No Guru, No Method, No Master

I have, once again, changed the tag line under my photo. The phrase “No Guru, No Method, No Master” first came into my awareness when I misconstrued the title of a Van Morrison album.  The actual title of the album is “No Guru, No Method, No Teacher” but for some reason I always unconsciously substituted “Master” for “Teacher.” Now I consciously make that substitution because I find it more accurate in describing my spiritual path. “Guru” is the Hindu word for a spiritual teacher. “Method” refers to a specific system or technique for achieving spiritual growth. “Master” is akin to Guru or Teacher, but also implies authority over another. These words are also all singular, inferring that there is only one Guru, Method, or Master. As I’m sure you have deduced from this blog, I have no one Guru, or Method, and don’t accept any Master–other than myself–when it comes to my spirituality.

Don't follow me, I'm lost too!

Some people have privately expressed their apprehension over my expressing certain “controversial” views within this blog (I think you can figure out which ones fit the bill). While I believe there is genuine concern behind such comments, the title of the blog is Speaking My Truth–the key word being “My.” This blog is about what I have discovered to be true for me through my own experiences. I am not suggesting or encouraging anyone to follow my spiritual path–on the contrary–I want people to feel free to follow their own spiritual path. I often found that what worked for me was more than a couple standard deviations from the mainstream. But that’s just me. I have always had an affinity for the road less traveled. As I pointed out in my first post–I have always tried to follow the Buddha’s advice and not accept ANYTHING on anyone else’s authority. In doing so, I don’t have to fear “radical” or “controversial” ideas. Ultimately, I will decide what is true for me based on the Universe’s best teacher–personal experience.

High Light: When a Psilocybin Study Leads to Spiritual Realization: Scientific American

High Light: When a Psilocybin Study Leads to Spiritual Realization: Scientific American

All Rivers

All Rivers was created with one mission in mind: To promote and support the universal values and teachings of the world’s religious, spiritual, philosophical and wisdom traditions.

What I do

I have decided to drop “counselor” and “counseling” from descriptions of what I do. Even though I have spent the past 26 years working as a professional counselor and am licensed as such by the State of Washington, I do not “counsel” anyone. Counseling suggests giving guidance to others and implies that somehow I am in a better position to do so than someone else. Who am I to provide guidance to anyone? At several points in my life I have been depressed to the point of suicide. Why on Earth should anyone seek counsel from me? So what do I do? The best I can offer to anyone else is to share my knowledge and possibly, wisdom, in the hope to educate. “Educate,” from the Latin educere, meaning “to bring forth from within.”

The Abode of the Medicine Buddha

A much wiser man than I once said, “By their fruits Ye shall know them. If the fruit of a tree is evil, then that tree is evil. If the fruit of a tree is good, then that tree is good.” I am reminded of this as I delve into the minefield of discussing my relationship with spirit allies in the form of psychoactive substances. It has been said that in polite conversation one should never discuss politics or religion. In discussing my relationship with psychoactives I’m doing both.

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with psychoactive substances for over 40 years (see prior posts). During that time I can honestly say that–like most close personal relationships–it has been both the source of my highest highs (unavoidable pun) and lowest lows.

Whenever people talk about these substances–whether it be alcohol, heroin, or anything in between–we need to remember that we can’t talk about them in isolation. As Alan Watts constantly reminded us–all existence is relative, nothing exists in a vacuum. We must therefore look not only at the substance, but its relationship to the individual and the results of that relationship. In scientific terms this means we must look at the outcome before judging the merits of any hypotheses.

Like anything else, psychoactive substances can produce seriously negative outcomes. Not only for those ingesting them, but also for those around them and society in general. However, does a substance’s potential negative outcome justify ignoring its potential good? Some would say “yes” and just leave it at that. I believe that reality is more nuanced than to fit in neat black-or-white categories, no matter how convenient or comforting they may be. Historically certain psychoactive substances have been used by many cultures as part of their spiritual and religious life. Indeed they are still in use today for this purpose throughout the world.

India is the birthplace of the oldest continuously practiced religion in the world–Hinduism. Hinduism traces its roots to texts call the Vedas (meaning “knowledge” or “wisdom”), which date back to 1,500–1,000 B.C.E. (for those of you who are math impaired that’s over 3,500 years ago). The oldest of these texts is the Rigveda, which roughly translated means “in praise of wisdom.” It is considered by most scholars to be the oldest religious text still in use today. The majority of the Rigveda consists of hymns to a psychoactive plant called Soma. Within the Rigveda, Soma is referred to as the “Creator of the Gods” and “God of the Gods.” No one knows exactly which plant was the source of Soma, but most believe it to be a plant containing psychoactive harmala alkaloids and beta-carbolines. These are found throughout India and the Middle East in the plant Peganum harmala (Syrian Rue). These are also, coincidentally, the same alkaloids found in the Banisteriopsis caapi, or Ayuahuasa vine of South America. Regular followers of this blog will note that Ayahuasca is the sacrament used for thousands of years by the indigenous people of the Amazon basin, as well as the present-day Santo Daime and União do Vegetal churches.

In the Americas there has also been a rich tradition of using psychoactive sacraments. Among pre-Columbian tribes of Mesoamerican peoples, psilocybin-containing mushrooms have been used in religious ceremonies at least as far back as 200 C.E. The name used for these mushrooms was teónanácatl, or “Food of the Gods.” Some, such as the late Terence McKenna, have speculated that use of such mushrooms by early hominids in Africa may have significantly contributed to human evolution. This theory is supported by the research of others, such as Roland L. Fisher and Giorgio Samorini. McKenna theorized that the ancient African grasslands were the historical “Garden of Eden” and that the mushroom–not the apple–was the fruit of the tree of (self) knowledge, which altered the evolutionary trajectory leading eventually to Homo sapiens.

As “far-out” as this may seem, it as good an explanation as any for the “great leap forward” made by Homo sapiens approximately 50,000 years ago when symbolic thought, language, and culture (religion, art, music, myth, etc.) emerged. This is biologically possible because one of the characteristics of the indole alkaloids (DMT, Psilocybin, etc.) is that they can intercalate (slip into) DNA and alter the genome. And, no, this is not the same as the false information spread back in the sixties that LSD damaged chromosomes.

Archeological evidence suggests the Native peoples of North American–particularly in present-day Northern Mexico and the Southwestern U.S.—have a history of using the mescaline-containing Peyote cactus (Lophophora williamsii) dating back to at least 200 years before the first Europeans arrived.  In South America, other mescaline-containing cacti–collectively referred to as “San Pedro” (Echinopsis pachanoi, Echinopsis peruviana, Echinopsis bridgesii, etc.)–have been used among the indigenous peoples of the Andes since as early as 1,400 B.C.E.

