🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We're the psychedelics newsletter that fought the law and the law won. Divine law, that is. 😏

Steve Urquhart has been a Mormon, a Utah state senator, and, more recently, a man in a disco ball helmet on ten grams of mushrooms. The third one was a religious observance. He should know; he cofounded the religion.

We asked Steve about the one tenet of his faith, why he thinks most psychedelic churches are cosplaying, and why he'd rather do jail time than ask permission to worship. 

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Growing up, my family situation was messed up. My 19-year-old brother killed himself when I was six. No adult ever explained it to me. One of his friends told me he'd been wrestling a bear and lost, so I stood at his casket trying to figure out where the bear got him. That loss and confusion controlled my entire life.

When I was ten, my family found Mormonism. At first, it grabbed me, but I eventually stopped believing in it, and realizing your whole existence has run on fiction is frightening. I lost meaning and my moral compass, so I got into a lot of nasty drugs and stupid risk-taking. In 2015, I made an attempt on my life. I say I escaped Mormonism through the sewer, and a lot of that landed on my wife, Sara.

Some friends who'd also left the church had found ayahuasca. Sara was intrigued, because she'd lost her faith too, so we went together. In that first ceremony, I was hanging out in a garden with God, and she felt familiar. I got the sense that she loved me more than any human who has ever walked this earth. Then I caught myself. This is ego. This is a delusion of grandeur. Then a hot wind started to blow, and everything dried and flaked away until I was standing on cracked earth, alone, forever.

The reason God felt so familiar, which I only worked out later, is that God was Sara. Sara was across the room during that same ceremony and, being pragmatic, she'd brought a list of five things she wanted answered. Number three was my name with a question mark. Next to it, she wrote, “Steve loves me as much as he can. It's not enough.” I'd have to do some serious contortions not to call that first ceremony a religious experience.

When I left the church, I left with guns blazing. I’d been lied to, so I figured I was done with God and religion altogether, which is why that garden vision was such a surprise. 

Most religions come with a lot of mental and spiritual programming. The interesting part is nobody meant to traumatize me. But when we coerce people into cramming our spirituality into somebody else's mold, harm usually follows.

Mormonism, like all religions, has its own mythology. What I had to realize is that my journey shouldn't be controlled by other people's stories. The default mode network upholds a lot of rules we think we need to follow. It creates fences around how and where we can act. Psychedelics help us bound over the fence.

The hardest part of leaving the LDS church was realizing I'm 100% in charge of my own spiritual journey. I'm the ringleader in the Steve circus of spirituality. St. Teresa of Ávila taught the same thing, that God lives inside each of us, which was heresy, and she defended it in front of the Inquisition. That's where I find my God—in myself.

The one tenet is that each individual can commune with the divine and receive guidance. When COVID hit, I went back to my friends and said people need community and connection, and they all said the same thing. We just came out of one crazy-ass religion; the world doesn't need another. So the question became, what specifically is dangerous about religion? The danger is unequal power dynamics. 

So the vision I had, appropriately enough, was of mushroom mycelium. The hyphae connect, disconnect, and branch off, and they're still autonomous. That's how TDA is built. You figure out your own doctrine, your own commandments, your own creed, and then we get together and compare notes. Instead of telling you you're doing it wrong, I get to say, here's what I found. How about you?

Many psychedelic churches start from the other end. The courts have laid out the indicia of religiosity, and a lot of the lawyering is about checking those boxes so the government stays away. To my eye, that's cosplay. To check those boxes, you need clergy and rules and someone to enforce them, which means you've built the hierarchy back. My belief is that safety comes through autonomy. You're safest when you understand you're in charge of keeping yourself safe.

Humans often protect themselves by comparing their situation to other situations. Religious insularity closes those comparative windows. So I fight that tendency and keep pulling other groups in. For example, a new church called Amrita ran a cannabis meditation ceremony on TDA's land while our people sat around singing with guitars. There’s always something new to learn or try out.

There's one TDA congregation down in Utah County that is so regimented that I find them precious. Their leader was telling me about their organizational creed, and I told her it was the cultiest shit I've ever heard. She said let me tell you the beautiful thing about my religion: I get to decide what I want to do, and if some of us want to govern our gatherings this way, we get to. And here's the other beautiful thing: none of us needs to care what Steve Urquhart thinks.

Where autonomy gets harder is inside my own head. Last year, Bryan Johnson did a very public five-gram journey tracking 249 biomarkers. So on New Year's Eve, I announced I was going to double him with a ten-gram journey. We called it twice the science. I posted to Instagram as “biologist Steve Urquhart” (I did major in biology, so technically not lying) and had my friend Paul Duane, the Cross-dressing Soul Anarchist, DJ in place of Grimes. I wore a disco ball helmet while friends “took measurements” all night. The night before, I sat at my kitchen table and thought, this could be the most sacred experience of my life. And then immediately, am I doing this wrong? Shouldn't it be more serious?

So mid-party I found my friend Leah and said we need to stop. I said, does this look like religion to you? She said I'm the one who's always saying nobody else gets to tell us how to worship. This is your circus, brother. Can we maybe make this one about unmitigated joy?

I am with the actual laws, but not the real-world situation. How many people are worshiping with entheogens right now and are legally safe doing it? Most of them. That's what the case law already gives us, and that's why millions of us are worshiping. 

My privilege weighs in here. There are a lot of people who aren't white men, who can't do this as freely as I do. They'd be in jail because that’s how unfairly the laws get enforced. 

My beef is with the Rushmore of legal talent leading this space. What they're arguing for is a booth where psychedelic worshipers present their papers and ask the government for a stamp of approval. Why are we the only worshipers volunteering to be regulated, asking to stand in a separate line and be given a yes or a no?

Religion existed before the American government, and the American government was specifically set up outside of it. I'm not stupid. I understand we have the Controlled Substances Act, and I might do some jail time. But that's what heretics have always done. Teresa could have been burned at the stake. I’d face due process and a government that has to meet heightened scrutiny to jail me. There has never been a more favorable moment in history to authentically explore your spirituality.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.