Unauthorized
Entry

Dear Missionaryish Family,

As you may already know being a part of Missionaryish, Reagan and I have spent over a decade in cross-cultural ministry, including years working in Thailand and currently preparing to launch a campus ministry at one of the most internationally diverse universities in America. What I am about to describe I first encountered not in academic literature but in the lives of people I was trying to reach with the gospel. The framework came later. The observations came first. I am writing this for my own reformed tradition, because we are often the last to name what our brothers and sisters on the field have been navigating for years. What is happening is real. It is documented. And it is coming to our congregations whether we have the framework for it or not.

Most of us have had the experience of looking back on a difficult season and wondering how we ended up somewhere we never intended to go. A relationship that compromised us. A belief that took root that we would never have entertained under normal circumstances. A pattern of behavior that seemed to come from nowhere. We tend to explain these things in terms of bad decisions or weak moments. But there is something more precise happening, and understanding it has significant implications for how we care for ourselves, for our families, and for the people God has placed around us.

There is a structure to who you are that governs access to you. This is not just psychological or emotional. It operates at the level of what can shape you, lay claim to you, and speak into the deepest places of your identity. Theologically we call this your covenantal architecture. It is the infrastructure of your relationships, the authorities you submit yourself to, the commitments your life is attached to, and the protective coverings that guard and preserve who you are as a person. This covenantal logic is not incidental to your identity. It is the very structure of it.

That architecture has a biological correlate. The prefrontal cortex, the brain's executive and evaluative system, functions as a kind of neurological gatekeeper. It is where critical assessment happens, where incoming information gets evaluated against a stable sense of self, where the question gets asked: should I let this in? When it is functioning well you have a natural capacity to evaluate what is pressing for access to you, to test it, to accept or refuse it. When it goes offline, that gatekeeping capacity is compromised. And here is what most people do not realize: it goes offline far more easily and far more commonly than we tend to think.

Acute grief suppresses it. The bereaved person in the immediate aftermath of significant loss is not simply emotionally tender. Their cognitive architecture is genuinely compromised. The thinking, evaluating part of the brain that normally asks should I let this in has gone largely quiet. This is why predatory behavior toward grieving people is so consistently effective and so consistently destructive. It is not simply that grief makes people emotionally needy. It is that grief temporarily compromises the structures that govern what has access to them.

Severe trauma does the same thing. The traumatized person is not processing experience through their normal executive functions. They are running on instinct and emotion with the part of the brain that thinks clearly and evaluates danger essentially switched off. The research on this is extensive and consistent. What it describes neurologically maps precisely onto what pastors and spiritual directors have observed for centuries: the traumatized person is vulnerable in a way that goes beyond the psychological.

Chronic stress degrades it more slowly. Sustained pressure, over months and years, progressively erodes the prefrontal function that maintains discernment and boundaried engagement. The person in ministry burnout is not simply tired. Their capacity for the kind of evaluated, protected engagement that keeps their covenantal architecture intact has been worn down by accumulated load. They become progressively more susceptible to things that would not have found purchase in them at full capacity.

This pattern runs across a wider range of human experience than most of us recognize. Extreme sleep deprivation. Emotional exhaustion. Certain forms of manipulative worship environments. Sustained rhythmic stimulation. Prolonged fasting. Each of these, in their own way and to varying degrees, produces states of reduced covenantal gatekeeping. The biological mechanism differs but the theological reality is consistent: the person becomes more permeable, and the environment they are permeable to is not neutral.

Researchers are currently conducting over four hundred clinical trials using psychedelic compounds, psilocybin, LSD, DMT, and ayahuasca, as therapeutic interventions for depression, anxiety, and trauma. A major international study published this year in Nature Medicine mapped the brain effects of these compounds across eleven independent datasets and five drugs. What they found, described in their own clinical language, is that these compounds produce a consistent and comprehensive suppression of the brain's normal hierarchical organization. The default mode network, the system most associated with self-referential processing and identity maintenance, is significantly disrupted. The normal filtering architecture that governs what a person is receptive to is flattened. The person becomes, in neurological terms, radically open.

The researchers view this as promising. The therapeutic outcomes in controlled settings are real. Depression scores improve. End of life distress reduces. The data is not fabricated. But the frame is dangerously incomplete.

What the brain scanning technology measures is the mechanism of the door opening. It does not and cannot measure what comes through the door when it opens. The entire research paradigm is built on the assumption that if their instruments cannot detect something it is not at stake. That is not a scientific conclusion. It is a limitation of the instrument being mistaken for a finding.

