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Council on Spiritual Practices

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The Council on Spiritual Practices is an American nonprofit that has promoted the use of psychedelics for spiritual and personal exploration. The CSP describes itself as "a collaboration among spiritual guides, experts in the behavioral and biomedical sciences, and scholars of religion, dedicated to making direct experience of the sacred more available to more people."[1] It funds academic research, publishes books, hosts speakers and holds conferences about the nature of religious experience and psychedelics.[2]

The organization was convened in 1993 by Bob Jesse, who was a vice president at Oracle whose interest in psychedelics was first piqued in a drug education lesson in junior high science class. However, it wasn’t until his 20s that he and a small friend group began to carefully experiment with them. He later described his first non-dual experience with LSD as transformative, a turning point that eventually shaped CSP's mission.[3] According to the journalist John Horgan, the Council was created by a group of "scientists, scholars, and religious leaders...quietly urging a reconsideration" of the spiritual benefits of psychedelics used in spiritual practice, for which they used the term entheogens, and was more focussed on education than lobbying.[4]

In 1995 the CSP published a "Code of Ethics for Spiritual Guides" that has been adopted by many psychedelic guides and influenced other codes of conduct in the field, such as one published by MAPS in 2021.[5][6]

In the 1990s CSP started reviving psychedelic research in academic settings, beginning with its collaboration at Johns Hopkins University, under Roland Griffiths.[7][8]

CSP supported the União do Vegetal in a religious liberty case that reached the Supreme Court case that allowed it to import ayahuasca to the United States, filing an amicus curiae brief.[9][10] In 2006, the Court ruled unanimously (8–0) in favor of the church's right to use ayahuasca as a sacrament under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.[11]

The CSP is based in Berkeley, California.[12]

References

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  1. ^ "Home".
  2. ^ Mieszkowski, Katharine (August 4, 2000). "Higher being: Can legalizing drugs bring us closer to God?". Salon. Retrieved 14 March 2025.
  3. ^ Pollan 39
  4. ^ Horgan, John (2004). Rational Mysticism: Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment. HMH. p. 139-140.
  5. ^ Pollan 416
  6. ^ The Past and Present of Psychedelics and Therapy. UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.
  7. ^ Pollan 51, 416
  8. ^ Hayes, Charles. “Can Science Validate the Psychedelic Experience?” Tikkun (Duke University Press), vol. 22, no. 2, Mar. 2007, pp. 65–68. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=24225073&site=eds-live&scope=site. "The prime mover behind all this progressive science is Robert Jesse, a former vice president of Oracle for whom life-changing entheogenic events inspired him to found the Council for Spiritual Practices (www.csp.org) in 1994...Working stealthily under the media radar, Jesse navigated the bureaucracy and moved the study to fruition, a strategy that kept it from being blackballed."
  9. ^ Pollan 27, 53
  10. ^ Brief of CSP et al. as Amici Curiae
  11. ^ Greenhouse, Linda (2006-02-22). "Sect Allowed to Import Its Hallucinogenic Tea". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2025-05-19.
  12. ^ Gellene, Denise (11 July 2006). "Counterculture Drug Provides Spiritual Boost". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2012-09-17.

Sources

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