DEE WILSON CONSULTING

This is part one of the third installment in our series Dimensions of the Spirit

 

In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) Emile Durkheim offered a concise and cogent definition of religion:” A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things … that is to say things set apart and forbidden,” followed by “beliefs and practices which unite into one moral community called a Church all those who adhere to them.” However, some commentators have pointed out that any type of religious practices and doctrines resembling a Church is a relatively late social development. In “Ritual Sacrifice Among Early Humans,” (2024) I argued that the practice of ritual sacrifice probably predates beliefs in gods and imaginative stories regarding gods, spirits and cosmic creation; but acknowledged that ritual practices and beliefs may have developed in tandem, rather than one preceding the other. The same can be said of experience of the sacred in relation to religious or spiritual beliefs, i.e., experience, imagination, belief and ritual practice likely developed interactively, rather than one causing the others.  This article is a discussion of the relationships between and among imagination, belief, ritual practices and experience in response to the sacred, both among early humans and as more fully developed religious systems became common around the world.   

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Durkheim’s views regarding the sacred    

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According to Durkheim, Aboriginal beliefs regarding the sacred were embodied in totemism: “For the Australians, things themselves, everything which is in the universe, is part of a tribe.” Furthermore, Durkheim asserted, “we may rest assured that this way of conceiving the world is independent of all ethnic and geographic particularities” (p. 146). Durkheim believed that early religious ideas were projections of the power of society onto the cosmos: “god is nothing else than society apotheosized.” Yet, for Durkheim the highly developed classification systems of totemism were combined with a “belief in a diffused impersonal force,” which “always remains actual, living and the same” (p. 189). Durkheim refers to this force as a “quasi-divine entity” whose energy is “diffused through all sorts of heterogenous things” (p. 189).  He reminds readers that many ancient peoples were cognizant of an impersonal force referred to by various names, such as mana, wakan or orenda. Durkheim quotes an authority on Native American spiritual beliefs: “No word … can explain the meaning of this word among the Dakota,” which embraces all mystery, all secret power, all divinity.” And: “no enumeration (of natural objects or phenomena) could exhaust this infinitely complex idea. It is not a definite or definable power … it is Power in an absolute sense.”  It would be difficult to improve on this description of the sacred in the experience of early humans, an experience and an idea which “repels all personification” (p. 195). 

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In this worldview, “there is nothing in the world which does not have its quota of orenda; but the quantities vary. There are some men or things which are favored” (p. 193). Mana, wakan, orenda can be acquired and used “in all ways for good or evil” (p. 194). This impersonal force is not a supreme being: “the mana is located nowhere and it is everywhere” (p. 194).  The totem, Durkheim asserts, “is the means by which an individual is put into relations with this source of energy, if the totem has any powers, it is because it incarnates the wakan” (p. 195). 

In Durkheim’s theory of early religious practices among Australian Aboriginals and other tribal peoples around the world, experience of the sacred is associated with totemic classification systems through which all natural phenomena are assigned group membership in order to tap the power of an impersonal mysterious quasi- divine source, which is at once everywhere and nowhere, and which can serve both good and bad ends. In the early attempts of humans to understand and tap the sacred power, the sacred was not personified. It could only be safely approached through ritual sacrifice.

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In his book, Religious Experience (1985), Wayne Proudfoot refers derisively to the “notorious obscurity” (p. 192) of the term, “sacred.”  Durkheim does not offer an explicit definition of the sacred because his sources insist that “It is not a definite or definable power… it is Power in an absolute sense.”  Nevertheless, Durkheim’s discussion provides a valuable starting point in understanding both the experience of and beliefs about the sacred: it is ancient, a precursor of religion in its current forms,  utilized totemic classification systems to project the power of society on to the cosmos, predates the idea of gods or God, is a source of personal power, is strictly distinguished from the profane, can only be safely approached through sacrifice and transcends the categories of good and evil. In addition, the sacred was given concrete meaning through symbolic representations that were considered as real (or more real) as the thing symbolized.  The goal of sacrificial practices was to strengthen the bond between human and the sacred through “an act of alimentary communion” (p. 337), which was also an effort to propriate a quasi-divine force and (later) the gods or God on whom life was believed to depend. 

