent: There is intelligence here. Immense, profound, ancient. But it’s not cold or mechanical.
Personhood: Despite the scale and intelligence, there is a deep feeling of relatability. This presence is personal, not abstract. It is not an “it”, it is a “Thou.” I might call this Christ, or Logos, or God. Others might use different words, but the experience is not merely conceptual. It is relational.
These six qualities describe the experience of reality that is accessed by powerful psychedelics such as 5-MeO-DMT. They also line up with every description of God, Source, the Universe, or whatever term you choose to name the transpersonal reality.
The conclusion I'm drawing at this point (subject to change as I continue this journey) is that what is experienced in powerful psychedelic encounters is the connection with the spiritual. The spiritual is both the substrate and superstructure of this reality. It’s the ground and the sky.
It’s something like: this reality emerges from and within the spiritual substrate/superstructure. At the same time this reality is experienced through a constraining of our conscious awareness of that spiritual substrate/superstructure.
The implications of this are of a spiritual reality that is a deeper, broader, vaster consciousness. And some of the qualities of that consciousness are well described within different spiritual and religious traditions.
For me personally, Orthodox Christianity gives me the most viable framework to understand this, as well as a practice in which to deepen my relationship with the deeper/transcendent reality.
The two main doctrines I want to draw upon from Orthodox Christianity to share here are the Trinity and theosis:
The Holy Trinity and Theosis
The Holy Trinity is fundamental to Orthodox Christianity. It describes the relationship between God the Father, God the Son, and God as the Holy Spirit. The three members of the Trinity are three different persons with one unifying essence.
“Three torches burning with a single flame.” - Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way
These three live in a state of mutual love with one another and for one another. This is the fundamental principle of God, mutual love (Cosmic Love) is the underlying original state of existence itself and is at the core of who we are.
The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is to bring mutual love into existence on Earth. Psychedelics can clearly facilitate direct experience of that love.
"God became man so that man can become god." - St. Athanasius
Finally the doctrine of theosis, the process of becoming divine through the grace of God. This is the heart of the Orthodox path: transformation and union through participation in the divine nature. We can think of this as the development of our individual and collective consciousness. Raising conscious awareness to the point of realising, both understanding and making real, the experience of our undivided conscious nature.
To what end?
I can’t and won’t make any claim to being able to grasp where this will lead us or why. However, my experience so far has taken me in a direction that is more meaningful, enriching, satisfying, and joyful. That seems like the right way to go.