Remaining Open and Curious

    "One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination & understanding are filled with doubt & indecision." Bertrand Russell

    A simplistic, superficial, literal 'understanding' of even the most complex of mysteries is common. We dread uncertainty, rush to conclusions & hide in group-think for (false) security. Respected monk Thomas Merton said that even in monasteries, people of spiritual depth are very rare:
    “Once in a while you will find someone with whom you can talk about (spiritual experiences). But they are hard to find. And when you are fortunate enough to find such a person it will be a temporary arrangement. For you will spend most of your life without such a person, which will be your solitude in which you will learn from God how to depend on God to guide you into ever deeper communion with God.”
    James Finley. “The Healing Path. A Memoir and an Invitation.” Orbis, 2023.

    ‘Most human institutions, by the purely technical and professional manner in which they come to be administered, end by being obstacles to the very purposes which their founders had in view.’ William James 

    “Don’t carry away a conclusion unless it has been arrived at through your own experience. Rather, if there hasn’t been direct experience, carry away the question.”
    Toni Packer. “The Silent Question. Meditating in the Stillness of Not-Knowing.” Shambhala, 2007.

    “Throughout much of Western history, until the fourth century AD when early, ‘primitive’ Christianity began to be systematically stamped out beneath the jackboots of the Roman Catholic Church, ‘beatific visions’ were the primary recruitment tool of the enormously ancient and influential ‘religion with no name’ that is the subject of The Immortality Key. This religion could shift and morph into multiple forms – The Eleusinian and Dionysian Mysteries are among the examples … and to these I would add the much older religion of the painted caves explored in Supernatural – but the common factor in every case was a psychedelic sacrament (sometimes food, sometimes drink, sometimes both) consumed by all participants.
    ‘Primitive’ Christianity started out around two thousand years ago as merely the latest form or incarnation of this archaic religion, and – at least in some cases – seems to have made use of bread & wine infused with psychedelic plants & fungi as its sacrament. At that time, because Christianity was persecuted under the Roman Empire until the reign of Constantine (AD 306-337) it was normal practice for its adherents to meet secretly in small groups to eat the bread and drink the wine of Holy Communion, and afterward experience powerful & deeply meaningful beatific visions. And more often than not, these secret ceremonies of direct experiential communion with the divine were led by women with men playing a secondary role.

    Then, from the second half of the fourth century AD onward, came the rise of Roman Catholicism, dominated by men who took decisive steps to marginalize the role of women in the Church and to remove the psychedelic elements from the sacrament, reducing Holy Communion to the empty symbolic act, devoid of powerful experiential content, that hundreds of millions of Christians continue to perform.
    My friend, the visionary artist Alex Grey, whose work has been much influenced by Ayahuasca, describes the Old Testament story of the serpent, the forbidden fruit, and God’s expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden as ‘the first psychedelic slapdown.’
    Pursuing that thought, Roman Catholicism’s persecution of ‘primitive’ Christians and the extirpation of their visionary Communion wine might be described as the second psychedelic slapdown.
    And then, in the twentieth century, just as we seemed to be freeing ourselves from the loveless iron grip of the Church and opening up to new spiritual possibilities, governments around the world waded in with the so-called ‘war on drugs’ – the third psychedelic slapdown.
    Over the centuries, therefore, enormous often deadly forces (with the power, for example, to burn people at the stake or imprison them for decades) have repeatedly been unleashed to prevent people from experiencing direct contact with realms & realities other than the mundane. At the same time, however, even when it must have seemed that the ‘religion with no name’ had been deleted completely from the human record, there were always – if I may extend the metaphor – multiple ‘backup disks’ in the form of psychedelic plants & fungi growing all over the planet. There might be long gaps, lacunae of centuries even, but the moment would always come when certain curious individuals, either by accident or by design, would sample the plants and mushrooms that serve as the permanent Hall of Records of the religion with no name, thus setting in motion the experiences & subsequent processes of social organization that would ultimately allow it to be rescued in full force.
    It is not an accident that the Mazatec shamans of southern Mexico refer to the psilocybe mushrooms used in their ceremonies as ‘little teachers,’ and, in a sense, that is what all psychedelic plants & fungi are – literally the ancient teachers of mankind. Whether we engage with Ayahuasca, or with Psilocybe Mexicana, or with peyote, or with LSD (which is itself derived from the fungus ergot) we are dealing with the biological agents of the religion with no name and with their numinous capacity to reawaken our spiritual appetites and potential.”
    Graham Hancock's Foreword to: Brian C. Muraresku “The Immortality Key. The Secret History of the Religion with No Name.” St. Martin’s Press, 2020.