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Experience of the sacred, beliefs and stories about the sacred (and there were many), along with ritual practices developed to bring humans into direct contact with the sacred, were enmeshed. There is no sound basis for insisting that, among early humans, experience of the sacred came before beliefs about the sacred, or vice versa as Proudfoot hypothesizes regarding spontaneous religious experiences that occur independent of a religious tradition: “it seems more likely that the supposedly natural and spontaneous experiences are derived from beliefs and practices in much the same way that an experience is produced in the more disciplined traditions of meditative practice” (p. 224). It seems more likely to Proudfoot that beliefs and practices come before experiences of the sacred because this is his preferred explanation of religious experience. My judgment is that both experiences of the sacred and beliefs regarding the meaning of these experiences may have occurred subsequent to the widespread development of ritual sacrifice, i.e., actions preceded experiences and beliefs. However, as much as I prefer this explanation, it is as speculative as Proudfoot’s account of religious beliefs determining personal accounts of spontaneous unsought religious experiences. 

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Mircea Eliade: The Sacred and the Profane

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Mircea Eliade’s book, The Sacred and the Profane (1957) continues to be one of the most important discussions of religious experience ever written. For Eliade, religious experience begins with a polarity: “The first possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the profane, … something wholly different from the profane” (pp. 10-11). In Eliade’s view, the sacred manifests itself to humans; it is an hierophany, i.e., “something sacred shows itself to us” (p. 11). Natural objects such as stones or trees can be experienced as sacred, i.e., the word sacred can be used as an adjective applied to natural objects whose “immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality” (p. 12). Natural objects viewed as sacred do not behave weirdly, or unnaturally, rather they are the means by which all nature is revealed as a “cosmic sacrality” (p. 12). How so?

Eliade offers a lengthy discussion of widespread ideas about the sacred in which a sacred tree stands at the center of the cosmos, i.e., trees became symbols of the sacred, parts of nature that were given a central role in imaginative stories regarding cosmic creation. However, this is cart before the horse. Arguably, the cosmic tree became an important symbol because in ancient societies the experience of the sacred was charged by powerful feelings. The sacrality of natural phenomena was conferred by feeling states that manifested only when these phenomena were separated from the normal course of profane life. In this account (which I favor), the profane world of every day experience acts like kryptonite on experience of the sacred which is first and foremost a highly charged feeling of ultimate absolute value associated with self- transcendence.   Such feeling states are experienced as supernatural manifestations possibly because the potential for such states is usually so effectively walled off by the instrumental, self-oriented awareness of the profane world. The sacred often manifests in experience as an “irruption,” (to use Eliade’s word) possibly because it is typically suppressed.

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According to Eliade, “the sacred is pre-eminently the real, at once power, efficacity, the source of life and fecundity” (p.28); “the sacred reveals absolute reality” (p. 30). Myths and symbols of the sacred embody the idea that “A universe comes to birth from its center; it spreads out from a central point …” (p.44). Eliade asserts that “the religious man sought to live as near as possible to the Center of the World,” by reproducing the cosmic center on “smaller and smaller scales” (p. 45) in the layout of villages and eventually in the creation of temples or churches.  Eliade explains that among North American and North Asian Arctic tribes “we find a central post that is assimilated to the axis mundi, i.e. to the cosmic pillar or world tree which … connect earth with heaven… cosmic symbolism is found in the very structure of the habitation” (p. 53). 

Eliade articulates a highly developed and interconnected set of ideas regarding the sacred that predated religious doctrines and reflected early thinking regarding the sacred around the world. One key belief was that “where the sacred manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence.” What stands out in Eliade’s discussion is his insistence that experience of the sacred among early human groups was an experience of “the real.” He writes: “… religious man can live only in a sacred world, because it is only in such a world that he participates in being, that he has a real existence” (p. 64) It is worth considering why the profane world, however lacking, would have been viewed as “unreal” in comparison with the sacred?  What experience, or experiences, were the foundation of this widespread world view among early humans?   