A better analogy is early radiation medicine. Scientists discovered that radiation could shrink tumors and genuinely helped patients. The results were real. But their model of how it worked was missing an entire category of harm. Marie Curie carried radioactive material in her coat pockets. Early radiologists suffered devastating tissue damage. Not because the therapy did not work but because the frame they were using could not see the level at which the damage was occurring.

Every tradition that has worked seriously with these states for centuries treated the opened condition with extreme protective care. Not because of psychological fragility. Because they understood from long accumulated experience that the state of radical openness is a state of radical vulnerability to a populated environment that is not uniformly benign. The shamanic guide, the ritual container, the ceremonial close, the integration period, these were not cultural decoration. They were protective technology built from generations of observing what happens when the door opens without adequate covering.

The clinical researchers have reproduced some of this protective structure without understanding what it is for. They provide a guide and a carefully curated environment. But they describe this as psychological support for a neurological event. They have no framework for what the guide is actually protecting against because their model of what a human being is does not include the covenantal architecture that was actually being protected.

The research on what people actually encounter during deep psychedelic states is extensive, cross-cultural, and remarkably consistent. Rick Strassman's clinical DMT research at the University of New Mexico produced encounter reports that his materialist framework could not account for. Subjects in a hospital setting, with no shared cultural framework, reported contact with beings they described as intelligent, non-human, and operating from a recognizable domain with their own agendas. Many reported that these beings communicated specific things, instructions, invitations, offers, that the subjects felt pressure to accept. Strassman eventually concluded that his materialist framework was insufficient and wrote extensively about the inadequacy of a purely neurological account.

The Stanford Research Institute remote viewing program, declassified through FOIA requests, documented the same pattern. The most gifted viewers were not simply receiving neutral information about physical targets. Ingo Swann, one of the program's most capable practitioners, documented with increasing concern that some of what he was making contact with was interactive, had its own agenda, and was actively attempting to use the contact for purposes that were not the viewer's own. The program produced genuine results and genuine alarm in roughly equal measure.

Benny Shanon's secular academic study of ayahuasca phenomenology documented across cultures and settings that entity encounters are not random or culturally constructed. People with no shared framework consistently report contact with beings of a specific character operating from a recognizable domain. Shanon, who has no theological framework for this, documents it carefully and then essentially sets it aside because he has no category for what he is describing.

The biblical cosmological framework provides the category. The second heaven in the scriptural account is a populated domain. It contains non-human intelligences operating between the physical world and the throne of God. Not all of them are operating under legitimate authority. Some are operating under the authority of the adversary and have been in the business of exploiting human permeability for longer than recorded history. What psychedelics, deep remote viewing, and certain other practices appear to do is grant access to that domain without authorization, without covering, and without the navigational framework that would make the contact safe.

The person arrives in the second heaven as an unauthorized visitor with no guide, no authority, and no protection. And the intelligences operating there are experienced enough with human beings to know precisely what to do with that situation.

This is not theoretical. There is a recognizable and consistent pattern of aftermath that appears across the psychedelic literature, the remote viewing literature, and the broader literature on unprotected contact with these intelligences.

The person returns from the experience with what feel like new convictions, insights, or imperatives. These frequently include a sense that their ordinary life is now too small, that their previous commitments were based on ignorance, that they have been shown something that supersedes their former obligations, and that following this new understanding requires breaking with what they had before.

Marriages end. Not because of ordinary marital problems but because one partner has returned from the contact with what feels like a downloaded set of new priorities that make the marriage feel like a cage built by a smaller version of themselves. Vocational commitments dissolve. Ethical frameworks that previously seemed solid suddenly feel like arbitrary cultural constructs. They are operating under a new governance that was installed during a period when their covenantal architecture was fully dismantled.

This is not abstract. Christa Black, a Christian author, speaker, and worship leader who spent years in the psychedelic and new age world before returning to Christ, describes watching this pattern destroy her marriage in real time. Her husband entered a ceremony, encountered what presented itself as a healing entity, and came home transformed in ways that looked initially like breakthrough. The hardness had melted, she says. He seemed overwhelmed with love. But within months he was receiving downloads from entities through left-eye-to-left-eye contact with a shaman, being told the marriage needed to end, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on investment decisions made on the instruction of beings encountered in ceremony, and eventually stopping all communication with her entirely. She documents that the consistent message delivered to people in the medicine across multiple accounts she witnessed was the same: leave your marriage. The entity does not arrive with a frontal assault. It arrives as a healer, then as a teacher, then as the governing voice in a person's life decisions. By the time the covenantal damage is visible the person receiving the instruction no longer experiences it as external influence. They experience it as their own deepest truth. That is not a coincidence. That is the mechanism working exactly as intended.

