Shrooms, anyone?
That “spiritual experience” you had on acid that one time?
Don’t be so quick to discount it as “just the drugs”. (As if that’s a phrase that actually means anything…everything is “just” something!)
Recent research on psilocybic mushrooms shows that hallucinogenic experiences have all the hallmarks of commonly-thought-of-as-valid “spiritual experiences”: The positive effects are real, and they last.
(This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. You?)
17 devoted students of Roshi accepted this page in 0.283 seconds without moving, or saying a word.
Hi PD,
There was the “Good Friday Experiment” back in the 80’s (?) that gave psilocybin to several participants in a church on Good Friday to see how that would affect their experience. The experiment was a bomb because it could not be double blind (everyone knew who took the psilocybin and who took the sugar pills), but all the participants except one reported a positive spiritual experience, and several years later they reported that their Good Friday experience positively affected their spiritual life.
On YouTube is a user named “MushroomJesus” who is a washout novice-monk from St. Anthony’s in Arizona. He had an experience one day, and the elders told him it was delusion, and he should just ignore it. He had a number of problems, and was later expelled from the monastery. “MushroomJesus” later tried psilocybin (?) and he claims it was exactly like his experience in St. Anthony’s.
I had a very interesting conversation a few years ago with a North-American shaman, where she described how she communicated with her ancestors by fasting for a week on sacred ground, and then taking peyote. Her ancestors would appear behind her outside of sight, but she communicates with them in a psychic way.
Religious language is often the only language that can describe a psychedelic experience, but that should not be taken to mean that psychedelics create authentic spiritual experiences. An impaired mind can in fact make people better, break them out of negative psychological loops (ecstasy), and give a new perspective of being. An impaired mind can also lead to a lesser quality of life. None of this grants any power beyond perception or a direct experience. Theosis only comes from purity, as we can see in the only people who manifest charisma: the saints. Healings still go on today, but only where there is purity as a prerequisite. Psychedelics can not bestow purity or sanctity.
S
Ah, I missed your posts! It’s such a unique sensation to agree with someone right up until the end, and I get it from you every. single. time. ;)
Here’s where you lose me: “None of this grants any power beyond perception or a direct experience. Theosis only comes from purity…”
(Well, actually you lost me a sentence before, because technically there’s no evidence that people on hallucinogens are any more “impaired” than people in the middle of communicating with their ancestors are. Would either be safe to drive?? –But I figure that’s basically a nitpick, so I’ll skip it if you want.)
Butbut…what’s this “power beyond perception or a direct experience” that you refer to? If it’s beyond perception and experience, then how can it be said to exist? And why does being imperceptible/inexperiencable make it *better* than something you can experience and sense? Why would I want my spiritual realizations to happen on a level I can’t detect??
“Theosis” is a word in the same class as “thetans” if you ask me, but it might even pale next to the absurdity that is “purity”. We’re talking about human beings, and there *are* no pure human beings. (At least, not over their lifespans or in totality; I’m sure most people have pure moments or do pure actions, the way you mean it. But then again, most people don’t get the kind of spiritual experience you’re talking about, so obviously that isn’t enough.)
Even if there are “pure people”, it’s only because of how the definition of “purity” is made up that day, and by whom. To some people, purity couldn’t be achieved without marriage; to people not very far away from them in time or place, it could only be achieved by virgins. And I’ve read enough about the lives of the saints to know that they came from hugely diverse backgrounds, and there’s no way anybody could say “all the saints did X and that’s why they had spiritual experiences”. If one could say that, it’d be simple to tell the congregations, “hey, just do X and you’re golden”. But come on, Joan of Arc was a mass-murderer. How come she can “talk to god” and be the better for it, but someone else can’t alter their consciousness another way and have a similar revelation?
Grinningly,
PD
I meant by “beyond” as in acquiring more than merely an experience. All you have left over from an experience is its memory, for good or bad, and the psychology you have after the experience is what changes you. Theosis will grant energy, which permeates the whole person, and the person then has a different quality then before theosis. An experience of God will leave obvious signs with the person, because the person is full of God’s energy. The observer and God co-mingle. An experience by itself, religious or drug induced, no matter how un-like any previous life experience, does not produce charisma. It is “natural”, not “super-natural”. Someone who took peyote can not later heal by prayer (St. John of San Francisco healed by prayer, for example).
Anything that deals with theosis will be dealing with a being that is everywhere present, “underneath” everything, but nevertheless distant from us. God is already “inside” us, but we are outside of God because we are separate beings—we are not God. God can be seen when the observer and God co-mingle. Hescychasts see the invisible God because their eyes have been changed by grace. Anyone who sees grace must necessarily be changed by it. Anyone who sees God must necessarily be in union with him. Hallucinogens do not control God, and do not force God to co-mingle. A drug induced religious experience is only an experience that we don’t have better language to describe other than religious language. An authentic spiritual experience will leave the person with God’s energy, which can be seen in charisma.
As for purity, purity can only be one thing, you cannot make up new definitions for this as you go. Purity is a state free from sin. Sin is failure to be pure. These are two extremes of a linear gradient. On this gradient you have the average for fallen humans, and individuals falling on either side of that average. Purity and sanctity are the same thing. Sanctified humans will always advance to further sanctity and purity, beyond death and the resurrection.
If you’re interested in trying some conscious altering drugs.. I’d suggest Salvia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvia_divinorum
It’s legal in most countries. My old roommate picked some up at the local smoke shop, and the effects only lasted about 10-15 minutes for me. I tried it twice.