In the case of all these substances (with the possible exception of Soma) they are still in use today within the cultures that have traditionally used them. This despite sustained efforts over hundreds of years by the Christian church and governments to eradicate their use. In fact some, such as Ayahuasca, have grown in use throughout the world through churches such as Santo Daime and União do Vegetal .

So, I think we have established that the use of psychoactive substances for spiritual and religious purposes is not anything new. Also, it is as alive and well now as any other time in human history. On to what many would consider the more pertinent question–is it “right”? Unfortunately, as much as some would like existence to fit into simplistic and comforting absolutist moral categories, existence tends to extend a metaphysical middle finger toward such efforts. Some find it preposterous to even discuss what constitutes a “valid” or “true” spiritual experience, as it presuposes there is some universally agreed upon standard.

When it comes to the phenomena of spiritual experience, there are basically three opinions. The first is that the only “true” spiritual experiences are spontaneous gifts provided through the grace of God (the Catholic church is but one example). Only those deemed worthy by God the Father shall receive such a blessing. In return, they shall be Canonized as Saints (assuming they meet all the other rules). According to this view, anything else is illegitimate.

The second opinion is that spiritual experience can only be brought about through hard work and sacrifice. Years of devotion, austerities, discipline, good works, etc. will–if you are lucky–result in some kind of awakening. Anything less is considered a spiritual “short-cut” and therefore “false.” I find it curious that people who are of this opinion consider practices such as hours of meditation or yoga to be “natural” while taking psychoactive substances is somehow “unnatural.” Contemporary neuroscience is revealing the biochemical nature of almost all psychological phenomena and has even delved into the nature of spiritual experience. I believe it is no accident that all these substances at the molecular level are astonishingly similar to our own neurochemicals. One researcher, Dr. Rick Strassman, has even referred to DMT as the “spirit molecule.”

The third opinion is that most eloquently described by the pioneering American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910) in his The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). James states there are many and varied forms of such experiences. Some take the form of the spontaneous conversion, others through a multitude of practices designed to facilitate such experiences. None is essentially “better” or “more authentic” than another. Each one is unique to the individual.

This does not mean, however, that the phenomena of spiritual experience itself cannot be described. Walter Pahnke (1931-1971) was a minister, physician, and psychiatrist who graduated with degrees from Harvard Medical School (M.D.), Harvard Divinity School (M.Div.), and Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (Ph.D.). He is most well-known as the principle architect of the Marsh Chapel or “Good Friday” experiment (see prior posts). He also developed something called a Phenomenological Typology of Mystical Experience, wherein he identified the common elements of all such experiences independent of how they occur.

Dr. Pahnke’s research identified nine specific elements common to all mystical experience. These are:

1.   A feeling of unity characterized by loss of normal ego consciousness and a sense of oneness.

2.   Transcendence of time and space.

3.   A deeply felt positive mood.

4.   A sense of sacredness.

5.   Objectivity and reality characterized by both Insightful, intuitive knowledge gained by the experience and the authoritative nature of the experience.

6.   Paradoxicality, or the resolution of apparent paradoxes.

7.   Ineffability, or the inability to describe the experience adequately.

8.   The transient nature of the experience.

9.   Persisting positive changes in attitudes and behaviors toward self, toward others, toward life, and toward the experience itself.

According to Dr. Pahnke’s research, if an experience has these qualities it is a genuine mystical experience. Other research by both Pahnke and others has shown that all these qualities can be found in the psychedelic substance experience.

Why then the controversy? I’m sure a good part of it has to do with the tendency to see things in absolute right-or-wrong categories. Naturally, if you have this mindset, whatever you are doing is “right” and whatever anyone else is doing is “wrong.” There can only be one path to the top of mountain. If you’re on a different path–you’re on the “wrong” path.

Another source of controversy is the puritan idea that anything that is too “easy” (or pleasurable) is “wrong.” This is a common belief among those unfamiliar with the use of psychoactive sacramentals, as they equate their use with “recreational” substance use or “partying.” On the contrary, using such substances as allies on the spiritual quest is far from “easy.” Just ask anyone who’s had a so-called “bad trip.” These substances are capable of not only revealing the angels within, but the demons as well.

Also, if one is using a psychoactive ally, there is much preparation (work) that needs to be done both before and after the experience itself. This is Huston Smith’s (see prior posts) chief argument regarding many who allegedly use these substances for “spiritual” purposes–the true evidence of the experience is what one does after the experience itself. In other words, the spiritual experience, no matter how it is achieved, is not an end in itself. Of all items listed in Dr. Pahnke’s typology, it is the last one–persisting positive changes in attitudes and behaviors toward self, toward, others, toward life–that is most often missing and, therefore evidence against a true spiritual experience.

This brings us to the final widespread misbelief that “religious” or “spiritual “use of these substances is a just a sham to rationalize getting high (as is no doubt the case with some who use “medical” marijuana). Unfortunately there seem to always be a minority of these poseurs within any group. I have met several myself during traditional Ayahuasca and San Pedro ceremonies. The fact that some will misuse these substances does not, however, delegitimize those who do use them for bona fide spiritual or religious purposes–just as the abuse of alcohol does not take anything away from the majority who use it responsibly.

I know that those who have already made their mind up will not be swayed by my arguments. I knew this when I made a commitment to this path. I will therefore end with a quote by English philosopher, sociologist, and liberal political theorist, Herbret Spencer (1820–1903):

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance–that principle is contempt prior to investigation.

I've Learned My Lessons Well

Some friends and acquaintances have commented to me that–although they have enjoyed my blog postings–it is sometimes difficult reading them. This, they say, is because of my holding nothing back. In other words, speaking my truth. One of my reasons for creating this blog was to do exactly that–to reveal myself fully before the world, warts and all. In examining my own life, as well as the lives of others, I have discovered that poor self-esteem is the root of nearly all evil. It leads to addictions, depression, and suicide. I have spent far too much of my life wasted in trying to do what Lincoln said could not be done–please all the people all the time. Having tried, I can say that by trying to please all the people all the time you can be assured of only one thing–YOU will be miserable. So I have decided that with whatever time I have left on this earth I am going to follow the advice of the late teen heart-throb Ricky Nelson–if you can’t please everyone then you’ve got to please yourself. Welcome to my garden party.

Prelude to Discussion of Entheodelic Plant Allies

The preceding posts are prelude to my addressing an issue that I was sure would be brought up by followers of this blog–the legitimacy of using psychoactive substances within a spiritual context. I felt Dr. Huston Smith’s article–Do Drugs Have Religious Import?–to be particularly significant since he is one of the world’s preeminent scholars on comparative religion and I will be making frequent reference to it in my upcoming post on this subject. I realize that people have very divergent opinions on this topic and I invite you to a lively, but cordial, discussion.