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Mircea Eliade on Shamanism

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One major dimension of the sacred is the search for spiritual powers as reflected in shamanism, a constellation of ancient spiritual practices found in tribal societies around the world. Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951) takes most of its examples of shamanism from Central Asia and Siberia, but includes discussion of similar traditions and practices in Australia and the Americas.

Eliade regards shamanism as a type of mysticism “in which the ecstatic experience is considered the religious experience par excellence.” In some ancient societies, shamans and priests responsible for sacrificial rites co-existed, but “the shaman and he alone, is the great master of ecstasy.”  (p. 4) However, Eliade asserts, “any ecstatic cannot be considered a shaman; the shaman specializes in a trance during which his soul is believed to leave his body and ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld.” (p. 5)   

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Eliade asserts that “The religions of Central and North Asia extend beyond shamanism in every direction, just as any religion extends beyond the mystical experience of its privileged adherents. Shamans are of the “elect” and as such they have access to a region of the sacred inaccessible to other members of the community.” (p. 7) Nevertheless, according to Eliade, both shamans and other members of their communities sought “magico-religious” powers through a wide range of sacred rites and experiences. However, they did so with trepidation:  “… as in all human beings the desire to enter into contact with the sacred is counteracted by the fear of being obliged to renounce the simple human condition and become a more or less pliant instrument for some manifestation of the sacred (gods, spirits, ancestors, etc.).” (p. 23)

Shamanic potential in Central Asia and Siberia was believed by many tribes to be associated with mental disturbance in early life and to be a calling that was inherited or signaled by spontaneous ecstatic experiences. Eliade asserts: “morbid phenomena frequently accompany both spontaneous manifestation and hereditary transmission.” (p. 21) A young person “called” by the spirit world could not refuse his destiny; to do so was to invite premature death.

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Aspirants to shamanic status underwent harrowing initiations which often involved long periods of isolation, stories of psychic or physical dismemberment and resurrection, contact with spirits and souls of the dead, descent to the underworld and other types of initiatory tortures such as prolonged denial of food and water or contemplating in detail one’s skeleton.  

Aspirants to shamanic initiation were expected to seek specific powers which they could clearly identify, e.g., powers of healing, self-protection or protection of the tribe, clairvoyance, prophesy, communion with animal guardians and other spirit allies. These powers were difficult and dangerous to acquire and could be misused. For this reason, the selection, initiation and functions of shamans was regulated by social norms and by constant vigilance of tribal members. Shamans believed by tribal members to have violated social norms in the exercise of their powers could be killed to protect the tribe.   

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Shamans were believed to acquire their powers through contact with sources of sacred power: animal guardians, other spirits, souls of the dead, gods, various natural phenomena, “pains,” e.g. objects both natural and manmade infused with power. Eliade states: “A shaman is a man who has immediate concrete experience with gods and spirits; he sees them face to face, he talks with them, prays to them, implores them – but he does not control more than a limited number of them.” (p. 88)

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In his discussion of North American shamanism, Eliade asserts:” Sometimes shamanic power is derived directly from the Supreme Being or other divine entities.” (p. 103) “…  guardian or helping spirits are not the direct authors of this (the shaman’s) ecstatic experience. They are only the messengers of a divine being or the assistants in an experience that implies many other presences besides theirs.” (p. 107)

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Eliade believes it would be a mistake to view shamanistic experience as separated from the traditions and beliefs of the societies in which shamans lived and had an important social role. He states: “Certainly, “history” – the religious tradition of the tribe in question -- finally intervenes to subject the ecstatic experiences of certain privileged persons to its own canons.” (p. xix) Beliefs and traditions shaped the interpretation of shamans’ experience, which, in turn, strengthened their world view and confidence in their traditions.     

 

Eliade’s discussion of shamanism suggests several conclusions about the sacred: it is a dimension of human experience impossible to approach directly without danger of psychic dismemberment; it was not an endeavor for the well-adjusted. It is potentially a source of various powers, not the least of which is the power to heal oneself. Regarding the widespread idea among commentators that shamanism was a socially endorsed psychopathology, Eliade states: “There is always a cure, a control, an equilibrium brought about by the actual practice of shamanism.” (p.29) Experienced shamans were often described by Western scholars who met them as keenly intelligent, healthy and possessing boundless energy. Elide describes the expectations applied by the tribe to Yakut shamans: “the perfect shaman must be serious, possess tact, be able to convince his neighbors; above all he must not be presumptuous, proud, ill tempered. One must feel an inner force in him that does not offend yet is conscious of its power.” (p. 29) These are aspirations that could be reasonably applied to clergy of mainstream Christian denominations.  

