Egodeath Yahoo Group – Digest 28: 2003-03-03

In a message dated 3/3/2003 8:21:39 AM Pacific Standard Time,
mhoffman@… writes:

> that knows that for *practical* reasons the mind must continue to make the
> false and illogical egoic assumptions, now known to be a practically
> required
> *convention*. Man cannot practically live by rationality alone.
>

When practical is seen as being false, it is from the mind that is not
allowed to rest within the motion of transition…..When true to thyself what
else is there…….

Norma


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Though Reformed theologians have some variety of nuanced positions, the
general spirit and mode of thinking is determinedly asymmetrical and
characterized by the following.


God controls everything, and everything is predestined. Nevertheless, the
following must be admitted, despite the mystery of apparent inconsistency to
our fallen minds.

If you are damned, it’s entirely your own fault, and not God’s fault at all
(though God controls everything). This is hard to understand, because sin is
darkness and confusion.
If you are saved, it’s entirely God’s doing, and not to your credit at all.
This is easy to understand, because goodness makes sense, like light and
clarity.


We all deserve to be damned as rebels against God – that’s God’s justice.
Some of us are saved by God – that’s God’s mercy.

Therefore God is just and blameless and merciful in causing some to be saved
while causing, or as they say “letting”, others be damned. Since *everyone*
deserves to be damned, and no one *deserves* by their own actions to be saved,
we must marvel at God’s generosity in saving anyone at all instead of causing
(or “letting”) the whole lot of us to be damned. This dizzying logic causes
seizure in tent revival meetings under the trees.


In some ways, these are clever riddles that can be solved by sophisticated
mystic reading. First of all, cast off literalist networks of interpretation
regarding what it means to be damned or saved, and solve it as a clever
riddle, finding the right alternative network of interpretation.

Is some ways, these are perverse devilish inconsistencies that serve to prop
up the freewill assumption even while denying that assumption. This suggests
that no-free-will may be a heresy in the orthodox view.

In some ways, these are consistent inconsistencies, like the following I
invented:

Sinners have free will. Saints don’t have free will.
Demons have free will. Angels don’t.

The Reformed theologians waffle to no end about whether we have free will, but
the point they are afraid to address is whether the idea of free will is even
logically possible at all, for any creature. Augustine seems to say that we
do have free will, but it’s broken and corrupt, preventing us from choosing
and accepting Christ’s offer of free salvation. Each theological has a slight
variation, but few of them deny the possibility of free will in principle.

Those few who flat-out deny freewill as a coherent possibility still insist on
blending the no-free-will principle with egoic moralism, producing a monstrous
confused system.

I actually hold that:
The ‘sinner’ is the mind who assumes that freewill is a coherent notion and
assumes that that mind has free will.
The ‘saint’ is the mind which assumes that freewill is an incoherent notion,
and assumes that that mind doesn’t have free will.

To be ‘saved’ is to deeply disown and reject the freewill assumption, though
doing so causes ego-death seizure and a sacrificial willing of the loss of
control. To will the sacrificial, transgressive rejection of egoic
self-control is to will as Christ did, “Not my will but your will be done.”
This amounts to an act of willing that is considered to be one’s own act that
is not considered as originating from oneself, but is injected into the mind
by the ground of being. It’s hard but not impossible to consistently discuss
this sacrificial, transcendent turning of the will against itself — the
important point is what the mind considers to be the *source* of the mind’s
will.

Reformed theology is centered on the topic of free will. It’s surprising that
there’s not more dialog between Reformed theologians and philosophers of free
will vs. determinism — two very different modes of approaching the issues.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

and moreover any particular instance of a mistaken thought is
predetermined anyway 🙂


=====

Jonathan Dunn
mailto:jon@…
http://ephemeral.info


__________________________________________________
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The language center resides within a very small portion of the brain, where
it receives imput, interprets, translates, and then directs all output,
dependent upon the development of this center early on.

The language center is not in any way, shape, or form, capable of emulating
every position of life through word symbols for what is without symbols,
what is without definition, cannot be formed by symbols and definitions.

It is the greatest query of transition for the thinker, which literally blows
the steam out of any mind, who believes it is a separate and superior
intelligence within a Self-sustained system, and thank goodness to the grace
of life for this.



Norma

There are degrees of genuineness in religion. The simple idea of low and high
religion can be usefully extended to contrasting low, medium, and high
religion. Literalist, orthodox Islam, Christianity, or Judaism are the
epitome of low religion. Quasi-official mystic Islam (Sufism), Christian
mysticism, Kabbalah, and mainstream American Buddhist meditation are
definitive of medium-level religion. The Buddhism that packs the magazine
stands is medium-level religion.

High religion is entheogenic religion and is essentially entheogenic even if a
small percentage of people have the rare ability and aptitude to cast away the
training wheels of entheogens and think themselves into an intense altered
state. More typically, meditation is a method of augmenting entheogens.
Medium-level religion is a pale shadow of high religion, and low religion an
even paler shadow.

Low religion is a pale shadow of high religion, and discarding the
supernaturalist literalism of low religion for a slight increase to medium
psychologized religion is only a slight correction of the pale shadow. Real,
definitive, original religion isn’t about supernatural or psychological
religion as in ordinary-state Jungian psychology; it’s about the specific
archetypal experiences of the intense altered state.

The worst problem and greatest enemy now of real religion isn’t
supernaturalism, it’s psychologized ordinary-state religion and mainstream
meditation practices. We must firmly reject identifying real, original
religion with Jungian archetypal psychologism and with meditation that isn’t
used as an augmentation for entheogen experiences.