I really didn’t understand what taking a trip meant until I tried Salvia because your mind really takes a trip to a different dimension. The experience ended up being very spiritual for me.
A word of caution though, you will look stupid while you’re spacing out and you move around a lot. A trip sitter is suggested. Here’s some videos of people on a Salvia Trip.
http://youtube.com/results?search_query=salvia&search_sort=video_view_count
After Salvia, I tried LCD, but I had a much better experience on Salvia. The LCD effects lasted way too long.
You know, maybe someday I’ll have to try that again. It didn’t work for me the first time, but maybe I was doing something wrong or expecting too much. Anyway, great links, and thanks for the info!!
WikiHow offers a way to find God without religion by calling the experience of endorphins to the brain as an experience of God. The thing is that again here, religious language is being used to describe a non-religious experience. This is unconvincing for anyone who admits to “following their gut” (instinctual thinking) in their day to day questions. What I mean is that most people are actually guided through life by “what feels right”, without a laid out plan, because we can’t always know what is the right thing to do in any given case. Endorphins do not provide meaning to life, just like any other impaired brain does not provide meaning to life. Endorphins don’t guide us in what is the right thing to do in any given situation. Someone who claims to finding fulfillment by being perpetually impaired is equivalent to someone finding fulfillment to being perpetually drunk. That is very shallow. You, PD, as a philosopher, know of how long the idea of proving God rationally has bounced around many great minds, and all this has been reduced to a really wicked spoonful of sugar? Can you concede that, until we can explain our “inner compass”, and how people have a sense of right without being able to explain it, we can stop referring to this sense of higher meaning as a cheap euphoria?
Well, there’s certainly no more hard evidence that endorphins are God than there is that an invisible anthropomorphic entity God — both are pretty much unsupported conjectures, and based on the meager facts we have (that people have these experiences and what they’re like), either could probably be true, given the right in-depth information. (It’s my personal opinion that both are likely to be false, since there are huge problems with either theory, however grand they sound when first stated.)
Of course, to religious people, scientific explanations sound hollow and incomplete; and to scientific people, religious explanations sound overly-imagined and ridiculous.
I’m a logic person, myself. I’m not willing to grant the validity of any argument that starts from a conclusion and finds evidence to support that conclusion; I’m just not. Now, neither religion nor science *have* to work that way — in fact, both of them claim that at their best, they don’t — but since, in this case, there’s not enough evidence to build any complete conclusion on, both religion and science tend to go backwards rather than admitting that there’s not enough data to go forwards. But if you ask me, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” to quote Wittgenstein.
By the way, your argument above is flawed, too — just because people (and animals, yeah?) are guided by their “gut instincts” doesn’t mean there can’t be a scientific cause for those instincts. Chemicals are our building-blocks, and they cause (or are part of the cause of our experiences of) love, memory, and pretty much everything else we can explain about the human experience. So there’s no basic, obvious reason why endorphins *can’t* be the answer — however, it is true that there’s nowhere near enough evidence to conclude that endorphins, or anything similar to them, IS the answer, either. Just like there isn’t a shred of good evidence for a miracle-causing personal God.
You’re right that a chemical process that explained spiritual experiences would be an unfulfilling answer for religious types looking for “meaning to life”. But just because people are looking for that meaning doesn’t mean that it has to be there in the form they want! People are looking for get-rich-quick schemes and cures for cancer, too; that certainly doesn’t mean those must exist. There’s always the possibility that “meaning” is something we bring to life, not something that’s there to begin with.
I certainly don’t think it’s endorphins, for the record. We experience endorphins all the time and don’t get any spiritual results or “symptoms” from it, and I doubt anyone could explain why sometimes this chemical causes this unique response, but not always. (You watch though, someone will eventually try to say that it’s because *their Church* interacts with the endorphins in just the right way!). But I think the “personal God” theory is just as ridiculous and ad hoc, really, for reasons we’ve gone over before. HOWEVER, to tie it all up, I don’t think this article was trying to say that some chemical thing about the drugs IS the spirit behind the spiritual — I read it as saying that altered consciousness caused by naturally-occuring chemicals can bring about the same type of insight / realization / whatever that churches and fasting and so forth can bring about. And considering how long in human history drugs have been used for exactly that (quite a bit longer than we’ve had churches!), combined with the vast number of people who’ve had these experiences, I don’t see a reason to argue with that.
I am sincerely baffled—really, I am—every time you say there is no evidence. It is like we are in two different realities, and I can’t figure out how to bridge them. This wears me out. Here is some data, you can buy a plane ticket and see this for yourself:
1.) Appearances of light at Zeitoun church, Egypt. The government is not in control, Jihadists run Egypt, and there is no way they are going to let the Copts get away with such public Christian miracles!
2.) Descent of Holy Fire, Jerusalem.
3.) Kiev-Caves Monastery with myrrh-streaming relics.
I am not starting from conclusions and working backwards. It is like on one side of the Atlantic, people go “oh yeah, I was there for that”, and then fly over to the other side of the Atlantic, and it is like “no, that does not happen”. I feel like I am talking to children who have been taught all their life that there is no such thing as Eskimos, and no one can prove that there are Eskimos….but, there are Eskimos, and you can go see them.
Endorphins have nothing to do with this data, that is why these articles are so bizarre. This is a clear-cut reason why endorphins are excluded as a cause for our religion. St John’s healing power was not in his own mind, but it healed others.