    “… in 2006, the (Johns) Hopkins team completed the first psilocybin (research) project since the 1970s, when research into the forbidden substance became largely impossible during the War on Drugs. Under tightly controlled conditions the psilocybin unleashed a profound, mystical experience that seemed to anchor the lasting emotional & psychological benefits recorded by the thirty-six volunteers. They had no life-threatening illness, and were otherwise free of the debilitating angst (morbid fear of death) that consumed (some previous research subjects with advanced cancer). But these early results were shockingly similar to the 2016 collaboration with NYU: one-third of the participants rated their experience ‘as the most spiritually significant of their lives,’ comparing it to the birth of a child or the death of a parent. Two-thirds placed it among the top five. When friends, family, & coworkers were interviewed, they confirmed the remarkable transformations in the volunteers’ mood & behavior for months, even years, following their single dose.
    From that moment on, Dr. Roland Griffiths upended his career to focus almost exclusively on psilocybin, creating what is now called the Johns Hopkins Psychedelic Research Unit. More than 360 volunteers and fifty peer-reviewed publications later, he’s ready to call a spade a spade. In his 2016 TED Talk, Griffiths said the drug-induced ecstasy he routinely witnesses in the laboratory is ‘virtually identical’ to that reported by natural-born prophets & visionaries throughout human history. The underlying experience itself, whether activated by psilocybin or some spontaneous internal flood of neurotransmitters**, must be ‘biologically normal.’ If we are essentially wired for mystical experience, it raises the intriguing prospect that, under the right mind-set & environment, any curious soul can be instantly converted into a religious savant.
    Griffith’s colleague, Dr. William Richards, has been testing that hypothesis since the 1960s, when he codeveloped the very scale to measure these peak states of consciousness, the Mystical Experience Questionnaire. … In his 2015 book, Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences, Richards maps out the essential features of the perfect psilocybin journey: transcending time & space, accessing knowledge that is normally not available. Oftentimes there is a merging of the everyday personality with a larger, more fundamental whole. Words fail to capture the unsinkable conviction that the experiencer has somehow glimpsed the ultimate nature of reality, an insight that seems ‘blatantly obvious’ at the time, and is usually accompanied by intense feelings of joy, tranquility, exaltation, & awe.”
    Brian C. Muraresku “The Immortality Key. The Secret History of the Religion with No Name.” St. Martin’s Press, 2020.

    ** NOTE: Neurotransmitters mediate but are NOT the "ultimate cause" of mystical experiences any more than a TV set actually causes the Olympic Games, or anything else we watch on it.
    ALSO, shamans who for thousands of years have, & continue to facilitate such numinous experiences, actually do so far more often & widely with drumming & other non-pharmaceutical rituals than with plant medicines.
    AND, with the appropriate "set & setting" people for millennia have also achieved profound mystical experiences & insights by themselves through meditation & other spiritual practices and less often, even spontaneously. This strongly suggests that we are not only "wired for mystical experiences," but that "we are spiritual beings, having a physical experience."

    “When we are in contact with the ineffable, divine reality that is our source, we also know what state we shall return to. Without this knowledge we are indeed dead, even though we may show signs of physical life.”
    Stephan A. Hoeller. “Gnosticism. New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing.” Quest, 2002.

    In summary, direct mystical experiences may be essential prerequisites for us to open to deeper realities, which our 'usual' way of perceiving & thinking these days, can rarely access or comprehend.
    A wide variety of spiritual practices - from yogic breathing techniques, various meditation techniques, chanting, drumming, dancing, tai chi / qi gong, yoga, sweat lodge ceremonies, and plant medicines in appropriate set & settings, with appropriately-trained traditional shamans or health-care professionals - pave the way to profoundly life-altering, life-affirming direct mystical experiences and insights.