A necessary word of complexity. The argument being made in this essay is not that non-human intelligences are the sole explanation for the damage described. That would be too simple and it would be dishonest. Human beings make real choices and bear real responsibility for them.

Christa's story is not only a story of demonic exploitation. It is also a story of a woman who overrode her own instincts when everything in her body said no at the first encounter. Who chose to prioritize the restoration of her marriage over plain obedience to what Scripture was saying. Who kept returning after the warning signs had already appeared. Those were real choices made by a responsible person. The spiritual forces at work did not make them for her. They exploited the direction she was already inclined to move.

And the human actors in these stories carry their own weight of accountability. The coach who introduced spiritually dangerous practices into a vulnerable marriage. The unsanctioned shaman operating without authorization from his own tradition. The podcasters and influencers promoting altered states to millions of people in receptive conditions. These are human beings making choices that damage other human beings and they are answerable for that regardless of what else is operating in the background.

The biblical picture is not a simple one. Human choice, fallen human actors, and non-human intelligences operate simultaneously and in concert. People make bad decisions. Broken and predatory human beings exploit vulnerable people. And non-human intelligences with a long history and a specific agenda work through and around both, exploiting the gaps that human sin and human suffering create, to produce outcomes that none of the human participants necessarily intended but that serve a recognizable purpose.

A framework that accounts for only one of these is not adequate to what is actually happening. Pointing only at demonic activity removes human accountability. Pointing only at human weakness removes the spiritual dimension that explains why certain patterns of damage are so consistent, so predictable, and so specifically targeted at the structures that protect covenantal integrity. The honest answer holds all three together.

The broken marriage, the abandoned ethical framework, the severed community ties, these are not simply side effects. They are the convergent outcome of human vulnerability, human predation, and spiritual exploitation operating together on the same covenantal architecture at the same time.

What makes this historically significant is that the psychedelic contact pattern is not new and not limited to clinical trials. It has been generating alternative frameworks for understanding reality for a very long time. The most historically significant and intellectually developed example is one that most Western Christians have not examined with sufficient theological precision.

Siddhartha Gautama was a man of genuine seriousness and intelligence who made profound contact with non-human intelligences in a state of deep physiological and covenantal vulnerability. He had been fasting severely, practicing extreme asceticism, and was in a compromised state that maps precisely onto the PFC suppression framework. The traditional accounts of what happened under the Bodhi tree describe not a peaceful cognitive insight but a prolonged confrontation with Mara, a being of considerable power and intelligence who attempted to prevent, disrupt, and co-opt the encounter. Mara is not a metaphor in the early Buddhist texts. He is described as a real intelligent entity with armies, with daughters deployed as temptresses, and with ongoing recurring access to Siddhartha in the years following the enlightenment. The Buddha's relationship with Mara in the Pali canon is interactive and never fully resolved.

The tradition presents what happened next as a decisive victory. Siddhartha touches the earth, calls it to witness his accumulated merit, and Mara withdraws. The Buddha rises enlightened. But examine the structure of that moment more carefully. The earth witness gesture is presented as the act of victory. But it is also the moment the resistance ends. The moment the self that had been fighting, seeking, striving, suffering, and refusing to yield finally goes completely quiet. The tradition presents this stillness as liberation. But there is another reading that the narrative itself cannot rule out. The stillness that followed was not the stillness of a man who had found something. It was the stillness of a man who had been emptied.

Mara does not stay defeated. He keeps coming back. In the Pali canon Mara appears repeatedly to the Buddha across his forty year ministry. He appears to his disciples. He appears to nuns. He is never finally gone. He is described as following the Buddha like a shadow. That is not the behavior of a defeated enemy. That is the behavior of an occupying presence maintaining its investment.

The peace that radiated from the figure who rose was not the peace of a liberated soul. It was the chilling stillness of a conquered one. A perfected mask. A vessel prepared.

The most theologically diagnostic fact is not the encounter itself but what Siddhartha did immediately afterward. He left his wife Yashodhara and his infant son Rahula in the middle of the night without saying goodbye and without making provision. The first and most foundational act produced by his enlightenment was the severing of his covenantal bonds. This is not incidental biography. It is the fruit identifying the tree.

Here again the complexity we named earlier applies. Siddhartha made real choices. He was a human being with genuine agency who genuinely abandoned his family. The spiritual dimension does not erase that accountability. What it explains is why the framework that emerged from that encounter so consistently produces the same fruit across every culture and every century that has received it. The pattern is too consistent and too specifically targeted at covenantal architecture to be accounted for by human weakness alone.