Do Drugs Have Religious Import? (Part 4)

Drugs and Religion Viewed Theologically

Suppose that drugs can induce experiences that are indistinguishable from religious ones, and that we can respect their reports. Do they shed any light, not (we now ask) on life, but on the nature of the religious life?

One thing they may do is throw religious experience itself into perspective by clarifying its relation to the religious life as a whole. Drugs appear able to induce religious experiences; it is less evident that they can produce religious lives. It follows that religion is more than religious experiences. This is hardly news, but it may be a useful reminder, especially to those who incline toward "the religion of religious experience," which is to say toward lives bent on the acquisition of desired states of experience irrespective of their relation to life's other demands and components.

Despite the dangers of faculty psychology, it remains useful to regard man as having a mind, a will, and feelings. One of the lessons of religious history is that to be adequate a faith must rouse and involve all three components of man's nature. Religions of reason grow arid; religions of duty, leaden. Religions of experience have their comparable pitfalls, as evidenced by Taoism's struggle (not always successful) to keep from degenerating into quietism, and the vehemence with which Zen Buddhism has insisted that once students have attained satori, they must be driven out of it, back into the world. The case of Zen is especially pertinent here, for it pivots on an enlightenment experience–satori or kensho–that some (but not all) Zennists say resembles LSD. Alike or different, the point is that Zen recognizes that unless the experience is joined to discipline, it will come to naught.

Even the Buddha had to sit. Without joriki, the particular power developed through zazen [seated meditation], the vision of oneness attained in enlightenment in time becomes clouded and eventually fades into a pleasant memory instead of remaining an omnipresent reality shaping our daily life. To be able to live in accordance with what the Mind's eye has revealed through satori requires, like the purification of character and the development of personality, a ripening period of zazen.

If the religion of religious experience is a snare and a delusion, it follows that no religion that fixes its faith primarily in substances that induce religious experiences can be expected to come to a good end. What promised to be a shortcut will prove to be a short circuit; what began as a religion will end as a religion surrogate. Whether chemical substances can be helpful adjuncts to faith is another question. The peyote-using Native American Church seems to indicate that they can be; anthropologists give this church a good report, noting among other things that members resist alcohol and alcoholism better than do non-members. The conclusion to which evidence currently points would seem to be that chemicals can aid the religious life, but only where set within a context of faith (meaning by this the conviction that what they disclose is true) and discipline (meaning diligent exercise of the will in the attempt to work out the implications of the disclosures for the living of life in the every day, common sense world).

Nowhere today in Western civilization are these two conditions jointly fulfilled. Churches lack faith in the sense just mentioned; hippies lack discipline. This might lead us to forget about the drugs, were it not for one fact: the distinctive religious emotion and the one drugs unquestionably can occasion–Otto's mysterium tremendum, majestas, mysterium fascinans; in a phrase, the phenomenon of religious awe–seems to be declining sharply. As Paul Tillich said in an address to the Hillel Society at Harvard several years ago:

The question our century puts before us is: Is it possible to regain the lost dimension, the encounter with the Holy, the dimension which cuts through the world of subjectivity and objectivity and goes down to that which is not world but is the mystery of the Ground of Being?

Tillich may be right; this may be the religious question of our century. For if (as we have insisted) religion cannot be equated with religious experience, neither can it long survive its absence.

Dr. Huston Smith 

Do Drugs Have Religious Import? (Part 3)

Drugs and Religion Viewed Philosophically

Why do people reject evidence? Because they find it threatening, we may suppose. Theologians are not the only professionals to utilize this mode of defense. In his Personal Knowledge, Michael Polanyi recounts the way the medical profession ignored such palpable facts as the painless amputation of human limbs, performed before their own eyes in hundreds of successive cases, concluding that the subjects were impostors who were either deluding their physician or colluding with him. One physician, James Esdaile, carried out about 300 major operations painlessly under mesmeric trance in India, but neither in India nor in Great Britain could he get medical journals to print accounts of his work. Polanyi attributes this closed-mindedness to "lack of a conceptual framework in which their discoveries could be separated from specious and untenable admixtures."

The "untenable admixture" in the fact that psychotomimetic drugs can induce religious experience is their apparent implicate: that religious disclosures are no more veridical than psychotic ones. For religious skeptics, this conclusion is obviously not untenable at all; it fits in beautifully with their thesis that all religion is at heart an escape from reality. Psychotics avoid reality by retiring into dream worlds of make-believe; what better evidence that religious visionaries do the same than the fact those identical changes in brain chemistry produces both states of mind? Had not Marx already warned us that religion is the "opiate" of the people? Apparently he was more literally accurate than he supposed. Freud was likewise too mild. He "never doubted that religious phenomena are to be understood only on the model of the neurotic symptoms of the individual." He should have said "psychotic symptoms."

So the religious skeptic is likely to reason. What about the religious believer? Convinced that religious experiences are not fundamentally delusory, can he admit that psychotomimetic drugs can occasion them? To do so he needs (to return to Polanyi's words) "a conceptual framework in which [the discoveries can] be separated from specious and untenable admixtures," the latter being in this case the conclusion that religious experiences are in general delusory.

One way to effect the separation would be to argue that despite phenomenological similarities between natural and drug-induced religious experiences, they are separated by a crucial ontological difference. Such an argument would follow the pattern of theologians who argue for the "real presence" of Christ's body and blood in the bread and wine of the Eucharist despite their admission that chemical analysis, confined as it is to the level of "accidents" rather than "essences," would not disclose this presence. But this distinction will not appeal to many today, for it turns on an essence-accident metaphysics that is not widely accepted. Instead of fighting a rear-guard action by insisting that if drug and non-drug religious experiences can't be distinguished empirically there must be some trans-empirical factor which distinguishes them and renders the drug experience profane, I wish to explore the possibility of accepting drug-induced experiences as religious in every sense of the word without relinquishing confidence in the truth claims of religious experience generally.

To begin with the weakest of all arguments, the argument from authority: William James didn't discount his insights, which occurred while his brain chemistry was altered. The paragraph in which he retrospectively evaluates his nitrous oxide experiences has become classic, but it is so pertinent to the present discussion that it merits quoting again.

One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality that probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question–for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge toward a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance.

To this argument from authority, I add two that try to provide something by way of reasons. Drug experiences that assume a religious cast tend to have fearful and/or beatific features, and each of my hypotheses relates to one of these aspects of the experience.