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Shamanism was a determined effort to tap the power of the sacred through initiation rituals and practices that risked madness and death and that sought to bring aspirants into direct contact with the spirit world and with gods or God. The powers of great shamans were believed to confirm a world view, but from another perspective demonstrates the way the sacred manifests in multiple forms and cultural contexts. Eliad asserts: “But the sacred does not cease to manifest itself, and with each new manifestation it resumes its original tendency to reveal itself wholly.” (p. xix) I have the opposite view:  in every experiential manifestation and religious tradition the sacred manifests its power fully but never wholly.  The sacred is never contained or wholly revealed by doctrines or beliefs of any religious tradition.    

                                   

William James: The Varieties of Religious Experience

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There is no other book about the psychology of religion that has come close to having the influence of William James’ classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Philosophers and psychologists who disagree with James’ perspective regarding the primacy of religious experience must nevertheless address his arguments, and they sometimes acknowledge the greatness of the book often referred to as “The Varieties” or VRE.  Wayne Proudfoot, one of James most astute critics (see below), comments in his book, Religious Experience: “The Varieties has been accorded an honored place in the development of the psychology of religion, but its contributions to the philosophy of religion has not been sufficiently appreciated in recent years. … He is an astute observer. We have had occasion to see that accurate observation does not guarantee adequate theory, but James’s instinct for the heart of the matter is often correct even when we take issue with the theory he espouses.” (p. 157) 

Proudfoot asserts (correctly) that James believed that “The deeper sources of religion lie in feeling and not in the intellect,” and “he (James) views religious beliefs as secondary products that would never have emerged had it not been for the prior existence of religious feeling.” (p. 158) James asserts: “I do believe that feeling is the deeper source of religion, and that philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products, like translations of a text into another tongue.” (p. 431) James rejects the idea that beliefs take precedence, or somehow produce religious experience. He asserts: “We can make ourselves more faithful to a belief of which we have the rudiments, but we cannot create a belief out of whole cloth when our perception actively assures us of its opposite.” (p. 212) Proudfoot (and some other philosophers) disagree with James because they believe that one function of religious beliefs is to produce experiences that confirm them. However, James’ emphasis on the importance of religious feeling in understanding the power of religious beliefs to command action suggests a hypothesis regarding experience of the sacred:  it is a way of valuing the cosmos and everything in it that transcends self-interest and aspires to release from self.   Imaginative stories and ideas regarding the sacred develop through a relationship to feeling states detached from self-interest in which the cosmos and/or some parts of nature and society have an absolute value or are viewed in a paradisal light.  Ideas and stories, in turn, shape the experience of the sacred in important ways. Experiences shape beliefs; beliefs influence experiences and how they are described and explained in first person accounts.

In addition, beliefs were given an imaginative form in stories that were often taken seriously even when philosophers did not believe in their literal truth.  There was likely no first cause to the interconnected system of beliefs, stories and experiences unless it was ritual sacrificial acts required by humans’ radically altered relationship to animals, as Roberto Calasso discusses in The Celestial Hunter (2016) and Ardor (2010).

James maintained that religious feeling, including and combined with phenomena such as “intuitions, hypotheses, fancies, superstitions, persuasions, convictions, and in general all our non-rational operations,” come from a “subliminal region”, which is “obviously the larger part of each of us …” (p. 483) James asserts: “In persons deep in the religious life … the door to this region seems unusually open” (p.484)

James began his concluding chapter: “Summing up in the broadest possible way” the characteristics and beliefs of all religions with the following comments:

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1. “That the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance; “

2. “That union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end.” (p. 485)
    

The “spiritual universe” is an unseen powerful presence in the lives of religiously inspired persons, according to James.  From his perspective, religious experience may be based on a feeling of union with this “higher universe”, or it is often the feeling of struggling to bring oneself into the right relation with a higher Power. From this perspective, religious feeling derives its power from a sense of harmony, or even union, with a sacred cosmos which is experienced (feeling plus belief) as having absolute value. But how does the capacity for religious feelings come to be associated with a belief in the sanctity of the cosmos? 

