Some people may take LSD to be one with Pink Floyd and watch the walls melt, but Thomas Roberts teaches about reaching higher planes with such psychoactive substances.

The educational psychology professor will teach a class on entheogens, psychoactive plants and chemicals used for religious purposes at NIU’s Naperville campus next semester. Considering claims that entheogens can “engender the experience of the divine within,” the elements of psychology, anthropology, theology, popular culture and other related fields also will comprise the class.

The class will focus on LSD, peyote, mescaline and ayahuasca as psychoactives and might touch on the use of marijuana in Rastafarian culture. Ketamine and MDMA also may be considered, though Roberts said there are differing schools of thought about whether those drugs are hallucinogens.

“Using some of these drugs, some of the people some of the time have very intense religious, mystical experiences,” Roberts said. “I prefer to call the experiences primary religious experiences & that is the experiences religion is based on, as opposed to the church or ethics or text or dogma.

“The mystical view is that underneath all those lies a basic religious experience which is a sense of oneness and sacredness & a mystical experience,” he added.

Roberts described the common characteristics of a “mystical” experience.

“It’s not mystical in the sense that you see on TV, like witchcraft and parapsychology and stuff like that,” he said. “The major trait, it gives you a feeling of ego-transcendence or going beyond one’s personal identity, and one feels that individual identity has sort of temporarily gone on a vacation. And in the most extreme cases, you feel like you are one with the cosmos or maybe a piece of music or beautiful flowers … just a sense of not being defensive to the outside world and sort of dropping those barriers.”

Experiments from the ’60s in theology and hallucinogens, some of the most thorough research done on the subject, will resurface in the class along with follow-up findings of the studies.

Though some may think that hallucinogens have no place in spirituality, Roberts said people who have had drug-involved mystical experiences would disagree.

“Some people like to approach religion through a doctrine or through a church or an organization,” he said. “I think there are a large number of paths of getting a spiritual experience and religion, and that people tend to over-value their own particular approach. What I’m working on is trying to get people to see that there is also an entheogenic path.”

Roberts said in consideration of the history of religion, psychoactives have been used throughout, even influencing western religion.

“There’s some surprising stuff … there’s a plant referred to in the Bible as ‘sweet cane,’ which some scholars of ancient Hebrew claim is cannabis,” he said. “It sounds like they’re talking about sugar cane, but it couldn’t be sugar cane because it wasn’t known then.

“They used it religiously, and they used it in burials,” he added. “Not long ago, they found an old burial in Israel that had some marijuana plants buried in with the woman’s grave.”

The interpretation of Greek myths also is linked with psychadelics, Roberts said.

“A lot of the things we know, for example, Jason searching for the golden fleece & according to a couple classicists, the quote-unquote ‘golden fleece’ was really dried Amanita muscaria tops. And the word ‘Jason,’ it turns out, means ‘drug man.’ So there’s this whole reinterpretation of things we grew up knowing or studied in high school,” he said.

Several books will supplement class discussions, including Roberts’ new book, “Psychedelic Sacramentals: Essays on Entheogens and Religion.” Texts by Psychedelic gurus like Aldous Huxley and Gordon Wasson will help round out the course.

Entheogens: Religion and Drugs, or EPS 592 and 492, which is found toward the end of the schedule of classes, is available to graduates and undergraduates and meets on six Saturdays between Jan. 26 and Apr. 6.