Beginning with the ominous, "fear of the Lord," an awe-full feature, Gordon Wasson, the New York banker-turned-mycologist, describes these as he encountered them in his psilocybin experience as follows: "Ecstasy! In common parlance . . . ecstasy is fun.... But ecstasy is not fun. Your very soul is seized and shaken until it tingles. After all, who will choose to feel undiluted awe? The unknowing vulgar abuse the word; we must recapture its full and terrifying sense." Emotionally the drug experience can be like having forty-foot waves crash over you for several hours while you cling desperately to a life raft that may be swept from under you at any minute. It seems quite possible that such an ordeal, like any experience of a close call, could awaken rather fundamental sentiments respecting life and death and destiny and trigger the "no atheists in foxholes" effect. Similarly, as the subject emerges from the trauma and realizes that he is not going to be insane as he had feared, there may come over him an intensified appreciation like that frequently reported by patients recovering from critical illness. "It happened on the day when my bed was pushed out of doors to the open gallery of the hospital," reads one such report.

I cannot now recall whether the revelation came suddenly or gradually; I only remember finding myself in the very midst of those wonderful moments, beholding life for the first time in all its young intoxication of loveliness, in its unspeakable joy, beauty, and importance. I cannot say exactly what the mysterious change was. I saw no new thing, but I saw all the usual things in a miraculous new light—in what I believe is their true light. I saw for the first time how wildly beautiful and joyous, beyond any words of mine to describe, is the whole of life. Every human being moving across that porch, every sparrow that flew, every branch tossing in the wind, was caught in and was a part of the whole mad ecstasy of loveliness, of joy, of importance, of intoxication of life.

If we do not discount religious intuitions because they are prompted by battlefields and physical crises–if we regard the latter as "calling us to our senses" more often than they seduce us into delusions, need comparable intuitions be discounted simply because the crises that trigger them are of an inner, psychic variety?

Turning from the hellish to the heavenly aspects of the drug experience, some of the latter may be explainable by the hypothesis just stated; that is, they may be occasioned by the relief that attends the sense of escape from high danger. But this hypothesis cannot possibly account for all the beatific episodes for the simple reason that the positive episodes often come first, or to persons who experience no negative episodes whatever. Dr. Sanford Unger of the National Institute of Mental Health reports that among his subjects "50 to 60 percent will not manifest any real disturbance worthy of discussion," yet "around 75" will have at least one episode in which exaltation, rapture, and joy are the key descriptions. How are we to account for the drug's capacity to induce peak experiences, such as the following, which are not preceded by fear?

A feeling of great peace and contentment seemed to flow through my entire body. All sound ceased and I seemed to be floating in a great, very still void or hemisphere. It is impossible to describe the overpowering feeling of peace, contentment, and being a part of goodness itself that I felt. I could feel my body dissolving and actually becoming a part of the goodness and peace that was all around me. Words can't describe this. I feel awe and wonder that such a feeling could have occurred to me.

Consider the following line of argument. Like every other form of life, man's nature has become distinctive through specialization. Man has specialized in developing a cerebral cortex. The analytic powers of this instrument are a standing wonder, but it seems less able to provide man with the sense that he is meaningfully related to his environment, to life, the world and history in their wholeness. As Albert Camus describes the situation:

If I were a cat among animals, this life would have meaning; or rather this problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world. I would be this world to which I am now opposed by my whole consciousness.

Note that it is Camus' consciousness that opposes him to his world. The drugs do not knock this consciousness out, but while they leave it operative they also activate areas of the brain that normally lie below its threshold of awareness. One of the clearest objective signs that the drugs are taking effect is the dilation they produce in the pupils of the eyes, while one of the most predictable subjective signs is the intensification of visual perception. Portions of the brain that lie deep, further to the rear than the mechanisms that govern consciousness, control both of these responses. Meanwhile we know that the human organism is interlaced with its world in innumerable ways it normally cannot sense—through gravitational fields, body respiration, and the like; the list could be multiplied until man's skin began to seem more like a thoroughfare than a boundary. Perhaps the deeper regions of the brain which evolved earlier and are more like those of the lower animals–"If I were a cat . . . I should belong to this world"–can sense this relatedness better than can the cerebral cortex which now dominates our awareness. If so, when the drugs rearrange the neurochemicals that transmit impulses across synapses between neurons, man's consciousness and his submerged, intuitive, ecological awareness might for a spell become interlaced. This is, of course, no more than a hypothesis, but how else are we to account for the extraordinary incidence under the drugs of that kind of insight the keynote of which James described as a reconciliation:

It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into one and the same genus, but one of the species, the nobler and better one, is itself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposites into itself.

Dr. Huston Smith 

Do Drugs Have Religious Import? (Part 2)

Drugs and Religion Viewed Phenomenologically

Phenomenology attempts a careful description of human experience. The question the drugs pose for the phenomenology of religion, therefore, is whether the experiences they induce differ from religious experiences reached au nature and if so how.

Even the Bible notes that chemically induced psychic states bear some resemblance to religious ones. Peter had to appeal to a circumstantial criterion—the early hour of the day—to defend those who were caught up in the Pentecostal experience against the charge that they were merely drunk. “These men are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day" (Acts 2:15). And Paul initiates the comparison when he admonishes the Ephesians not to "get drunk with wine, but to be filled with the spirit" (Ephesians 5:18). Are such comparisons, paralleled in the accounts of virtually every religion, superficial? How far can they be pushed?

Not all the way, students of religion have thus far insisted. With respect to drugs, Professor R. C. Zaehner has drawn the line emphatically. He writes:

The importance of Huxley's Doors of Perception is that in it the author clearly makes the claim that what he experienced under the influence of mescaline is closely comparable to a genuine mystical experience. If he is right the conclusions are alarming⁷

Zaehner thinks that Huxley is not right, but Zaehner is mistaken.

There are, of course, innumerable drug experiences that haven't a religious feature–they can be sensual as readily as spiritual, trivial as readily as transforming, capricious as readily as sacramental. If there is one point about which every student of the drugs agrees, it is that there is no such thing as the drug experience per se–no experience which the drugs, as it were, merely secrete. Every experience is a mix of three ingredients: drug, set (the psychological makeup of the individual) and setting (the social and physical environment in which it is taken). But given the right set and setting, the drugs can induce religious experiences indistinguishable from ones that occur spontaneously. Nor need set and setting be exceptional. The way the statistics are currently running, it looks as if from one-fourth to one-third of the general population will have religious experiences if they take the drugs under naturalistic conditions, meaning by this conditions in which the researcher supports the subject but doesn't try to influence the direction his experience will take. Among subjects who have strong religious inclinations to begin with, the proportion of those having religious experiences jumps to three-fourths. If they take them in settings that are religious too, the ratio soars to nine out of ten.