       

Antonio Damasio: Feeling and Flourishing 

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Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist and philosopher. His book, The Strange Order of Things (2018) provides an important and provocative theory of the biological evolution of mind. Damasio states:

         “Homeostasis refers to the fundamental set of operations at the core of life from … its beginning in early biochemistry to the present. Homeostasis is the powerful, unthought, unspoken imperative whose discharge implies, for very living organism, small or large, nothing less than enduring and prevailing.” (p.25)

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According to Damasio, homeostasis is more than regulating internal chemistry to   ensure survival. Rather, “it ensures that life is regulated within a range that is not just compatible with survival, but also conducive to flourishing.” Homeostasis precedes the creation of genes. Damasio asserts: “Homeostasis has been the    basis for the value behind natural selection, which in turn favors the genes … The development of the genetic apparatus is not conceivable without homeostasis.” (p.26) Damasio’s argument that metabolism came before genes is provocative but not radical. This view “has been persuasively argued by Freeman Dyson and is favored by a number of chemists, physicists and biologists, among them J.S.       Haldane, Stuart Kauffman…” and others (p.39). However, … Marshall in The Genesis Quest (2020) maintains that the best recent thinking regarding the origins of life has moved past this “either metabolism or genes” debate to include both    found in vesicles on land with wet/ dry cycles.  

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What is radical is Damasio’s view that homeostasis used genes in its “endeavor toward optimization of life.” That is: “genetic material would have assisted the    homeostatic imperative (toward ‘flourishing’) by being responsible for the generation of progeny.” Homeostasis “embodies the biological value on the basis of which natural selection operates.” (p. 43) In other words, metabolism led to   early life forms that achieved optimal states (i.e., flourishing) which these life    forms, including single cells, sought to sustain by somehow creating genes that would ensure progeny.  In Damasio’s account, “flourishing” sounds much like a condition of well-being.  

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Damasio views feelings as “the deputies of homeostasis.” He states, “In standard circumstances, feelings tell the mind, without any word being spoken of the good or bad direction of the life process.” (p. 26) Damasio asserts that feelings always have a positive or negative valence, e.g., pain or pleasure or through other oppositions such as well-being or emotional distress. Damasio maintains that all sensory experiences in organisms with a central nervous system have an affective   component. According to this perspective (with which I agree), there is no value neutral sensory experience in animals or humans, a feature of sensory   experience that creates the potential for beauty, a concrete indicator of flourishing. 

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In the theory I endorse, experience of the sacred among early humans was an unusual type of flourishing, i.e., an experience of unity or harmony with the cosmos as a whole, and/ or the divine being or beings who created the cosmos. This theory includes the following elements:

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• Experience of the sacred has a genetic basis, which does not mean that any specific idea or system of ideas regarding the sacred are true.

• Flourishing is the homeostatic value accorded to experiences when they embody well-being; experience of the sacred commanded the attention of early humans because the feeling states that were part of the experience far exceeded any other human experiences in intensity and power. The sacred was “Power” in an absolute sense, and led to a search for a wide range of spiritual powers, including healing powers and the power to commune with animals.  

• The sacred was “nowhere and everywhere” because powerful feeling states were projected on both the natural world and social world.

• Durkheim’s contention that the power of society was the underlying cause of sacred experience reflects the importance of tribal unity for human survival. Sacred flourishing was most powerfully experienced in ritual practices that intensified the experience of a tribal community which was far more important than the life of individual tribal members. Nevertheless, all of nature came to be incorporated in ideas of the sacred.    

• Sacred flourishing was multidimensional, i.e., there was a wide range of sacred experiences and a multitude of ideas and stories developed to explain their origin and meaning and to guide humans’ interaction with the sacred. 

• Ritual practices developed to strengthen human contact with the sacred quickly came to embody the idea articulated by Robertson Smith: “Sacrifice was not founded to create a bond of artificial kinship between a man and his gods, but to maintain and renew the natural kinship which primitively united them” (p. 338 in Durkheim). This view was compelling because of the connection of sacred experience with feeling states that embodied flourishing taken to its most extreme degree. 