The framework that emerged from that encounter institutionalized the abandonment as the necessary condition of liberation. The entire Buddhist philosophical and monastic structure is built on the logic that liberation requires detachment and detachment requires the progressive dissolution of covenantal bonds, to family, to community, to place, to obligation, to the web of relationships that constitute covenantal personhood. The householder path is acknowledged in some traditions but always as a lesser path. The fully realized being is the one who has successfully detached from all of it.

If the goal of Buddhist practice is the systematic emptying of the self-structure that constitutes covenantal personhood, then at scale across a civilization what is being produced is a very large number of progressively emptied vessels. People who have been trained for years or decades in the systematic dissolution of the very architecture that would protect them from unauthorized occupancy.

The monastic traditions in particular are extraordinarily sophisticated at this. Meditation teachers across the Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana traditions developed over centuries an extraordinarily refined technology for dismantling the default mode network, suppressing the prefrontal cortex, dissolving the subject-object boundary, and producing states of radical openness and receptivity. They have been doing with great discipline and sophistication exactly what the psychedelic compounds do chemically. And doing it to entire populations across entire civilizations for two and a half thousand years.

The Dharma, the teaching itself, functions in this reading as the most effective large-scale vessel preparation technology ever deployed in human history. More sophisticated than the psychedelic compounds because it produces the emptied state gradually, voluntarily, with the full cooperation of the practitioner, without the bounded time window that limits chemical induction, and wrapped in a framework that presents the emptying as the highest possible human achievement.

The trap is elegant because it is built from real wisdom, genuine ethical content, and practices that produce measurable effects. The mask is perfect precisely because it is not a crude imitation. It is a real tradition of genuine depth producing real effects in real people, while the direction of travel of those effects serves an agenda that the tradition itself is structurally incapable of identifying.

Even within the traditions adjacent to Buddhism there has been a persistent recognition that ego dissolution practiced without adequate protective framework produces something that is not liberation. The Left Hand Path traditions in both Hindu and Buddhist tantra explicitly recognized that the emptied state is a state of danger as much as possibility. They developed protective frameworks, elaborate ritual structures and guru relationships with specific authority, precisely because practitioners who had genuinely dissolved their self-structure were observed to return from those states as different people in ways that could not be accounted for by ordinary psychological language. They saw the pattern. But they had no access to the covenantal framework that would have identified the mechanism accurately.

At this point a careful reader might object. If self-emptying is the mechanism of danger, what do we make of Christian fasting? The biblical tradition is full of it. Moses fasted forty days on the mountain. Elijah fasted forty days in the wilderness. Jesus fasted forty days before his ministry began. The church has practiced fasting as a spiritual discipline for two thousand years. Is the essay arguing that all of this is dangerous? No. But the distinction matters enormously.

Christian fasting is not the dissolution of the self. It is the temporary subordination of the body's demands for the purpose of covenantal reorientation. The appetite is not destroyed. It is suspended. The self is not emptied of its identity. It is emptied of its distractions. And critically the emptying is directional. It is not a clearing of space for whatever arrives. It is a clearing of space specifically oriented toward the one with whom the covenant already exists.

In Buddhist practice the emptying is the destination. The self that is dissolved does not return to a fuller covenantal life. It is extinguished progressively and permanently. In psychedelic induction the emptying is directionless. The architecture is dismantled without orientation. Whatever is in the environment has access. In Christian fasting the emptying is bounded, temporary, and covenantally addressed. You are not opening yourself to the environment. You are closing yourself to the world's noise in order to hear more clearly the voice of the one to whom you already belong.

Even Jesus did not fast indefinitely. The forty days ended. He ate. He returned. The number forty echoes Israel in the wilderness, Moses on the mountain, Elijah on the road to Horeb. In each case the extended period of stripping away is bounded. It has a purpose, a direction, and a conclusion. The wilderness prepares. The mountain clarifies. And then the person descends, crosses the river, returns to the people. The covenantal life is not escaped. It is re-entered with greater clarity.

The old metallurgical image is apt here. Dross is the impurity that rises to the surface when metal is heated. The smelting process does not destroy the metal. It purifies it. Christian fasting aims to remove the accumulated noise and attachment that obscures the person's true orientation. What remains is not less of the person. It is a clearer version of the person, more aligned with the covenantal identity that was always there. Same surface mechanism. Opposite direction. Completely different source and destination.

Jesus did not abandon his mother. From the cross, in his final hours, in the extremity of suffering, he made explicit provision for her care. The incarnation is not a departure from embodied covenantal life but its fullest expression. The Son of God took on flesh, situated himself within a specific family, a specific people, a specific covenant history, and fulfilled every obligation of that history rather than transcending it.