How do we know that the experiences these people have really are religious? We can begin with the fact that they say they are. The "one-fourth to one-third of the general populous" figure is drawn from two sources. Ten months after they had had their experiences, 24 percent of the 194 subjects in a study by the California psychiatrist Oscar Janiger characterized them as having been religious. Thirty-two percent of the 74 subjects in Ditman and Hayman's study reported that in looking back on their LSD experience it looked as if it had been "very much" or "quite a bit" a religious experience; 42 percent checked as true the statement that they "were left with a greater awareness of God, or a higher power, or ultimate reality." The statement that three-fourths of subjects having religious "sets" will have religious experiences comes from the reports of sixty-nine religious professionals who took the drugs while the Harvard project was in progress.

In the absence of (a) a single definition of a religious experience acceptable to psychologists of religion generally, and (b) foolproof ways of ascertaining whether actual experiences exemplify any definition, I am not sure there is a better way of telling whether the experiences of the 333 men and women involved in the above studies were religious than by noting whether they seemed so to them. But if more rigorous methods are preferred, they exist; they have been utilized and confirm the conviction of the man in the street that drug experiences can indeed be religious. In his doctoral study at Harvard University, Dr. Walter Pahnke worked out a typology of religious experience (in this instance of the mystical variety) based on the classic cases of mystical experiences as summarized in Walter Stace's Mysticism and Philosophy. He then administered psilocybin to ten theology students and professors in the setting of a Good Friday service. The drug was given "double-blind," meaning that neither Dr. Pahnke nor his subjects would know which ten were getting psilocybin and which ten placebos to constitute a control group. Subsequently the reports the subjects wrote of their experiences were laid successively before three college-graduate housewives who, without being informed about the nature of the study, were asked to rate each statement as to the degree (strong, moderate, slight, or none) to which it exemplified each of the nine traits of mystical experience as enumerated in the typology of mysticism worked out in advance. When the test of significance was applied to their statistics, it showed that "those subjects who received psilocybin experienced phenomena which were indistinguishable from, if not identical with . . . the categories defined by our typology of mysticism."

With the thought that the reader might like to test his own powers of discernment on the question being considered, I insert here a simple test I gave to a group of Princeton students following a recent discussion sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson Society.

Below are accounts of two religious experiences. One occurred under the influence of drugs, one without their influence. Check the one you think was drug-induced.

Suddenly I burst into a vast, new, indescribably wonderful universe. Although I am writing this over a year later, the thrill of the surprise and amazement, the awesomeness of the revelation, the engulfment in an overwhelming feeling-wave of gratitude and blessed wonderment, are as fresh, and the memory of the experience is as vivid, as if it had happened five minutes ago. And yet to concoct anything by way of description that would even hint at the magnitude, the sense of ultimate reality . . . this seems such an impossible task. The knowledge which has infused and affected every aspect of my life came instantaneously and with such complete force of certainty that it was impossible, then or since, to doubt its validity.

All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of fire . . . the next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life.... I saw that all men are immortal: that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world . . . is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain.

On the occasion referred to, twice the number of students (46) answered incorrectly as answered correctly (23). I bury the correct answer in a footnote to preserve the reader's opportunity to test himself.

Why, in the face of this considerable evidence, does Zaehner hold that drug experiences cannot be authentically religious? There appear to be three reasons:

First, his experience was "utterly trivial." This of course proves that not all drug experiences are religious; it does not prove that no drug experiences are religious.

Second, he thinks that the experiences of others which appear to be religious to them are not truly so. Zaehner distinguishes three kinds of mysticism: nature mysticism in which the soul is united with the natural world; monistic mysticism in which the soul merges with an impersonal absolute; and theism in which the soul confronts the living, personal God. He concedes that drugs can induce the first two species of mysticism, but not its supreme instance, the theistic. As proof, he analyzes Huxley's experience as recounted in The Doors of Perception to show that it produced at best a blend of nature and monistic mysticism. Even if we were to accept Zaehner's evaluation of the three forms of mysticism, Huxley's case, and indeed Zaehner's entire book, would prove only that not every mystical experience induced by the drugs is theistic. Insofar as Zaehner goes beyond this to imply that drugs do not and cannot induce theistic mysticism, he not only goes beyond the evidence but proceeds in the face of it. Professor Slotkin reports that the peyote Indians:

See visions, which may be of Christ Himself. Sometimes they hear the voice of the Great Spirit. Sometimes they become aware of the presence of God and of those personal shortcomings that must be corrected if they are to do His will.

And G. M. Carstairs, reporting on the use of psychedelic bhang (marijuana) in India, quotes a Brahmin as saying, "It gives good bhakti. You get a very good bhakti with bhang," bhakti being precisely Hinduism's theistic variant.

There is a third reason why Professor Zaehner might doubt that drugs can induce experiences that are genuinely mystical. Professor Zaehner is a Roman Catholic, and Roman Catholic doctrine teaches that mystical rapture is a gift of grace and as such can never be reduced to man's control. This may be true; certainly the empirical evidence cited does not preclude the possibility of a genuine ontological or theological difference between natural and drug-induced religious experiences. At this point, however, we are considering phenomenology rather than ontology, description rather than interpretation, and on this level there is no difference. Descriptively, drug experiences cannot be distinguished from their natural religious counterpart. When the current philosophical authority on mysticism, Dr. W. T. Stace, Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, was asked whether the drug experience is similar to the mystical experience, he answered, "It's not a matter of its being similar to mystical experience; it is mystical experience."

What we seem to be witnessing in Zaehner's Mysticism Sacred and Profane is a reenactment of the age-old pattern in the conflict between science and religion. Whenever a new controversy arises, religion's first impulse is to deny the disturbing evidence science has produced. Seen in perspective, Zaehner's refusal to admit that drugs can induce experiences descriptively indistinguishable from those that are spontaneously religious is the current counterpart of the seventeenth century theologians' refusal to look through Galileo's telescope or, when they did, their persistence in dismissing what they saw as machinations of the devil. When the fact that drugs can trigger religious experiences becomes incontrovertible, discussion will move to the more difficult question of how this new fact is to be interpreted. The latter question leads beyond phenomenology into philosophy.

Dr. Huston Smith

Do Drugs Have Religious Import? (Part 1)

Students of religion appear by and large to be dismissing the psychedelic drugs that have sprung to our attention in the sixties as having little religious relevance. The position taken in one of the most forward-looking volumes of theological essays to have appeared in recent years accepts R. C. Zaehner's Mysticism Sacred and Profane as having "fully examined and refuted" the religious claims for mescaline which Aldous Huxley sketched in The Doors of Perception. This closing of the case strikes me as premature, for it looks as if the drugs have light to throw on the history of religion, the phenomenology of religion, the philosophy of religion, and the practice of the religious life itself.