 

There was one way that flourishing in sacred experience was different than what Damasio refers to in his discussion of homeostatic flourishing: experience of the sacred was not a reflection of the quality of regulation of internal bodily states or of an individual organism’s relationship to the surrounding physical environment. Rather, experience of the sacred brought humans into affective and imaginative relationship with the cosmos in a way that might not have served the survival of individuals. This was a potentially a dangerous experience which had to be approached carefully and even with trepidation.  If, indeed, experience of the sacred has a genetic basis, its genetic instructions (so to speak) do not follow the rules of Darwinian evolution applied to selfish genes.  

 

Paradisal experience and the sacred

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In Ardor (2010), Roberto Calasso’s extraordinary book on Vedic beliefs and sacrificial practices, Calasso comments: “every sacrifice is a boat sailing heavenward,” (p. 8). Calasso maintained that among the Vedas, the use of soma, probably a psychedelic drug, led to a state of awareness that “became the pivot around which turned thousands and thousands of meticulously codified acts.” (p.14). For the Vedas, nothing else in life compared to this state of awareness; “they wanted only to live in certain states of awareness” (p.14). Paradisal experience has been a dimension of sacred experience around the world for thousands of years and is enmeshed with the idea that some parts of nature and society, or the cosmos as a whole, have absolute value.

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Eliade asserts: “The religious idea of absolute reality, which finds symbolic expression in so many other images, is also expressed by the figure of a miraculous fruit conferring immortality, omniscience and limitless power, a fruit that can change men into gods. The image of the tree was not chosen only to symbolize the cosmos, but also to express life, youth, immortality, wisdom. … the tree came to express everything that religious man regards as preeminently real and sacred. … This is why myths of the quest for youth or immortality give prominent place to a tree with golden fruit or miraculous leaves, a tree growing “in the distant land” … and guarded by monsters …. He who would gather its fruits must confront and slay the guardian monster” (p. 149) 

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The Garden of Eden story, possibly the deepest and most profound myth in Western religions, puts two trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, in an idyllic garden. Adam and Eve are warned not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, but the wily serpent temps Eve to taste the forbidden fruit: “For God knows that when you taste of it your eyes will be open, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5) The serpent’s words are chosen carefully. The serpent does not promise that Adam and Eve   will have Godlike power or be immortal; rather, they will “know good and evil,”, i.e. they will be creative agents with moral choices able to shape their world (and themselves). However, one of the costs was expulsion from paradise.

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Everything that is deep and mysterious about this story is implicit; contrary to Christian theology it is only superficially a story about the punishment for disobedience of God’s commands. The key to understanding the story is how God discovers the disobedience of Adam’s shame at his nakedness. God realizes that Adam is self-aware for the first time. In the Genesis story, self-awareness, creative agency, moral choice, and death are associated. This way of being in the world violates the laws of paradise.  In Myths to Live By, Joseph Cambell comments: “Taken as not referring to any geographical scene, but to a landscape of the soul, that Garden of Eden would have to be within us. Yet our conscious minds are unable to enter it and enjoy there the taste of eternal life, since we have already tasted of the knowledge of good and evil” … though since the enclosed garden is within us, must already be ours, even though unknown to our conscious personalities” (p.27).

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Psychedelics and Paradisal Experience

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Until recent decades, it was possible for persons who doubted that ancient myths about paradise, like other religious stories, had any validity and who employed the term “mystical” in a pejorative way, to disregard first person accounts of paradisal experience.  Ideas of heaven and hell were widely viewed as religious nonsense. The development and widespread use of psychedelic drugs has made it possible for persons with a wide range of religious beliefs, or no beliefs, to have paradisal experiences, not a single experience but rather a wide range of experiences affected by three main factors: 1) the feelings, beliefs, mental/ emotional capacities of the person taking the drug; 2) the dosage of the drug and, 3) the setting in which the experience occurs.