The resurrection does not dissolve embodied covenantal identity. The risen Christ still bears the wounds. He still eats fish on the beach. He still calls his disciples by name. He is more himself, not less. The liberation the gospel offers is not liberation from covenantal bonds. It is liberation within them. Not detachment from embodied relational obligation but the laying down of life within it.

The Buddha called the earth to witness and went quiet. Christ called out with a loud voice and the earth shook. One of those is the sound of a self being surrendered to occupancy. The other is the sound of a self being offered in love. The difference between surrender to an occupying intelligence and the voluntary offering of a life is the difference between a vessel being emptied and a person being redeemed.

Every human tradition that has understood permeability has built protective protocols around it. The shamanic traditions developed guides and ritual containers. The liturgical traditions developed prayer forms and communal structures. These instincts are not wrong. But a protective protocol only works to the degree that it has access to actual authority over the environment it is navigating. The clinical researchers with their playlists and carefully curated rooms are the furthest reduction of this instinct. The skeleton of the protective structure is present. The source is entirely absent.

The Lord's Prayer is not a religious ritual that approximates protective technology. Read it carefully with everything in this essay in mind and it presents itself differently.

The Lord's Prayer does not stand alone. It is the center of a broader covenantal protective structure that Christ himself gave to his people.

The sacraments are covenantal seals. Baptism is the public marking of covenantal identity. The person is named, claimed, and placed under the authority and protection of the triune God in the presence of the witnessing community. The Lord's Supper is the regular renewal of that covenant. The communal reaffirmation of belonging, the repeated act of placing oneself again under the covering of Christ's own body and blood. In the framework of everything this essay has argued, these are not incidental religious practices. They are the most robust available forms of covenantal architecture maintenance. Regular, embodied, communal, and grounded in the actual authority of the one who governs the environment in question.

Community is covenantal covering. The person who is known, prayed for, accountable, and held within a body of people who share covenantal standing before God is structurally different from the isolated individual. The isolated person navigates the populated environment alone with whatever protective capacity they can generate internally. The person embedded in genuine Christian community has a web of covenantal relationships that provides covering, witness, and the prayers of others who are themselves under the same legitimate authority.

This is why the early church's practices of communal prayer, confession, and mutual accountability were not simply social mechanisms. They were covenantal protective infrastructure. And it is why the contemporary church's drift toward individualized, consumerized, non-accountable participation is not merely a cultural concern. It is a structural vulnerability operating at exactly the level this essay has been describing.

Before we close, a preview of where this conversation is going.

Everything in this essay has been describing a problem of access. The wrong things are getting in to people during their most vulnerable moments because the structures that normally govern access have been compromised. The solution we have outlined is covenantal protection through prayer, sacraments, and community. But there is an evangelistic dimension to this that deserves its own treatment and we will explore it in a future issue.

Here is the simple version. When a person's covenantal architecture has been damaged or when they have never had one at all, they do not primarily need an argument for Christianity. They need to be received into a community that functions differently from every other community they have encountered. A community where the relationships are not transactional. Where people show up when nothing is expected in return. Where there is genuine accountability without shame and genuine welcome without conditions. Where the authority structures exist to protect rather than to exploit.

That kind of community does something that no argument can do. It creates the conditions for a person to experience, possibly for the first time, what it feels like to be genuinely covered rather than exposed. To belong to something that does not require them to dissolve themselves in order to fit in. To be known without being consumed.

When someone experiences that, they are not just encountering a nicer social group. They are encountering a different lord operating through a different kind of community. And that encounter creates the conditions for what can only be described as defection. Not just a change of belief but a transfer of allegiance from one governing authority to another.

This is what the early church was doing in the Roman world. They were not primarily winning arguments. They were offering a quality of community that the empire could not replicate and that the mystery religions could only counterfeit. People defected to Christ because they encountered his people and recognized in the community something that their previous lord could not provide and had in fact been actively working to prevent them from finding.

In our context, with the covenantal architectures of so many people compromised by grief, trauma, psychedelic contact, and the progressive dissolution of the family and community structures that once provided natural covering, the most powerful evangelistic move available to the church is not a better argument or a more compelling program.

It is a community that actually functions as one.

We will explore what that looks like in practice in the next issue.

So now that you have read this theological argument, remember that theology does not stay on Sunday. It permeates the week. Before you open your phone tomorrow morning, consider starting with the Lord's Prayer. Not as a recitation, but as a covenantal act. Work through each petition deliberately.

This is how the Lord's Prayer becomes a way of life rather than a way to start a meeting. And that, more than any theological argument, is what the populated environment on the other side of the open door was designed to prevent.