Drugs and Religion Viewed Historically

In his trial-and-error life explorations man almost everywhere has stumbled upon connections between vegetables (eaten or brewed) and actions (yogic breathing exercises, whirling dervish dances, flagellations) that altered states of consciousness. From the psychopharmacological standpoint we now understand these states to be the products of changes in brain chemistry. From the sociological perspective we see that they tended to be connected in some way with religion. If we discount the wine used in our own communion services, the instances closest to us in time and space are the peyote of The Native American (Indian) Church and Mexico's 2,000- year-old "sacred mushrooms," the latter rendered in Aztec as "God's flesh"—striking parallel to "the body of Christ" in the Christian Eucharist. Beyond these neighboring instances lie the soma of the Hindus, the haoma and hemp, identical with and better known as marijuana, of the Zoroastrians, the Dionysus of the Greeks who "everywhere taught men the culture of the vine and the mysteries of his worship and everywhere was accepted as a god " the benzoin of Southeast Asia, Zen's tea whose fifth cup purifies and whose sixth "calls to the realm of the immortals," the pituri of the Australian aborigines and probably the mystic kykeon that was eaten and drunk at the climactic close of the sixth day of the Eleusinian mysteries. There is no need to extend the list, especially as Philippie de Felice's comprehensive study of the subject, Poisons Sacrés, Ivresses Divines (Sacred Poisons, Divine Raptures), is about to appear in English.

More interesting than the fact that consciousness-changing devices have been linked with religion is the possibility that they actually initiated many of the religious perspectives that, taking root in history, continued after their psychedelic origins were forgotten. Bergson saw the first movement of Hindus and Greeks toward "dynamic religion" as associated with the "divine rapture" found in intoxicating beverages. More recently Robert Graves, Gordon Wasson and Alan Watts have suggested that most religions arose from such chemically induced theophanies. Mary Barnard is the most explicit proponent of this thesis. She asks in the autumn 1963 journal of Phi Beta Kappa:

Which was more likely to happen first–the spontaneously generated idea of an afterlife in which the disembodied soul, liberated from the restrictions of time and space, experiences eternal bliss; or the accidental discovery of hallucinogenic plants that give a sense of euphoria, dislocate the center of consciousness, and distort time and space, making them balloon outward in greatly expanded vistas?

Her own answer is that "the latter experience might have had an almost explosive effect on the largely dormant minds of men, causing them to think of things they had never thought of before. This, if you like, is direct revelation." Her use of the subjunctive "might" renders this formulation of her answer equivocal, but she concludes her essay on a note that is completely unequivocal:

Looking at the matter coldly, unintoxicated and unentranced, I am willing to prophesy that fifty ethnobotanists working for fifty years would make the current theories concerning the origins of much mythology and theology as out-of-date as pre-Copernican astronomy.

This is an important hypothesis–one that must surely engage the attention of historians of religion for some time to come. But as I am concerned here only to spot the points at which the drugs erupt onto the field of serious religious study, not to ride the geysers to whatever height, I shall not pursue Miss Barnard's thesis. Having located what appears to be the crux of the historical question, namely the extent to which drugs not merely duplicate or simulate theologically sponsored experiences but generate or shape theologies themselves, I turn to phenomenology.

Dr. Huston Smith

The Marsh Chapel Experiment

The Marsh Chapel Experiment (a.k.a. "the Good Friday Experiment") was run by Walter Pahnke, a graduate student in theology at Harvard Divinity School. The goal was to see if in religiously predisposed subjects, psilocybin (the psychoactive principle in psilocybin mushrooms) would act as reliable catalyst in facilitating religious experience. The experiment was conducted on, Good Friday, 1962 at Boston University's Marsh Chapel. Prior to the Good Friday service, graduate divinity student volunteers were randomly divided into two groups. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment, half of the students received psilocybin, while a control group received niacin as a placebo. Almost all of the members of the experimental group reported experiencing profound religious experiences–providing empirical support for the notion that psychedelic drugs can facilitate religious experiences. In 2006, a more rigorously controlled version of this experiment was conducted at Johns Hopkins University yielding very similar results.

Pahnke, Walter N., Drugs and Mysticism: An Analysis of the Relationship between Psychedelic Drugs and the Mystical Consciousness. A thesis presented to the Committee on Higher Degrees in History and Philosophy of Religion, Harvard University, June 1963.

Griffiths RR, Richards WA, Johnson HW, McCann UD, Jesse R: Mystical-type experiences occasioned by psilocybin mediate the attribution of personal meaning and spiritual significance, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

Dr. Walter Houston Clark, 1902-1994

Psychedelic drugs are simply an auxiliary which, when used carefully within a religious structure, may assist in mediating an experience which, aside from the presence of the drug, cannot be distinguished psychologically from mysticism.

Dr. Clark was a psychologist with a religious background who took a special interest in psychedelic drugs and religious experience. He was educated at Williams College and Harvard University. During his lifetime, he was a professor of psychology and religion at Bowdoin College, Middlebury College, Hartford Seminary School of Religious Education, and Andover Newton Theological School. Dr. Clark believed that–properly administered–mind-altering drugs were a source of intense religious experiences. His own analysis was published in 1969 as Chemical Ecstasy: Psychedelic Drugs and Religion and also his later book, Religious Experience: Its Nature and Functioning in the Human Psyche (1973).

Psychedelic Salon

Just discovered a great site for audio from some of the greats (Alan Watts, Terence McKenna, etc.).
http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/
Enjoy!

Thanks Terry!

I’m listening once again to Terence McKenna’s “The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge” audio dialogs and continue to revel in his timeless genius.

Meeting the Buddha on the Road

I teach one thing–how to end suffering.