There is a huge difference between treating non-augmented meditation as an
advanced alternative to the real, entheogenic religious trigger, and the
current dominant notion of treating non-augmented meditation as the real thing
while entheogens are held to be a nearly-as-good simulation or way of
augmenting meditation.

Entheogens must be firmly held as original and central, while meditation can
only be correctly conceived as a later, derivative, alternative variant of the
original, entheogenic trigger of the mystic altered state.

Today’s mainstream meditation magazines are wrong. They are good in
acknowledging or grudgingly admitting that entheogens were by far the main
factor in awakening the Baby Boomer generation to meditation and Buddhism, and
they are good when they occasionally mention as an aside, in a footnote, that
entheogens aren’t absent from pre-American Buddhism. What really sucks hard
about these dominant magazines is their distortion of priorities of emphasis.

They put meditation on a pedestal as original, core, real, essential religion,
often including archetypal symbolism applied to the mundane or slightly
altered state of consciousness, while denigrating entheogens and relegating
them to a controversial adjunct. When you put the cart before the horse, you
don’t understand the main thing about the cart and horse. Medium-level
religion is better than low-level religion, but it’s a threat to real religion
because it threatens to hide the existence of an even higher religion.

Just because medium-level religion is higher than low-level religion doesn’t
mean that medium-level religion is the high-level religion; it’s not.
Medium-level religion is just medium-level religion, even if some of its
elements can appear in high-level religion, such as the rarely effective
technique of meditation without entheogens, and psychological allegory per
Jung, Campbell, and the pre-1960s Alan Watts.

Most non-entheogenic meditation and most psychological allegorized religion
suffers from Boomeritis, a useful idea described by Ken Wilber — it claims to
be high religion, when it’s not, and it claims to be intense and effective and
transformative, when it’s not. It’s one degree of improvement claiming to be
full improvement, denying that there is yet another, higher baptism to be had.

This debate between the existence of two versus three levels of religion is
found clearly in the Christian tradition as a major debate in theology and
heresy. It’s a heresy to hold that there are two baptisms and three levels of
religious status: those who are not catechized and water-baptized are the
lowest, those who are superficially catechized and water-baptized are
medium-level Christians, and those who are also baptized by the fire of the
Holy Spirit, with ideally the sacrament of apolytrosis, are high-level
Christians.

Charismatics, Pentecostals, or per the book title “Gnostic Protestants”, hold
that there are two baptisms (lower and higher) and two levels of Christians,
forming three levels of religion — however, mainstream Charismatics appear to
be unaware of entheogens.

From the Christian orthodox point of view, there are two degrees of heresy:
claiming like the mainstream mystics that Christianity is essentially about
contemplation and psychological archetypes (medium-level religion), and worse,
claiming that Christianity is essentially about entheogenic intense mystic
experiencing, reflected by mystic metaphor. Look with dismay upon
medium-level religion that dominates the newsstand, with its deep fallacy of
labelling mere medium-level religion as high-level religion.

A sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit and genuine, authentic high-level
religion is an entheogenic plant — any entheogenic plant. Any one magical
plant species is a symbol for entheogenic plants in general, so clues
indicating Amanita mushroom don’t indicate the predominant use of Amanita, but
rather, the inspiring presence of the use of various entheogens, such as the
deliriants like Datura. An Amanita halo or archangel Gabriel’s lily indicates
the complete open pharmacotheon of magical plants — one meaning of the image
of the vast assembly of angels.

Psychological meditation religion is lukewarm religion — it’s a better form
of religion, but only better than the worst form of religion. Medium-level
religion may not support wars, but neither does it provide full religious
experiencing or enlightenment. Boomeritis isn’t a matter of labelling low
religion as high religion, but of labeling medium religion as high religion.

In Wilber’s theory of transpersonal developmental psychology, a main idea is
that the mind must in some way reject its existing dominant level of
development in order to move beyond it to a higher level that in some way
incorporates the previous level. So must we reject or negate today’s
predominant medium-level religion in favor of high-level religion.

Today’s magazine stand shows the great extent to which medium-level religion
has recently become predominant over low-level religion: there are ten
Buddhism magazines, and only two Christian magazines, one of those being a
humor magazine (The Door) that serves to discredit low, mundane Christianity
and the other a skeptical archaeology magazine (Biblical Archaeology Review)
that serves to disprove low, literalist Christianity — sometimes near its
sister magazine Bible Review, which serves to use literary study to disprove
literalist Christianity.

It has become rare to find believing (low) Christian magazines such as
Christianity Today in mainstream urban bookstores or newsstands. The
available religion magazines at the newsstand clearly indicate the direction
the mainstream has recently been moving: away from believing (low)
Christianity, through skeptical disproof of low Christianity, to psychological
mythic Christianity and mainstream meditation-oriented Buddhism.

In the popular mind, Christianity is identified with low religion, while
Buddhism is identified with better religion or high religion. For all
practical purposes, the magazines that should be identified with high religion
are found in the psychoactive drug magazine section: Heads, Trip, MAPS,
Cannabis Culture, and High Times. Even better and closer to original, high
religion would be the journals Entheos and Eleusis, which emphasize not
psychedelics, but entheogens in religion.

