Tuesday, September 7, 2010

psychedelic

The vastness and beauty of nature often stirs the soul. Immanuel Kant explicitly linked morality and nature when he declared that the two causes of genuine awe are "the starry sky above and the moral law within.” Darwin felt spiritually uplifted while exploring South America:

In my journal I wrote that whilst standing in midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, "it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind." I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the breath of his body.

The New England transcendentalist movement was based directly on the idea that God is to be found in each person and in nature, so spending time alone in the woods is a way of knowing and worshiping God Waldo Emerson, a founder of the movement, wrote:

Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental; to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty

Something about the vastness and beauty of nature makes the self feel small and insignificant and anything that shrinks the self creates an opportunity for spiritual experience.

People often refer to viewing great art, hearing a symphony, or listening to an inspiring speaker as (crypto) religious experiences. And some things give more than a taste: They give a full-blown, though temporary, escape. When the hallucinogenic drugs LSD and psilocybin became widely known in the West, medical researchers called these drugs "psychoto-mimetic" because they mimicked some of the symptoms of psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. But those who tried the drugs generally rejected that label and made up terms such as "psychedelic" (manifesting the mind) and "entheogen" (generating God from within). The Aztec word for the psilocybin mushroom was teonanacati, which means literally "god's flesh"; when it was eaten in religious ceremonies, it gave many the experience of a direct encounter with God.

Drugs that create an altered mental state have an obvious usefulness in marking off sacred experiences from profane, and therefore many drugs, including alcohol and marijuana, play a role in religious rites in some cultures. But there is something special about the phenethylamines—the drug class that includes LSD and psilocybin. Drugs in this class, whether naturally occurring (as in psilocybin, mescaline, or yage) or synthesized by a chemist (LSD, ecstasy, DMT) are unmatched in their ability to induce massive alterations of perception and emotion that sometimes feel, even to secular users, like contact with divinity, and that cause people to feel afterwards that they've been transformed. The effects of these drugs depend greatly on what Timothy Leary and the other early psychedelic explorers called “set and setting,” referring to the user's mental set, and to the setting in which the drugs are taken. When people bring a reverential mindset and take the drugs in a safe and supportive setting, as is done in the initiation rites of some traditional cultures, these drugs can be catalysts for spiritual and personal growth--the strongest effects often included: feelings of unity with the universe, transcendence of time and space, joy, a difficulty putting the experience into words, and a feeling of having been changed for the better. Many report seeing beautiful colors and patterns and having profound feelings of ecstasy, fear, and awe.

Awe is the emotion of self-transcendence. The emotion of awe happens when two conditions are usually met: a person perceives something vast (usually physically vast, but sometimes conceptually vast, such as a grand theory; or socially vast, such as great fame or power); and the vast thing cannot be accommodated by the person's existing mental structures. Something enormous can't be processed, and when people are stumped, stopped in their cognitive tracks while in the presence of something vast, they feel small, powerless, passive, and receptive. They often (though not always) feel fear, admiration, elevation, or a sense of beauty as well. By stopping people and making them receptive, awe creates an opening for change, and this is why awe plays a role in most stories of religious conversion.

- Johnathan Haidt


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