The Buddha

IMHO, Buddhism is the most misunderstood of the world's major religions–not only by those outside looking in, but by its followers as well (bad enough I've got the Christians coming for me with pitchforks and torches, now the Buddhists will be joining them). This is because what I see in Buddhism is NOT (and never was intended to be) a religion. The problem is that Siddhārtha Gautama (i.e., the Buddha) was so far ahead of his time (5^th century B.C.E.) that there was no other paradigm for his teachings. What he actually taught was what today we would call cognitive psychology. Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, I submit for your consideration the first two verses of the Dhammapada–the Buddha's first teaching:
Mind precedes its objects. They are mind-governed and mind-made. To speak or act with a defiled mind is to draw pain after oneself, like a cart behind the feet of the ox drawing it.
Mind precedes its objects. They are mind-governed and mind-made. To speak or act with a peaceful mind, is to draw happiness after oneself, like an inseparable shadow.
If this is not cognitive psychology, then butter my butt and call me a biscuit. Cognitive psychology and Buddhism are founded upon the same principle: Our thoughts–which include our perceptions, interpretations, judgments, beliefs, etc.–are the source of, and means to ending our suffering. Put another way, we do not see the world as it is–we see the world as we are.
In fact, the Buddha's lack of any traditionally "religious" content has led some Buddhist scholars, such as Stephen Batchelor, to conclude the Buddha was agnostic–if not atheist–in his religious views. This is, I believe, one of the reasons Buddhism spread so quickly throughout Asia. Without any of the typical religious trappings to get in the way, when Buddhism entered a new country, it simply incorporated its own established religious beliefs into Buddhism (much like early Christians co-opted Pagan holidays to make it easier to gain converts). This is why, for example, Tibetan Buddhism is very different from Japanese Buddhism. In fact, without the iconography of the Buddha–one would probably not recognize these as the same religions.
Another example of this is the widespread belief that Buddhists believe in reincarnation. Many do, but not because of anything the Buddha taught. When studying the origins of a religion, one of the difficulties faced is to separate what is an essential religious teaching from things that are simply artifacts of the time and culture from which it came. In the Indian subcontinent during the 5^th century B.C.E. people did not just believe in reincarnation–it was considered a fact, just like the sky is blue and water is wet. Not only did no one question it, no one would even think to question it. So of course when this new teacher came along and didn't specifically say anything one way or the other about it, reincarnation was just absorbed into the Buddha's teachings. Since reincarnation was seen as a form of suffering and the Buddha was teaching a way to end suffering, it just made sense that the goal of Nirvana was to be freed from the cycle of birth and rebirth.
One would never suspect that within the Buddha's teachings is the concept that we do not have a soul or spirit that exists independently of the mind. The only Buddhists who directly confront this are Ch'an (Chinese) or Zen (Japanese) Buddhists–which were heavily influenced by Taoist philosophy when Buddhism came to China. Ch'an and Zen Buddhism has a distinctly existential–almost nihilistic–focus.
So what then is the core of the Buddha's teaching? First, the Four Noble Truths:

1.    The truth of the existence of suffering;

2.    The truth of the cause of suffering;

3.    The truth that suffering can be eliminated; and

4.    The truth of how to eliminate suffering (the Noble Eightfold Path).

The first of these is pretty much a no-brainer–at times, life sucks. The surprise comes in the second truth–we (specifically our minds) are the cause of life sucking. The actual word the Buddha used for this is dukkha, which is usually translated as "unsatisfactoriness." Simply put, we find life unsatisfactory because it often doesn't meet our expectations. "What is" is not the way we think it "should" be, so we blame what is for not meeting our expectations–never stopping to realize (until the Buddha came along) that it's our expectations that are the true cause of our suffering. Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis, or David Burns (three prominent cognitive psychologists) couldn't have said it better.
The third truth follows from the second–if we know the cause of suffering, we can eliminate it (or at least greatly reduce it). OK, so how do we do this? Enter the fourth truth–the Noble Eightfold Path.
The Noble Eightfold Path is divided into three aspects: Wisdom (1, 2), Ethical Conduct (3, 4, 5), and Concentration (6, 7, 8). Specifically, the Eightfold path consists of:

1.    Right Understanding;

2.    Right Thought;

3.    Right Speech;

4.    Right Action;

5.    Right Livelihood;

6.    Right Effort;

7.    Right Mindfulness; and

8.    Right Concentration.

Now keep in mind that during the past 2,500 years whole forests have been sacrificed to written discourses on the Noble Eightfold Path. I'll just be flying high overhead to give a broad picture of the landscape. You can parachute down and hack through the brush on your own.
Right Understanding is pretty simple–it basically refers back to the Four Noble Truths. This is the "right understanding" of suffering. The Greek stoic philosopher, Epictetus, echoed the Buddha's concept of suffering in the 1^st century C.E. when he said "Men are not upset by things, but by the views they take of them." Right Understanding also includes the law of karma–that every action produces a result (what goes around, comes around).
In the language of cognitive psychology, Right Thought means to identify and challenge one's cognitive distortions and irrational beliefs about themselves, other people, and the world around them.
The first of the three dealing with Ethical Conduct is Right Speech. The specifics of which are basically to be truthful and to not engage in divisive or abusive speech. Pretty straightforward.
Right Action is basically doing nothing that brings suffering to others. I like to think of it as the Buddhist version of the "Golden Rule"–treat others as you would have them treat you.
Right Livelihood takes right action into how one makes a living. Again, the idea is that you do not engage in an occupation that brings suffering to others (Republicans need not apply. Opps! That's not right speech. Shame on me!).
The last three have to do specifically with the practices of meditation. Right Effort primarily has to do with mental discipline. Not only in keeping the first five steps on the path always in mind, but also to provide the discipline for the remaining two steps.
Mindfulness is a specific Buddhist meditation technique, the goal of which is to bring mindful awareness to everything we do. Right Mindfulness is specifically referring to this last aspect.
Finally, we get to Right Concentration, which is actually the practice of meditation itself. Within the Buddhist tradition there are many specific meditation techniques, but all require focused attention and concentration.
There it is–Buddhism in a nutshell. As I said, one could spend many lifetimes (if you buy into the whole reincarnation thing) studying the details of all this, but this is what I consider the essence of what the Buddha taught. Once I was able to peel away all the superfluous B.S. that had little, if anything, to do with the core teaching–I found a genuine affection for Buddhism. But, I still would file it under "Psychology," rather than "Religion."

The Tao that can be told

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

The nameless is the beginning of heaven and Earth.

The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.

Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.

Ever desiring, one sees the manifestations.

These two spring from the same source but differ in name;

This appears as darkness.

Darkness within darkness.

The gate to all mystery.

Lao Tzu

Tao Te Ching

So begins the first chapter in the Tao Te Ching–the foundational text of Taoism. Taoism has existed as a philosophical system in China since about the 6^th century B.C.E. When I began my spiritual quest in earnest, Taoism was the first tradition that resonated with me. It’s difficult to encapsulate Taoism in just a few words. A fact made even harder due to their being at least 3 major divisions and an untold number of minor sects. However, my interest has solely been in Taoism as a philosophical system.

Perhaps the first thing that attracted me to Taoist teaching was that is essentially non-theistic (i.e., without a belief in a Deity). Instead, Taoism refers to the Tao–a word that is usually translated as “path” or “way.” The Tao is viewed as a cosmic force or energy that underlies all existence. As such, it is the source of the natural laws by which the entire Universe operates. The actions (the manifestations) of the Tao are best understood through studying the natural world. An analogy would be the wind. Think of the wind as the Tao, which cannot be seen (the mystery). We are only aware of the wind by its actions (the manifestations) within the physical universe (i.e., trees bending, leaves blowing, etc.). That which is not in harmony with the Tao will eventually cease to exist. Therefore, a follower of the Tao attempts to live his or her life in harmony with this cosmic force. This is also the philosophy behind the Taoist moving meditation and martial art, T’ai Chi. The practice is designed to help one harmonize with the Universe.