So congratulate today’s Buddhist magazines on fully attaining the medium level
of religion, but refute them if they make the Boomeritis move of labelling
themselves as high religion and thus obscuring the existence of actual high
religion. High religion can very well be identified as entheogenic religion,
although the goal is not the use of entheogens, but rather, integrating the
state and insights and fullness that are most effectively and reliably and
originally triggered by entheogens.

A rare few may be able to attain this state without entheogens, but there is
good, sound reason to name the high mystic state the entheogenic state. High
religion is essentially entheogenic religion, even if a few have the rare
aptitude of simulating the authentic entheogen state without entheogens.

— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

Heads http://www.headsmagazine.com
Trip http://www.tripzine.com
MAPS http://www.maps.org
Cannabis Culture http://www.cannabisculture.com
High Times http://www.hightimes.com
Eleusis http://www.eleusis.ws/en
Entheos http://www.entheomedia.com
Biblical Archaeology Review, and Bible Review http://www.bib-arch.org
The Door http://www.thedoormagazine.com

Michael,

Do you see entheogens in the yogic / vedantic / shaivite literature?
It seems to me that a survey of the world’s spiritual literature
shows that the above place the heaviest enphasis upon the possibility
& importance of attaining altered states. And yet it would appear
the entheogens are not emphasized in this material.

Thank you.
– jon

Let it be clear that anything that is helpful, entheogenic and not, for human
lives to remember the true essence of being, reflected through words and
actions that are not attached to the author, can never be other than
truthful.

The manufacturing of experience labeled as religious, yields religious
experience, dependent upon an interpretor who describes the experience as
religious, predicated upon words already written whether the message is
weaved by metaphor or not.

It’s a safe that has been cracked, with some writings on papers decoded, and
some dates uncovered as to the origin of religion which yield to the eyes
that it is made out of time……It remains a paradigm staying within a
paradigm but labeled as new and improved by its higher status of analysis.
All things man-ufactured are man-made.

What does not read, write, and interpret, what does not describe,
religious-cize, and capitalize,……..is the core, the center of being, the
innocence, simplicity, and integrity of life,… the bareness of life seen
only through naked eyes which wear no costumes.

Norma

From what I’ve read, Salvia is so perfect, so efffective, like taking the peak
window from a twelve hour altered state session, that it gives insights that
take years to play out. Melding into frozen spacetime, uniting with the
divine figure of your choice, returning to the hub: primary religious
experiencing on tap.

I haven’t read much on Salvia and my thinking lately tends to be universalist
and unconcerned about particular species; what is most important is entheogens
in general and the mystic altered state of loose cognitive binding. Mixed
wine contained a diverse assortment of active plants, used together as an
entheogen. The sadly missed young researcher who drowned on Ketamine wrote a
book about combinations of psychoactives.

Cannabis seems to be a good general multiplier of other plant effects, and
opium is a great stabilizer for nausea often caused by magical plants.
Exhaling salvia, you can see the breath of God, the holy ghost, turning the
zodiac.


I’ve set the record straight on the status-relation between meditation and
entheogens, clearing the way to put entheogens on the pedestal of religion
where they belong, as surely as the lifting of the Eucharist during the Mass.
There remains a frustrating seeming lack of explicit literary evidence to
support my principle of the constant rate of entheogen usage across eras and
locales.

Studying the suppression of drug references in 1960s-70s Rock may provide a
good model to explain why there is so little explicit and undeniable evidence
for the central role of entheogens in religions. If everyone who matters
knows of a psychoactive lotus plant, then every icon with a lotus counts as an
explicit declaration that Hinduism is supported by, and rests on, an
entheogenic foundation.

Similarly, if the religionists who matter recognize some Amanita halos, then
to them, who have eyes to see, it is plain as day that what makes saints holy
is entheogens — the message is obscured to those outside, and plain as day to
those within. I should write in more detail the many parallels between
entheogen encoding in Rock and in religion — the same dynamics and strategies
are used in both, resulting in the same permanent controversy between the
entheogen-literate and the entheogen-illiterate.

People are almost cleanly divided regarding recognizing entheogen references,
in either field. This clean division indicates the presence of a classic
paradigm shift or pattern-locking two-state system. Either religion is
against entheogens and has nothing to do with that, or it’s caused by, and
rests on a foundation of, entheogens and has everything to do with that.
Either entheogen references are rare and isolated in Rock, or they are just
about everywhere, constituting the house religion.

Ozzy Osbourne wrote a song about this, rejecting conventional prohibitionist
religion in favor of acid rock, “’cause rock and roll is my religion and my
love – may think it’s strange – you can’t kill rock and rock, I’m here to
stay”. Ego death through LSD with THC was literally the house religion of
Rock, from 1965 to 1990, and much of the best rock is spiritual. But popular
entheogen religion would be better if it were more well-informed about
religion, philosophy, and psychology.

Suppression has caused the best thinkers to avoid publishing, so that only the
uneducated entheogenists are available as popular representatives of the mind
of the entheogenic community. Political suppression distorts and hides the
fact that entheogens are associated with the more intelligent people, and it
suppresses the potential of the entheogenic Rock religion to be integrated
intelligently with world religions.

Scholarship about the entheogenic nature and origin of religion is stifled and
suppressed by the phony, profit-driven enterprise of prohibition. The result
is inferior and deeply hidden entheogenic encoding, like the bulk of bad,
ridiculous alchemy. Profit-driven suppression of genuine entheogenic religion
ends up producing what we have ended up with: junk Rock, and junk religion,
worthless and uninspired, with the distinct presence of inspiration buried
under layers of dissimulation.

