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Psychedelic Spirituality (2nd Ed.)
Tarl Warwick
http://amzn.com/1722910011
July 12, 2018
Review by Michael Hoffman, July 17, 2018
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R6F5D8LS1UBF7/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1722910011
Enjoyable modern and archaic critical commentary
This book by Styx (Tarl Warwick) gives balanced coverage of modern anti-Prohibitionist thought and ancient (and pre-20th Century) spiritual usage of psychedelics.
The paper quality and printing is good. There’s no bibliography, citations, or index.
Styx’ modern-era anti-Prohibitionist discussion is not groundbreaking, but is readable.
Styx asserts the equivalence of meditation and psychedelics, but I infamously assert that “Meditation is bunk”; nondrug meditation steals credit from psychedelics, which are by far the actual source of religious enlightenment throughout the history of religions.
Styx tends to agree with my Maximal Entheogen theory of religion: Psychedelics are the best, and completely unproblematic, and thus the only real explanation of religious mythology.
Below, I summarize and condense some assertions in the book.
Through using psychotropics, man’s consciousness developed. Psychedelics are not necessarily degenerate force that debases Western Civilization, but rather, helped build up Western Civilization. Page 123: “… the importance mind-altering substances in general, and psychedelic ones specifically, have played in human development.”
Styx criticizes the theory that religious mythology comes from dreaming (page 54), because that’s explaining the not-understood by the not-understood. I similarly reject the Jung/Campbell theory that religious mythology describes dreaming; I assert that religious mythology actually describes psychedelic experiencing of non-control and timeless no-free-will.
Does the book discuss psychedelics as a means of experiencing frozen-time no-free-will Cybernetic-Eternalism, per Minkowski’s iron block universe and Parmenides’ denial of change or meta-change?
Page 79-80: “In ego death, all sense of volition is removed. The mind then has less than full capability to control itself. Such a state is variously frightening and liberating: a state of psychic dissolution, producing detached volition and then non-volition.”
Page 93: “Amanita and salvia temporarily plunges oneself back into this tribal, primitive state, in which volition partially dissolves.”
Psychedelics don’t make you dumb, having a decline in mental faculties — this couldn’t be further from the truth. Some of the greater minds of history worked with such things, leading from chemistry and biology to interest in spirituality. Page 98.
Science is not opposed to spirituality; they occur together. Page 82: Psychedelics tune into another, truer plane of reality, a different “vibration” mode. Page 84: “The spiritual is science as yet not quite understood.”
“We now know that psilocybin forms complex but short-lasting connections in the brain that are not normally present at all, allowing the synthesis of ideas that would normally be separate — thus temporarily turning the user into a sort of savant.” (page 86)
That’s similar to the underlying cognitive mechanism as described in the Egodeath theory of religion as “Metaphorical Psychedelic Eternalism”, in which psycholytics cause “loose cognitive association binding”, which causes an experiential shift and thus a mental world-model transformation from the default-mode Possibilism to the Eternalism model of time and personal control power, including meaning-shifting to recognize religious mythology as metaphorical description of this experiential world-model shift.
Does Styx advocate the McKenna fallacy that Christianity eliminated, omitted, and suppressed psychedelics? I didn’t find much discussion of the psychedelic Christian Eucharist tradition.
Page 98: “With psychedelics, many of my insights into the spiritual world that I would otherwise possibly have overlooked became possible. The belief that such things are “bad” or “wrong” are based on religious systems which themselves were intertwined with the ancient usage of such substances; from the tree of life depicted as an amanita on through to relative modernity before the era of prohibition.”
Page 142 mentions the Plaincourault amanita-tree fresco, covered in my article “Wasson and Allegro on the Tree of Knowledge as Amanita”.
Regarding manna as mushrooms, Styx reads “wandering in the desert” literally, rather than as “wandering 40 years in cow pastures” as described in some recent books.
Styx, like most people, even like John Allegro, fails to consider the key question, “To what extent were psychedelics used throughout Christian history?” We are constitutionally incapable of thinking of that question; as an occult psychedelicist and religion commentator, Styx ought to be better and consider that question, which to me has always been the most glaring, obvious question. Perhaps the two books closest to raising that most-key question:
Strange Fruit: Alchemy, Religion and Magical Foods: A Speculative History
Clark Heinrich
1995
Amanita throughout Western religious history.
The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity
Jerry Brown & Julie Brown
2016
Discusses Wasson, Allegro, and the Plaincourault fresco; and mushrooms in cathedrals’ stained windows and illuminated manuscripts.
Styx reminds me of Christian Ratsch, providing broad coverage of the wide range of psychotropics, including a measured contrast between psychedelic psychotropics vs. deliriants, through an occult or spiritual (though superficial and limited) perspective: a broad plant coverage, but shallow and limited regarding religious altered-state phenomenology. Benny Shanon provides the missing, needed “cognitive phenomenology” perspective on entheogens or psychedelics (I’d say ‘psycholytics’; mind-loosening), where I’d especially look for experiential cognitive phenomenology of frozen-time non-control.