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Before I took LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote in my mid to late 20s I had heard from peers and writers on the subject that the expectations of the person taking the drug was likely to shape the experience, and I was used to hearing psychedelics described as hallucinogens. Nevertheless, I did not have the slightest idea what lay in store for me after ingesting LSD for the first time. My main emotion was fear of losing control of my mind.

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What actually occurred was possibly the biggest surprise of my life and something I could never have anticipated if I had read a dozen books on psychedelics. The first surprise was that I did not have hallucinations, and have never had hallucinations while taking other psychedelic drugs. Psychedelics are mind enhancing; my mind is not inclined in a visionary direction. I was inundated by waves of bliss which allowed me to enter deeply into whatever I perceived, especially music, so that the boundary between whatever I perceived and myself were effaced, porous, but not eliminated. I did not lose self-awareness and my determination to understand in language what was happening to me was intensified rather than erased. I did not allow myself to be drowned in the ocean of bliss though I could imagine that occurring. I was powerfully sensitized to persons I came in contact with and to their every statement or gesture. I remained in this state for several hours.

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The idea that the paradisal awareness I experienced could be minimized or dismissed as a strange effect of drug induced changes in brain chemistry seemed ridiculous to me at the time. Every human experience depends on brain chemistry. The appeal to changes in brain chemistry can be applied to every mystical experience that occurs during meditation, protracted isolation, fasting, spinning in circles, etc.  It is a non-explanation, (i.e., a truism) embraced by persons who reject the idea that these experiences have any significance for understanding the world on other grounds.

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One of the best and most famous descriptions of psychedelic experience is Aldous Huxley’s, Doors of Perception (1954). Huxley discusses his experience after he ingested four-tenths of a gram of mescaline: “The other world to which mescaline admitted me was not a world of visions … The great change was in the world of objective fact.   Huxley entered a world “where everything shone with the Inner Light, and was infinite in its significance. … The legs … of that chair how miraculous their tubularity, how supernatural their polished smoothness. I spent several minutes … not merely gazing at those bamboo legs, but actually being them, or rather being myself in them.”

One of the most surprising features of paradisal experience for Huxley (and me) was its interiority; i.e., becoming a part of the objects of perception and experiencing them in great detail, far more so than in ordinary life. The world of sense perception was more fully revealed, i.e., “transfigured,” to use Huxley’s description.

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In The Doors of Perception, Huxley proposes that under ordinary circumstances, the human mind acts like a reducing valve: “The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive and remember at any moment… “(pp. 22-23). According to Huxley, psychedelic drugs disable the reducing valve function of the mind in relation to sense perception. However, he does not adequately explain why more sensory information is better than less. Per the discussion of flourishing above, it is likely that the reducing valve of the mind has the same effect on feeling as on sense perception, i.e., feeling (positive or negative) is likely to “flood the zone” of conscious awareness and in doing so, transfigures sense perception.

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Huxley does not discuss the importance of dosage in psychedelic experience. Huxley took .4 of a gram of mescaline, a large enough dosage to reveal the seemingly infinite detail of objects, but not large enough to eliminate his ability to focus his awareness on specific objects, flowers, art, etc.   A larger dosage may have eliminated his ability to focus his awareness and to reflect on his experience with language as it was occurring. 

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The Noetic Quality of Mind at Large

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Huxley’s experience of a transfigured sensory world was thoroughly infused with metaphysical speculation. Huxley speculates that “ … each one of us is potentially Mind at Large … (which) has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us stay alive …” (p. 23)   

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One of the most surprising features of my psychedelic experiences was perceiving the world from the perspective of Mind at Large, but without losing self-awareness.   I used different language than Huxley, i.e., I speculated that I was perceiving from the perspective of the “All -One,” released from self-concern but not from self-awareness. Huxley states: “To this new-born Not-self, the behavior, the appearance, the very thought of the self it had momentarily ceased to be, and of other selves, seemed … enormously irrelevant … how I longed to be left alone with Eternity in a flower, Infinity in four leg chairs and the Absolute in folds of a pair of flannel trousers!” (pp. 35-36)

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Psychedelic experiences, mystical experiences and many religious experiences can be revelatory just as any new powerful experience, i.e. falling in love for the first time, may be a revelation.  However, it is not the intensity of some psychedelic experiences and mystical experiences that occur in other ways that leads to a new understanding of the world. It is seeing the world in a completely new way that changes ideas and beliefs. 