In the slightly more open drug climate of the mid-1970s, symbolically encoded
acid allusions were communicated to a certain degree. But those same lyrics
and allusions, heard in the deeply oppressive climate of the turn of the
millennium, almost completely fail to communicate the mystic-state allusions.
Only in such a foolish dark-ages climate could anyone like me have discovered,
or rather rediscovered, what was barely hidden in its own day.


Wilber lately holds that there are 2000 variables constituting one’s
psychospiritual development. His early works tended to paint a simple picture
of collective progress in psychospiritual development; lately he is almost
qualifying that.

I’m certain that the Hellenists were far superior to his low assessment of
their “mere mythic level of development”, and I don’t care what everyone says
in these anti-Christian times, I know what I see when I look at the
iconography and writings of the Middle Ages: they speak from within the
mystic’s garden of sacred plants, as surely as the sophisticated iconographic
language of the Central American Catholic artists. And I’d like to know what
percentage of Revivalist Christians have used sacred plants.

Again, we can understand how the entheogenic nature of Christianity was
suppressed in the past by matching it to recent history, looking at how
entheogenic Christianity was suppressed in the aftermath of the 1960s.

By a sheer miraculously improbable coincidence, at the same time as Boomers
dropped acid and smoked pot and turned on to Buddhism, giving the middle
finger to their parents’ version of Christianity, so too did many of the
Boomers become Jesus Freaks, now euphemized as Jesus People, providing the old
story, “I used to do drugs all the time, but now I get high on Jesus”, which
is the same as the post-acid, American Buddhist story.

It must be certain that a fair number of Christian Rock musicians have had
Christian experiences of the Holy Spirit through LSD — but we don’t hear
about that. Why not? The socio-political suppression of psychoactive drug
use doesn’t stop people from using entheogens, but it does stop them from
communicating their use of entheogens. Similarly, earlier Christians had
compelling reasons to use entheogens, but they have at the same time had
compelling reasons not to communicate that unambiguously.

As we have been forced to do with acid allusions in Rock, we may have to learn
to accept that mainstream religion inherently prevents explicit, certain, and
unambiguous references to sacred psychoactive plants.

We may have to accept in religion, as in acid allusions in Rock and in
alchemy, that the study is inherently encoded, and never explicit, so that the
only way we can receive communication from those who went before is by
learning their latin, their specialize encoded language, because they were
always prevented from speaking in the vernacular of plain English.

It is a shame that explicit mentions of entheogenic species probably aren’t
forthcoming in religion, but this doesn’t stop scholars from moving forward
with learning this latin, learning the symbolic encoding system of allusions
to magical, divine plants. One Jewish legend holds that the grape vine used
to produce something like 113 psychoactive products, but now it only produces
one.


Today’s meditation religion is bullshit substitution for real, intense,
direct, simple, no-nonsense intense religious experiencing and magazines like
New Age know it; they are not transformative and do not shed insight on
religious myth. The most impoverished form of religion, by some measure, is
middle-level religion — they have removed the supernatural, while replacing
it with oversold psychologism that cannot possibly deliver on its promise.

An outdated theory of religious myth is that it is primitive explanation of
natural mundane phenomena. Actually, that description fits conventional
archetypal psychology well (Jung/Campbell & pre-psychedelic Watts): Jungian
psychology is a primitive, uninformed attempt to explain religious myth,
without recognizing that the myth originates from intense entheogenic mystic
experiencing. Middle-level, Jungian mythic-psychology is unsatisfying except
when compared to Freud’s low psychology.

Jungian psychology is only halfway toward the Integral pinnacle. Just as the
ordinary baptized Christian has only experienced John the Baptist’s
water-baptism and has yet to experience fire baptism by the Holy Spirit — the
baptism in Jesus’ name — so is Jungian psychology only halfway toward the
full realization of psychology. Here my thinking clashes with Ken Wilber’s
way of thinking, residing in a different framework.

It is hard work defining what’s wrong or distorted in Wilber’s framework.
*Because* Wilber is such a good theorist, it becomes all the more profitable
to leverage him by looking for systemic flaws, distortions, or limitations.
How must his theory be adjusted? Does it err in making high human development
overcomplicated and irrelevant, etherial and disconnected from practical
reality? Wilber’s theory is wandering lost, without a clear enough sense of
what matters more and less.

My style of theorizing has always put different principles first. Perhaps his
theory is simple and focused in its own way, and mine is in a different way.
It is most puzzling: how can his theory be so damn good, yet totally miss the
boat on my dirt-simple, rational entheogenic model of ego death? I want to
change my .sig to contain the whole of my theory in two sentences, such a
simple core that it breaks Wilber’s system. What would Wilber not agree with?


Nutshell Summary of the Simple Theory of Ego Death & Religion

Religion is originally and essentially an expression of the entheogenically
triggered intense mystic altered state, in which the ultimate insight is
rationally, simply, and coherently realized, causing a network-shift of
meanings and flipping the mental worldmodel from the egoic version to the
transcendent version. The ultimate insight is no-free-will, realized in
conjunction with no-separate-self.

The ego is largely illusory, and the ego is the imagined controller agent, so
self-control is largely illusory and must be deeply reconceived to fit with
the worldmodel of a frozen timeless block universe in which the near future,
like all spacetime, already timelessly exists. This model is no more certain
than anything, but is elegantly coherent and its coherence is comprehended and
experienced during the mystic state of loose cognitive-association binding.

This conception of religion is the essence of religion and enlightenment, and
is that which all religion-myth and archetypal psychology ultimately points
to.


