Ordinary Mystics
AVAILABLE OCTOBER 1, 2026
Psychedelics, Faith, and The Reclaiming of Direct Spiritual Experience.
DISCOVER AN ANCIENT WAY TO MEET THE SACRED
Something has been pulling at you. Maybe it started as grief, or a weight that therapy and prescriptions couldn't reach. Maybe it is quieter, a low hum of something missing. Or perhaps you’ve reached the stage of life you spent decades working toward, only to wonder: what comes next?
Right now, across America, ordinary people are gathering in living rooms, churches, and clinics, eating sacred mushrooms, and coming home changed. Researchers at Johns Hopkins, NYU, and a growing number of other institutions have documented these as among the most spiritually significant experiences of participants' lives—ranking them alongside the birth of a child or the death of a parent.
Humans have met the Divine through sacred plants and mushrooms for millennia, yet modern America drove this history underground. Today, a minister may face prosecution for offering the very same sacrament a scientist in a white coat legally administers in a laboratory.
Writing as a scholar who serves a psychedelic church, Matt Zemon bridges the clinical lab and the candlelit ceremony. Weaving his own mystical experiences with a rare look inside the emerging faith communities practicing today, Ordinary Mystics explores what happens when people encounter the Sacred directly.
This is a book for anyone who senses there is more to spiritual life than belief alone.
"The spiritual side deserves the same seriousness we have fought to give to science… The freedom to seek the Sacred directly belongs to all of us."
—Rick Doblin, Founder & President, MAPS
"Staying changed long after the glow has worn off is a discipline… Ordinary Mystics gives these experiences a tradition patient enough to turn them into lasting change."
—Rabbi Zac Kamenetz, founder of Shefa
"Matt Zemon does something wondrous in this book: he makes the ineffable, effable… Ordinary Mystics is a helpful new gospel, beautifully written. Let it take you to church."
—Rev. Molly Phinney Baskette, UCC minister and author
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ORDINARY MYSTICS: ResourcesFor the work that surrounds the experience.
Free, plain-language materials for individuals, small groups, and event organizers. Use them, share them, adapt them.
Discussion Guide
A companion guide for groups, classrooms, and book clubs — questions and prompts to keep the conversation going after a talk or a chapter.
Discernment Guide
A framework for thinking through whether, when, and how to engage — questions to sit with before making a decision, written for seekers and the people who care about them.
Integration Practices
Practical, non-prescriptive practices for the work that surrounds the experience — setting intention beforehand and making meaning afterward.
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