The following experience, unaided by drugs or any unusual events, happened to me when I was 17: I was standing on a baseball field during batting practice with the high school team I played for when suddenly for a few minutes I could see in the light of eternity. I have never understood how “seeing in the light of eternity” was made evident to me. There was no change in sense perception, no sudden emotion, no voices or visions, no encounter with spiritual beings, yet I had a powerful awareness of the specific moment being a part of eternity. I had no idea what to make of this experience which I did not discuss with anyone. I was an agnostic at the time. I did not become religious or change my attitude toward religion in any way. The experience left me refreshed, less depressed by far. My only conclusion from the experience is that “there is plenty of time.”

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Many years later I encountered a text from The Bhagavad Gita: “Because we all have been for all time: I, and thou, and those kings of men. And we shall all be for all time, we all for ever and ever.” (Chapter 2, verse 12) At the time, I had never heard of The Bhagavad Gita, much less studied it or adopted its doctrine, nor was Hindu thought or practice a part of the culture in Texas where I grew up.  It is not true that all mystical or religious experience occurs within a religious or spiritual tradition, though this is often the case as one might expect.  Experience of the sacred is full of surprises, which is also true of other types of human experience. Experience of the sacred does not always follow from beliefs, though beliefs along with spiritual practices, can and do influence mystical or other religious experiences and their interpretation.

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At higher doses, psychedelic experience can shatter ego-based subjectivity, i.e.  the subject-object structure of normal sense perception or self-reflection. During the last time I ingested a powerful psychedelic drug more almost fifty years the following occurred:

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I, along with my wife and friends, was sitting by a beaver dam in the Rocky Mountains. I found myself increasingly unable to assimilate and think coherently about the world around me. I became alarmed that I was losing self-awareness and was being drawn into the world around me, not a single object (or a few objects in that world) but the external world as a whole in all of its infinite variety. At that moment, my awareness was reversed, as if an envelope had been turned inside out, and I was drawn into the buzzing current of my brain entirely and completely. I have no words for that experience and am not even sure if it makes sense to describe what occurred as an experience. For a few minutes, I was lost in the electric current which underlies brain function. When my self-awareness returned, the external word was present in wondrous detail, ‘transfigured’ to use Huxley’s word.      

             

Does mysticism involve another form of sense perception?

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The world revealed in mystical experiences is so unusual and extraordinarily illuminating that some mystics and scholars with a positive view of mysticism (there are a few) sometimes assert that mystics have a sense that most other humans lack. This view has been strongly opposed by scholars (see Katz, Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, 1978) who view the knowledge claims of mystics as nonsense. After all, what would that sense be? What can it mean to refer to a ‘sense of the sacred’ in discussions of either mysticism or other religious experiences?

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A more illuminating comparison is with the experience of beauty, or the inability to perceive certain types of beauty. For many people, the beauty of music, or of the visual arts, is of tremendous importance. But what about persons who can hear music or view visual art without the experience of its beauty? To these persons, music is just noise; it lacks aesthetic value. The world (or some parts of the world) is beautiful only because sense perception is combined with positive feeling. The perception of beauty does not depend on a special sense, but rather on the feeling of aesthetic value attached to creating a harmonious unity out of fragmented elements. The experience of beauty is value added by the human mind to experiences perceived as either desirable or propitious to human flourishing. It is not an added element of the world requiring a special sense.

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The same is true of sacred experience. It is the ordinary world of sense perception and of human relationships transformed by the experience of their absolute ultimate value, a potential that has the same genetic foundation as the sense of beauty. In addition, the sacred has been viewed as a source of powers derived from contact with spirits or divine beings or Being, powers difficult and dangerous to acquire.   Metaphysical systems and religious doctrines are cultural ways of understanding these potentials. Even when these philosophies and doctrines are dismissed and ridiculed, the potential for sacred experience remains. Sacred “irruptions” are as certain to occur in human societies as dormant volcanoes with an active core are sure to eventually explode.

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Part Two will discuss skeptical perspectives and attempt to bring the dimensions of the sacred discussed in Part One into a coherent whole.       

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