Wilber has written only a few words about free will and entheogens. His
worldview of what’s most important is quite different than the view expressed
above. An increasingly common move of the meditation promoters is to admit
that entheogens thoroughly surpass meditation in effectiveness, no contest,
but then to play a game of switching and redefining what meditation is for.
Now they say that meditation isn’t importantly associated with tangible
altered states — this is a defensive move into fog.

Now they say that meditation is for mindfulness and lovingkindness that causes
an enduring state of ethical good behavior. That’s an invented false system
of priorities, saving the patient’s body by chopping off his head. Nothing is
more New Age, in the worst sense, than inventing a religion of worshipping
nebulous haze and fog, escaping into empty, meaningless dangling pointers.

This is the same choice as Quantum theory offers: either physics can’t be
comprehended and visualized, and it’s all essentially abstract; or, it can be
explained rationally and visualized, through hidden variables and nonlocality.

There are two choices we have now: either religious practice of
contemplation/meditation is about feelgood haze and fog and dangling pointers
such as ‘mindfulness’ and ‘lovingkindness’ leading to a “spiritual
transformation of character” that amounts to ongoing ethical good behavior; or
it is about intense mystic altered-state experiences, such as entheogens
definitively trigger, that causes a specific change from one specific mental
worldmodel to another specific worldmodel of self, space, time, and control.

The American Buddhist magazines are fully committed now to promoting the
conception of Buddhist meditation as being not a method of triggering the
intense mystic altered-state experience, but rather, about lasting mindfulness
and lovingkindness. If those terms mean anything, they should be seen as
incidental to religious insight and religious experiencing proper. Such
Buddhism commits the offense of proferring incidental and hypothetical
side-effects of meditation as though they were the main purpose.

As entheogens are understood and respected increasingly, such an escapist New
Age Buddhism will be forced to retreat even more and concede additional
territory to entheogens, just as it has already conceded the intense mystic
altered state to entheogens. Everything significant that non-entheogenic,
mainstream Buddhist meditation can achieve, entheogens can trigger much more
effectively and reliably, no contest.

Is realizing no-separate-self the goal? Entheogens work extremely well for
realizing no-separate-self, while non-augmented meditation barely works at
all. More data will only confirm this more. So then entheogen-disparaging
Buddhism may say, “Well, then, the main goal of Buddhism was never really to
realize no-separate-self; the truly important thing is attaining the ongoing
state of mindfulness and lovingkindness and ongoing good ethical conduct.”

That is already happening; there is less and less emphasis on rational
realization of metaphysical principles, and ever louder emphasis on the hazy
fog of New Age lovingkindness, emptied of rational content as well as emptied
of intense religious experiencing.

Then Buddhism may redefine the terms, taking the position that entheogenic ego
death is nothing at all like meditation-derived ego death, and that the
stopping or speeding of thoughts in entheogenic experiencing is unrelated to
the much more desirable quietness and mindfulness of pure and natural
meditation.

The defenses against the manifest superiority of entheogens over non-augmented
meditation have become this absurd, twisting and turning and redefining the
goals and the terms, doing anything at all to erect a paradigm that shuts out
the obvious uncontested superiority of entheogens by all measures.

If entheogens win the religion game by all measures, which they
incontrovertibly do, then such New Age Buddhists make the ultimate lame
defensive move that is every bit as bad as literalist Christianity, of
redefining the goal of religion and redefining the measures of effective
religion. What will they do when entheogens prove vastly superior at
producing ‘lovingkindness’ and ‘mindfulness’ and ongoing good ethical conduct?

It will become embarrassingly clear, as clear as the movie Traffic which
exposed the groteque futility and misguidedness of prohibition, that such New
Age Buddhism is simply defending an a-priori, jealous bias against entheogens
and is, like official Christianity, even willing to abandon religious
experiencing and religious insight if those must be sacrificed to save face in
their commitment to denying the perfect efficacy of entheogens and the
historical predominance of influence and inspiration of entheogens in
religion.

It’s like it would kill such anti-entheogenic Buddhists to admit that there is
a lightning path to religion and it is, by any reasonable measure, the best
path we have ever and always had. At that point, we leave the explicit points
of debate and begin, like Richard Double’s study of the motivations behind the
free will defenders, or like Dan Russell’s book Drug War, inquiring what the
real, underlying commitments are that lie behind the intellectual arguments
being put forth.

Who benefits, in what ways, and how much, by defending the
entheogen-disparaging view of religious meditation? McKenna proposes that
conventional religion serves as an ego defense against the threat posed by
real religious experiencing. In that case, the conventional religion of
anti-entheogenic meditation defenders is the religion of demons of darkness;
that kind of Buddhism has become regressiveness disguided as progressiveness,
wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Substitute, ersatz religion, a false gospel, milk religion falsely marketed as
meat religion. I have no reason to loathe literalist Christianity — it’s
dead as a serious contender. Not even believing Christians really believe in
such Christianity any more — that was only a temporary, modern-era distorted
conception of Christianity, anyway. All eras except the modern probably took
Christianity to be almost entirely symbolic, reflecting entheogenic
psychological archetypal experiences.

More and more, it appears that the darkest of the dark ages, in the field of
religion, was the modern — the only era to wholly lose any grasp of the
essence of religious-myth, in conjunction with losing the connection between
entheogens and religion. Modern Christianity, which is to say literalist
Christianity, had its short time but the reigning religion of the parents to
be thrown off now is anti-entheogenic American Buddhism, which is debated in
the good but too-frustrating-to-read book Zig Zag Zen.

