Tags / 17 quotes from 4 sources
#religious-experience
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
LSD and ego dissolution
These drugs reliably induce states of altered consciousness, much like dreams or religious ecstasy. Daniel X. Freedman, a pioneer of psychedelic research on LSD, wrote that LSD enables “portentousness” of the mind, so that it can perceive more than it can tell, experience more…
Erik Davis - On Psychedelics
Neuroscience meets spirituality: cross over from third-person descriptions to first-person encounters
I suspect we will see more and more thinking individuals cross over from third-person descriptions to first-person encounters, especially if the therapeutic and cognitively enhancing character of these experiences holds true over time. In other words, despite and because of our…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Four levels of the psychedelic experience
Masters and Houston start by asking the basic question facing anyone who becomes involved with LSD—how can individual trips differ so wildly from one person to the next?—and drawing on several years of research, they speak of “four levels of the drug experience hypothesized as…
Grof's transpersonal realm
the transpersonal realm One of Grof’s most provocative findings was that birth and death appear to be deeply interrelated in the unconscious mind. Reliving their own birth, subject after subject believed they were in fact dying—dying for real—and, emerging from their ordeal…
Huxley's chair like the Last Judgment
Confronted by a chair which looked like the Last Judgment—or, to be more accurate, by a Last Judgment which, after a long time and with considerable difficulty, I recognized as a chair—I found myself all at once on the brink of panic. This, I suddenly felt, was going too far…
Grof's Basic Perinatal Matrices
At the time I didn’t know what to make of any of this—and all I am doing at the moment is to give a quick synopsis of what I read. For the really important bit came next. Grof suggested that these primal experiences, our very first taste of sentient life in the world, were of…
Discovering Ockeghem's Requiem
During the trip when I caught my first glimpse of the sacred, I had been listening to a CD of Hildegard of Bingen. The music must have touched me more deeply than I realized, because when I returned the CD to the library I borrowed two further discs of late medieval/ early…
Houston Smith's essay on drugs and religion
During my reading spree I had run across an essay by Houston Smith titled “Do Drugs Have
Religious experiences versus religious lives
Religious Import?” The text was well known and had been one of the most widely reprinted of all papers on psychedelics in the ’60s. Despite being in many ways unusually positive for an academic, Houston Smith had felt bound to draw a line under psychedelics, and his tentative…
Underhill's five stages of mysticism
Gradually I was reading more and more religious material, and the most satisfying overview I found was the model proposed by Evelyn Underhill in her Mysticism. In this classic work she breaks down Christian spirituality into five major stages, the first three of which are…
Meltdown in God
As I write this, true recall of what I felt, the existential suchness of it, has gone. But like the other no-boundary states that summer, what I do remember perfectly is its overwhelming self-evidence. I was everything. It was as simple as that. Nor was this something I had…
Can a drug vision equal a saint's?
In any case, how can you take a vision that a saint or contemplative has worked toward for years and say that it is the “same” as one produced by dropping a dose of a drug? In the first place, the revelation, which has crowned years of effort, remains and transfigures your life…
Neem Karoli Baba takes LSD
During the ’60s, when the debate as to whether psychedelics afforded an authentic mystical experience was at its height, there had appeared to be only one solution: to find someone who had experienced both states and could affirm or deny their identity. The only person who had…
Visionary versus mystical experience
In summary, I would suggest that, yes, psychedelics and the magic they access could possibly prove a key factor in the birth of a new universal religion. They are coming from an angle outflanking all our materialistic conditioning—and doing so with a speed and to a depth…
The dark night of the soul
Several times already I’ve referred to Evelyn Underhill’s analysis of individual religious evolution, but largely only in relation to the stages of Conversion, Purgation, and Illumination. But these constitute only the introductory steps to a full spiritual life (which…
Love as the primary cosmic fact
Shortly after that momentous May morning in the Los Angeles hills, Aldous Huxley’s wife, Maria, had died of cancer. Huxley nursed her devotedly through her last days, but during the months following her death he found himself increasingly attracted to a younger woman, Laura…
The One Day When Christians And Atheists Sing From The Same Hymn Sheet | Giles Fraser | Comment | The Guardian
Religious experiences can be explained in terms of brain chemistry
I also refrained from mentioning that many it is now common knowledge that religious experiences such as a sudden overwhelming feeling of onesness with God, are merely the result of chemical reactions in the brain involving serotonin and other chemicals that the body generates…