5 highlights from Shawn Ryan's interview with exorcist about spiritual warfare: 'Be willing to suffer'

By Jon Brown, Christian Post Reporter Monday, July 27, 2026

5. Shawn Ryan's bad psychedelic trip and deliverance: 'Forbidden realm'

Following a discussion about the extent to which demonic intelligences are aware of the physical realm and interact with it, Ryan noted that he recently had to undergo his own spiritual deliverance after recent psychedelic use led him into a realm where he wasn't supposed to be.

"I've never really realized the power of prayer until the last couple weeks ... we've been talking about it all week: my last psychedelic experience," he said. "I said some of your deliverance prayers and had intuitive experiences of demons leaving my body."

During a separate interview with Tucker Carlson that aired last Friday, Ryan revealed that he recently had a horrific psychedelic-induced experience while undergoing therapy with ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT, two potent psychoactive substances that have been studied in specific clinical settings for conditions such as addiction, PTSD and traumatic brain injury.

While Ryan has recounted somewhat positive experiences on such substances in the past, he told Carlson that his most recent trip offered him a glimpse into the pain and isolation of Hell, which he said convinced him that God was showing him that spiritual wholeness cannot be found in the "quick fix" of psychedelics.

"I just never imagined it to be anything close to what I just experienced," he said of his hellish experience, the details of which he was reluctant to convey. "I don't think the human mind can imagine that kind of agony and torture and aloneness. ... You just can't — you can't put it together, unless you feel it. And I've either felt a small glimpse, or I got the whole thing."

"I would take all the science that they're finding, the good things about [psychedelics] and justify it," he later said. "But in the end, you're opening — you're just in a forbidden realm that maybe we should or should not be f—ing around in. But I won't be f—ing around in that realm anymore. I can tell you that." He claimed God gave him "strict guidance" to avoid such substances in the future.

Throughout his interview with Carlson, a noticeably subdued Ryan expressed his loss of faith in politics, the military, the media and other human institutions, but said he had come to believe that the only reliable truth is that found in the Bible.