I haven’t seen such a perversely and determinedly warped and biased distortion
of entheogens since the Catholic theologian Zaehner. One reason I dislike
electing a small handful of scholars as representing the scholarly
investigation of entheogens is that they become targets for such distorted
rebuttals and dismissals.

Huxley and Grof and the Good Friday Experiment are treated by anti-entheogen
religionists (fearful propagandist apologists who know well how baseless their
position is) as though they are the perfect and final word on what entheogens
are all about, as though we’ve given the scholars a chance to investigate and
write about entheogens when we in fact have not.

This brings us back to the distortions caused by the politics of suppression
of entheogens. If entheogens were given a fair chance to compete against
non-entheogenic religion, everyone knows as a public secret that entheogens
would totally blow away substitute religion, on all counts, by far. Everyone
knows this, and knows like the drug war, that any tiny loss of the battle
against entheogens would be total, cataclysmic defeat.

Ego, the defender of anti-entheogenic religion, knows full well what a futile
and unwinnable battle he faces. The religion of the lie knows it rests on a
foundation of sand and has no hope against the entheogenic rock in any fair
contest. Anti-entheogen religion, like prohibition, can only be defended
through unfair methods of lies, distortion, inconsistency, and incoherence.

In a fair debate, which is impossible in this political climate, with
competent defenders, entheogenic religionists would certainly win the debate
against the anti-entheogen meditation promoters, and everyone knows it, as
surely as the prohibitionists refuse to engage in refereed intellectual debate
with reformers.

That’s why the rebuttals of Huxley and the Good Friday Experiment all reek of
propaganda, deliberate and ill-willed distortion, and prior commitments and
investments rather than following Reason and evidence where it leads.

The anti-entheogen meditation proponents have no real case and are playing a
purely defensive game to save their public prestige and avoid admitting that
their religious practice is nothing of substance, not transformative but just
a lifestyle accessory and mundane coping mechanism, certainly not a
worldview-inverting, ego-threatening Religion that deserves its capital R.

Substitute religion, called spirituality, is the Church of Ego, and I would
not call it “narcissism” as in Wilber’s definition of Boomeritis, but simply
and plainly, the egoic, unenlightened worldview falsely labelling itself as
the transcendent, enlightened worldview. I follow the simple description of
Boomeritis as Elizabeth Debold wrote in her article “Boomeritis and Me”, in
the magazine What Is Enlightenment (wie.com).

Today I received a special issue responding to her article. The
professionals, of all kinds, always profit from telling how difficult progress
to enlightenment is, not from telling how easy it is. They are inherently in
the business of selling enlightenment on the installment plan, not the short,
lightning path that makes their own expertise look mundane.

Real gurus show genuine humility by highlighting how simple and rational the
important core of enlightenment is, and how easy it is to trigger the intense
mystic altered state. There’s really little to it, and the best gurus are the
guides who deliver the most goods with the least inflationary nonsense that
would seek to blow up enlightenment into something bigger and more alien than
it is.

Professionals define religion as something incomprehensibly difficult and
laborious and rare, something you certainly need years of professional
guidance to make any progress in. Psychedelic psychotherapist Grof, being a
true teacher in the lightning-path tradition, is the better kind of
professional, like the better part of the shaman tradition.

You can count on magazines like What Is Enlightenment to commit to a model in
which psychospiritual transformation is rare, laborious, never-ending,
complicated, etherial, endlessly subtle, and challenging, rather than simple
and finite and straightforwardly attainable in a short time.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

Enlightenrnent is an off shoot of all religious endeavors…..It is a means
of someone holding something over an other. It is the placing of a label,
action and a goal, by a program, not by living breath, on that which is the
substance of all life…..



Norma

[posting by norma]

Now, that means what?
I don’t see how your reply have *anything* to do with
the topics of this group.

Wilber characterizes Boomeritis as some sort of narcissism. I think of
Boomeritis as ordinary egoic deluded thinking, with ordinary clueless
religiosity, mistaken as transcendent thinking, ego transcendence, and high
religiosity. What he characterizes as “narcissism” of the would-be
progressives, I think of as egoic thinking that is mistaken for transcendent
thinking — simply the age-old idea of people thinking they are being
religiously advanced or enlightened, when they aren’t particularly religiously
advanced or enlightened at all, just religious-styled. Boomeritis is the
condition of unenlightened, untransformed, uninitiated people who consider and
style themselves as enlightened, transformed, and initiated.

There have been regular complaints about postings that lack an effort to
provide comprehensible content, so I added the following to the posting rules.

Vague, unclear, hazy postings are off-topic and out of scope and are subject
to moderation. Contributors must make the effort for rational, clear,
explicit, intellectual, articulate, and comprehensible presentation of
particular points.

— Michael Hoffman

Only words can be moderated……Never truth….

Earl Doherty (JesusPuzzle.com) and the other scientific rational atheist
skeptics have done so much to show that literalist Christianity is incorrect.
But that kind of rationality is mistaken, incorrect, and illogical, in that it
fails to comprehend and understand the genuinely valid rationality in high
myth-religion. That middle-level science fails to understand the symbolic
encoding or language and correct, rational meaning of myth-religion-mysticism.

To make the problem worse, most mystics and even theorists of myth don’t
understand the rational meaning of myth-religion-mysticism either. So we
bounce between camps: Indeed, the scientists are correct that the literalist
religionists are wrong. Should the scientists then concede that the typical
mystics and myth-theorists are correct? No.