Styx’ book is more concerned to fully critique drug Prohibition, from the perspective of cultural history, than to enumerate the experiential cognitive phenomenology of psychedelics.
An interesting, creative chapter compares various attitudes toward psychotropics. I disagree with Styx’ conventional, false dichotomy between “stoner vs. psychonaut”, page 118. Styx puts forth a too-static model of motivations; he doesn’t correctly describe the sequential relationship between “recreational stoner per Hedonism” and “serious psychonaut per Epicurianism”.
I hold that the clearest late-modern era expression of peak religious experiencing is in Acid-Inspired Rock lyrics; it is precisely the stoner lyricists who most vividly report the psychedelic experiential shift from Possibilism to Eternalism, which is the spiritual regeneration described by traditional religious mythology, including Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian mythemes. For example, Iron Maiden: “I’ll take you to the other side, to see the truth: the path for you is decided.”
Instead, combine Styx’ two categories (recreational stoner vs. spiritual psychonaut) in a crossover: the stoner feels desire — we can label that as “recreational” — to enter the psychedelic state, and then the recreational stoner sees the snake-shaped worldline of pre-set thoughts in the Eternalism experiential mode, discovering and perceiving, experientially, the Minkowski frozen timeless spacetime block, also per Parmenides in Greek antiquity.
Against Styx, I assert that it is a myth that stoners lack spiritual wisdom. The most authentically and traditionally enlightened people in the late-modern era come from stonerism, not from Pop Sike Newage “psychonaut” culture. Stoners write lyrics vividly describing their psychonautic experiencing within the intense psychedelic state, their experiencing of being a helpless doll or puppet controlled by Fatedness, experienced vividly in the Cybernetic-Eternalism state of consciousness. Newage Pop Sike psychonauts report more piecemeal, these fragments of the traditional full experience of frozen time and noncontrol.
Styx overlooks the “surprising discovery” aspect of exploring psychedelics: Styx writes, page 120: “A person can hardly expect to derive substantial wisdom from the usage of psychedelics in a spiritual sense unless the person already possessed, before using anything, the motivation to explore the spiritual effects.” The word ‘recreational’ mis-characterizes the youthful desire for psychedelics. I describe the attraction to psychedelics not as recreational, but as innate in the cognitive design or make-up of the mind: the mind innately desires to explore the psychedelic, loose-cognitive experiential mode, for psychological maturation and transformation.
Styx has a too-static view of distinct motivations (page 151): “Early man saw no spirituality in the substances; this came later as greater mental and organizational capacity developed. Until that point, mushrooms were seen as a way to alleviate boredom.” Change Styx’ wording “early man” to “stoners”, to produce a more accurate, dynamic depiction of the sequential relationship between the supposedly separate people, “stoners vs. psychonauts”; it’s more like “stoners develop into psychonauts”, whether in the archaic or late-modern era.
On Page 121, Styx fails to mention Samorini’s book describing the ancient use of animals to test psychoactives for toxicity: “To determine which species were edible, many toxic species would have been ingested as well, sometimes leading to the death of those testing them.” However, page 151 mentions “animals imbibing such substances”.
Animals and Psychedelics: The Natural World and the Instinct to Alter Consciousness
Giorgio Samorini
2000 (Italian), 2002 (English)
Styx advocates recognizing a greater connection between psychonaut and occultist in history (page 143). In this book and in Styx’ “True Enlightenment” video, Styx overemphasizes enlightenment as open-ended free thinking. Page 144: “Practicing the occult requires liberating the mind by dissolving the veil of bias and enculturation which normally suppresses free thought.”
On this topic of what enlightenment consists of, Styx’ video asserts that true enlightenment is the ability to think for oneself and determine your own course of action, without the need for other people to interfere in your thought process.
Styx rejects the idea that enlightenment is some particular special “secret knowledge”. Against Styx, I agree enlightenment is “special knowledge”; I identify and specify enlightenment as the Eternalism model of time and personal control; revelation is of a kind of non-control and no-free-will, inherently revealed as a mode of experiencing in the loose cognitive association state.
I agree with Styx that psychedelics loosen old thought-structures, but I’d put it slightly differently than Styx’s term “free thought”: the mind’s default, tight association binding is loosened, switching from one experiential mode to another which reveals a specific, innate, traditional religious alternative worldmodel of time and control.
I see Styx’ open-ended “free thinking” (loose cognition) as merely an intermediate means, that reveals a specific alternative constrained, innate (thus pre-structured) experience and new specific worldmodel, a temporary experiential state-shift producing a specific traditional (vs. innovative free thinking), permanently transformed, expanded worldmodel; this temporary means and permanent change of worldmodel is described by religious mythology — not arbitrary open-ended free thinking.
— Michael Hoffman, the theorist of religious mythology as Metaphorical Psychedelic Eternalism
The Egodeath theory 