One of the essential aspects of the Tao’s manifestation in the Universe is constant change. The most recognized icon for Taoism is the T’ai Chi (usually referred to as the “yin/yang”). This circle divided into light and dark symbolizes the constant interaction of two complimentary elements–yin and yang–which are the source of everything (the ten thousand things).

That which engenders Creation is itself uncreated; that which engenders Change is itself unchanging. The Uncreated is able to create; the Unchanging is able to effect change. That which is produced cannot but continue producing; that which is evolved cannot but continue evolving. Hence there is constant production and constant evolution. The law of constant production and of constant evolution at no time ceases to operate.

Lieh Tzu

I like Taoism’s reverence for the natural world and the idea of trying to live in harmony with it. A good example of this can be seen in traditional Chinese landscape paintings. In these landscapes, people (or the evidence of people such as buildings, etc.) are virtually invisible–hidden among the majesty of the natural world. Most Taoists saw society as a corrupting influence on the individual and would often live as hermits in the forests or mountains. Thoreau–though not a Taoist in name–certainly lived in accord with many Taoist principles.

Taoists were–for the most part–very rational and scientific. They studied nature to understand the underlying principles at work. In so doing, Taoists by-in-large founded the principles of traditional Chinese medicine. They tended to see the “big picture” and knew that anything–even if left alone–would eventually change. It seems they viewed the Universe as a wondrous mystery just waiting to be explored.

A word of caution: If you decide you would like to do some study of Taoism, be aware that there is a magical-shamanic folk religion that uses the name Taoist and has little–if any–connection to Taoist philosophy. This is typically called “Religious” or “Popular” Taoism.

 

Mysticism, Spirituality, and Organized Religion

Some of you may have wondered about my use of the term Mystic along with Counselor and Educator under the vision of my benevolent countenance. A mystic is a person who practices mysticism.

Mysticism (from the Greek, mystikos) is the pursuit of communion with, or conscious awareness of divinity, spiritual truth, or God through direct experience. Mysticism usually centers on a practice or practices intended to nurture such experiences or awareness.

I consider myself to be a mystic in that–following the Buddha’s advice–I accept as truth only that which I can verify from my own experience. When it comes to spirituality or religion this means I do not believe anything unless I have direct experience of it, which–by definition–means mysticism.

Mystics and organized religion have an ongoing love–hate relationship. Religious traditions need mystics for their origins (Where would Christianity be without Christ, or Buddhism without Buddha?), but mystics are very disruptive to the status quo once a religion is established around them. If you’ve got a means of having direct experience of the divine, who needs an ecclesiastical hierarchy as an intermediary? We can’t have ordinary people running around communing directly with God as this doesn’t bode well for church attendance and–perhaps more importantly–the Sunday collection plate.

In order to guard against this threat to their spiritual monopoly, religious organizations do one of three things:

1)    They segregate those with any mystical inclinations away from the masses by relegating them to monasteries, convents, etc. while also making admission to these groups unattractive with requirements such as vows of poverty, celibacy, etc.

2)    They claim that mystics are “special” people (Saints, etc.) favored by God that we should worship and revere, but not try to emulate.

3)    They attack mystics as being heretics who blaspheme the true doctrine and therefore must be excommunicated, banished, punished, or killed (sometimes all of the above).

I think this is one of the reasons–perhaps THE reason–established religions and even new age spiritual “gurus” (sorry Alan) shun the use of entheogenic substances by their followers, as they make the mystic experience far too democratic. It’s much easier to allow for a spiritual democracy when everyone in the tribe is wearing a loincloth and living in a hut with a dirt floor. Democracy of any kind makes those in power very nervous.

The problem is that once the spiritual experience becomes a religion, it ceases to be about individual spirituality and instead becomes centered around idolatry. Even though many religions–particularly the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam)–pay lip service to idolatry as a sin, the reality is quite different. They get by with this on a technicality–idolatry by definition is worship of a physical object as God. Since people are not considered physical objects, it’s OK to worship Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, etc. and not call it idolatry. Of course idolatry is always what the “other” religions do, not one’s own.

As an example, shortly after 9/11, I overheard two people discussing Islam. Because one of Islam’s most well-known icons is the crescent moon, one was telling the other than followers of Islam “worship the moon as their god.” I’m presuming this person was sharing this as evidence that Islam practiced idolatry and was, therefore, an inferior religion. I wonder if this person would apply the same “logic” to Christians by saying they worship a “wooden cross as their god” and that this too is idolatry. It can be a slippery slope from religious iconography to religious idolatry, and the difference is often  only a matter of perception.

A footnote: To anyone who doesn’t already know, Jews, Christians, and Moslems all worship the SAME God–the God of Abraham. A fact that would make the conflict among them laughable if not for its deadly consequences.

My own definition of idolatry is more–dare I say it–liberal in that I view any form of worship that puts the messenger before the message as idolatry. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with reverence for the messenger, unless in the process the message gets lost or marginalized.

And there is nothing “wrong” per se with religious worship. In Hinduism–the world’s oldest living religion–there are four paths to union with Brahaman (Universal Soul). These are each referred to as a form of yoga (interesting coincidence, the etymological meaning of the word yoga and religion are virtually identical). These are:

Bhakti Yoga–the path of love, devotion, and worship,

Karma Yoga–the path of right action and good works,

Raja Yoga–the path of meditation, and

Jñana Yoga–the path of wisdom.

Hinduism does not see any one of these paths as better than any of the others. They are simply ways toward the same end. Different paths are suited to different people and one may choose any as their primary path. Also, this does not mean that a particular path is chosen to the exclusion of others. I believe anyone with a genuine spiritual inclination will engage in aspects of all these at various times.

It is not surprising that most Hindus–indeed most people of ALL religious faiths–choose Bhakti–the path of love, devotion, and worship–as their primary path along with a little or a lot of Karma–good works–thrown in as well. These paths are the least difficult for the everyday person who has to manage daily responsibilities such as work, family, etc. You go about your business with love in your heart, devotion to your faith, and do such good works toward your fellow man as you are able. Nothing wrong with that. In fact the world would be a much better place if more people did this.

Others (such as yours truly) are more attracted to the paths of meditation and/or wisdom. Usually, because of the amount of time these paths require, they are more accessible to people with both the time as well as inclination to devote to them–clergy, religious scholars, monks, spiritual gadflies with access to a computer and internet connection, etc.