It requires balancing and modifying notions about science and myth-mysticism;
today’s scientific rationalists misunderstand, and the mystics and theorists
of myth also misunderstand. No existing camp is very close to the truth about
myth-religion.

Scientific rationalists think that if there is any valid insight in myth,
science knows that insight better. This is partly correct. The best science
fully understands the meaning of myth, and the best of mythic thinking is
fully rational and scientific.

Mediocre scientific rationality fails to comprehend mythic meaning, and
mediocre mythic thinking fails to attain to rationality. Excellent scientific
thinking is fully in accord with excellent mythic thinking — at the top, they
embrace and the mind can make rational scientific sense out of myth and enjoy
it as a kind of mathematical art.

It’s sad to see great researchers such as Earl fall so short of full rational
comprehension of myth-religion. They assume that because literalist
Christianity is irrational, myth-religion can’t be explained easily and
rationally — but it can. The situation is very much like two intelligent
people arguing about a series of signals, or a stereogram.

The one thinker manages to decode the signals and lock focus on the encoded
stereogram image, and the other doesn’t, and therefore maintains that the
signal is meaningless noise and that the stereogram is just a flat picture
with no hidden picture.

As much as I want rationalists to recognize that myth may make perfect sense
when understood correctly, I immediately warn that today’s researchers of myth
and religion fully misunderstand their subject, not recognizing that myth
expresses the transcendent but very definitely comprehensible and specific
insights and experiences of the intense mystic altered state, characteristic
of entheogens.

Ultimately, fully developed scientific, rational thinking is able to enjoy
theology and myth as clever artistic plays and commentary on the logical
insights of the loose cognitive state. Today’s rational scientists are every
bit as dull, uncomprehending, unintelligent and irrational, as today’s
middle-level religionists.

They are all unsatisfying in practically the same way: they reject low
myth-religion and frank irrationality, while failing to attain to
comprehending and understanding high myth-religion and the ultimate end-state
of rationality, a cognitive state that gives rise to a worldmodel so perfectly
rational, the mind’s accustomed background assumptions of free will and
self-control become non-viable, leading to a system crash and reboot that
desperately requires a mental move that escapes, a la Hofstadter and Godel,
any particular, determinate system of rationality.

How does that crashed ego-controller, who crashed by attaining perfect
rationality, rationally regain practical control? Only by stepping up the
sense of what it means for rationality to be perfected. Regular perfect
rationality is what caused the dire problem of ego death and loss of control
in the first place; the only type of perfection of rationality that could work
to reboot the system is a qualitatively different, more transcendent type of
perfection of rationality.

Simple perfect rationality is not a viable operating system for a responsible
control-agent; an element of transcendence must be added, for practical reason
of seeming to be a control agent. The lie of egoic control and free will must
be reintroduced into the mind’s worldmodel even after the mind’s rationality
has developed to the point of showing egoic free-will self-control to be
logically incoherent and no more than a practical convention of illusion.

The simple perfection of reason that shows no-free-will to be as nonsensical
and unlikely as literalist religion, combined with the experience of
no-free-will, is not an absolute proof of no-free-will. However, the
ego-death experience is a real phenomenon to be explained — it is the king of
the mythic archetypes.

The ego-death experience doesn’t depend on attaining perfect certainty, but
rather, just an intensely strong confidence and feeling, such as can result
from a few years of intense grappling with the difficulty of personal
self-management while using entheogens to provide the loose-cognition state
that contributes insight into the problem.

Ego death is an intense experience that happens when the reflective mind
realizes how all the self-control problems it has been wrestling with would be
cleanly and simply solved by the worldmodel of the timeless block universe
with no individual free will.

When a mind intellectually appreciates and feels what an elegant solution this
is, or amounts to, or would be, then the practical problem of self-control
arises, and ego death occurs, and rationality concludes that ordinary perfect
rationality must leap into transcendent perfect rationality to regain, and to
discover a rational justification for, the illusion once again of being a
free-willing egoic control agent with an open future.

Myth coherently expresses and points toward this mental dynamic, in a
perfectly intelligible and rational way, never requiring religious literalism
or superstitious magic or psychic abilities. Everything about the mental
dynamic is a move from lesser to ordinary to higher to ultimate rationality.
It is easy to mistake high myth and ultimate rationality for low myth and
irrationality.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

It is easy to mistake high myth and ultimate rationality for low myth and
irrationality. Ken Wilber’s idea of the pre/trans fallacy explains this
mistake, but even he doesn’t have a consistent, firm, clear, specific grasp on
what is most important in mythic symbolism and transrationality.

Should scientific rationalists who fail to rationally comprehend the meaning
of myth be pointed to Wilber as the key to understanding myth? No, the
essence and the core of comprehension is lost in Wilber’s understandably
complex system, with lopsided and unclear results. He doesn’t discuss
transrationality in the way that would be most useful for the greatest number
of people. His system is, for all practical purposes, wrong, or unseeing.

He has no real grasp of the problem of self-control and how it is reflected in
myth and how it is amplified and made to blossom or brought to a climax
through entheogens. He has many of the required pieces, but many of the
central key pieces are buried and strewn apart in his system. It’s not enough
for a model of religious experiencing to have the right pieces in a heap, or
in just any configuration.

