Confronting the Mystical in Psychedelics

Unexplainable experiences often arise during a psychedelic trip. People have personal encounters with God, or meet entities which Terence McKenna described as “self-transforming elf machines.” In surveys, people who identify as atheists before their experiences no longer identify as such afterwards. Psychedelics have been found to push people away from ‘physicalist’ or ‘materialist’ views of the universe, and towards panpsychism and fatalism. Journalists Oshan Jarow and Shayla Love will talk with philosopher and a scholar of religion Daan Oostveen about ways of interrogating the mystical in psychedelics that go beyond reducing everything to biology or making metaphysical assumptions.

Dr. Daan F. Oostveen is a philosopher and a scholar of religion working at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies of the Faculty of Humanities of Utrecht University. He graduated from Ghent University with M.A. degrees in both Philosophy and Comparative Literature. His PhD was awarded by the Faculty of Religion and Theology of VU Amsterdam, with a doctoral dissertation on multiple religious belonging. For his doctoral research, he spent a year as a research fellow at the People’s University of China in Beijing to study contemporary Chinese religious diversity in 2018. He is a founding member of the New European Humanities in the 21st Century Network (neh21.net), which works on connecting innovative research on the humanities in Europe for the World Humanities Report and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Future Humanities. His research interests include the new humanities, comparative religion, and posthumanism. He has published on new materialism and psychedelics, and has presented his research at Beyond Psychedelics and the International Conference on Psychedelics Research.

Shayla Love is a science journalist based in Brooklyn, and a staff writer at Psyche and The Guardian. She writes primarily about science, health, and psychology, and she is interested in the moments when history, culture, and philosophy interact with present day research. She has a master's degree in science journalism from Columbia University, and her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Scientific American, Vice, The New Republic, Harper's, Wired, and more.

Oshan Jarow is a staff writer with Future Perfect at Vox, where he covers political economy and consciousness studies. His interests range from guaranteed income and shorter workweeks to advanced meditation and psychedelics, tracing the relationships between social theory and philosophy of mind. In former lives, he co-founded the Library of Economic Possibility, helped open a fine dining restaurant in New York's Hudson Valley, and received a bachelor's degree in economics and philosophy.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

222 E 46th St, 222 East 46th Street, New York, United States