Wilber has almost all the required puzzle pieces, but he hasn’t put them
together in a practical way; he has a bunch of airplane pieces but not a plane
that can actually fly. His framework is misfocused; the pieces need to be
flipped into a different configuration that emphasizes the problem of rational
self-control and the experience of loss of the sense of control, combined with
the experience of timelessness, during the intense mystic altered state, and
recognize how myth-religion expresses this very dynamic.

Wilber has some meditation-state experience and some metaphysical theory and
some understanding of myth, but he can’t identify the most powerful, most
central, and most relevant dynamics and insights, that would make the most
intense and distinct transformation happen straightforwardly in the majority
of minds. He thinks that psychospiritual progress is something that slowly
proceed on many fronts.

He doesn’t realize how simple, straightforward, rational, comprehensible, and
easy the main, classic religious transformation is. There really isn’t much
to it — this transformation was routine for the Hellenists, but Wilber thinks
that the Hellenists were primitive and had different psyches than we do now,
except for Mr. Historical Jesus, who was, inexplicably, psycho-spiritually
more advanced than we are.

The Hellenists were closer to the simple, concise core of understanding than
Wilber. Ingest the entheogenic sacrament, experience no-free-will and ego
death, discover the limits of ordinary perfect rationality, discover the
ability to validly and rationally postulate an even more perfected,
transcendent rationality that can account for illusion and convention, and
express this through various myths.

Very effective, attainable, simple, to-the-point, and no-nonsense — unlike
Wilber’s massive, complicated, unfocused system that has no clear central
transformation insight/experience but instead requires decades of meditation
with gradual incremental mini-transformations or transformation through
relatively continuous development.

Finally, in the end, Wilber’s system is unwieldy and impractical, like the
period when the guitar stores were carrying both the dirt simple and eminently
practical Line 6 Flextone guitar amp and the Johnson Millennium amp based on
the unwieldy DigiTech technology with lots of little programming buttons and
deep menus.

Ken Wilber’s system is like the Johnson Millennium amp — unfocused,
complicated, difficult to use, confused about its audience, not sure what its
central goal is, not focused on the central goal of most people in actual,
real circumstances. My ideal is more like the spirit that so suddenly thrust
Line 6 from out of nowhere into the lead: pick a realistic and popular target
scenario to address, and focus on the main goals, with ease of use,
practicality, and relevance.

As a sprawling theory of integral everything, Ken’s is a balanced and
effective theory. But he really, by a practical measure, is not — surprising
to say — very clear about the core pivot-point of the main transformation
that lies as a potential in every mind. Alan Watts was much more focused on
that main, pivotal transformation. The ideal theory then should combine the
sprawling overall integral framework of Wilber, with the focused core
transformation model of Watts.

Watts had a firmer grasp on the most central concerns that are relevant for
the main transformation we all can experience: sudden satori, Christian myth
in detail, and entheogens, and self-control, with an occasional treatment of
the illusory nature of individual free will. Wilber has these aspects but has
them less than Watts, and has a huge integral theory that overshadows,
obscures, and scatters apart these most important, key points.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

Truth can’t be moderated, as by a discussion group moderator. It wouldn’t
make literal sense to talk about “moderating truth”; the word “moderate” isn’t
used that way. To talk that way would only make poetic sense.

There are two ways of expressing truth. Poetic aphorisms, which are often
unclear and confusing to other people, and explicit statements. It is an
abuse of this discussion group, per the group’s original purpose and charter,
to express truth in aphorisms without explicit clarification. A significant
number of people have complained because of postings here that are unclear.

The problem isn’t a matter of whether postings express truth. The problem is
that aphoristic style postings, without additional clarification, are
ambiguous and practically meaningless. Postings that are practically
meaningless are out of scope and subject to moderation, even if they contain
truth.

That is the problem people are complaining about. It would be rude and
inconsiderate as well as a violation of the posting rules to post only
aphoristic truths in this group. Many people take the stated character of
this discussion group seriously. They come here because of the group’s
mission and design. When that design is ignored

One of the biggest reasons enlightenment is out of reach is the tendency to
use poetic rather than explicit language, and the tendency to insist that only
poetic language and not explicit language, can describe religious or
transcendent insight. The blend in this group should be about 80% explicit
and 20% poetic language. The whole goal is to make explicit about religion
what has only been poetic previously. Poetic expression is the problem to be
solved and explained.

The end goal is not to post poetic expressions, but rather, to explain poetic
expressions explicitly. Given these goals, postings that lack explicit
expression are the problem rather than the solution.

If more people complain about the lack of explicit and unambiguous content in
postings here, even if the postings express truth in their poetic and
aphoristic way, moderating the postings would be a reasonable and fair way of
protecting the interests of the community that has been and could be attracted
here specifically because of the main promise and charter of the group: to
make explicit and unambiguous that which has been chronically and persistently
poetic.

The goal is to clearly explain, not just poetically characterize, transcendent
insight such as occurs around the high religio-philosophical-psychological
experience of ego death and rebirth. Postings that aren’t cooperating and
helping in this project of clarification will be moderated, to make good on
the promise and mission and dedication of this discussion group. Such
moderation isn’t about the truth content in postings, but rather, the degree
of explicit, unambiguous clarity in postings.

I will do the least moderation that produces the greatest benefit toward the
mission of this group. I have been uncertain whether to clamp down on the
poetic postings — it doesn’t make much difference to me, directly. But if
people are complaining that the postings violate the group’s mission
statement, I am concerned that the postings in question are driving away
participants and reducing the success of the group.

Maximizing the membership of the group has always been a non-goal. If I
moderate postings, it is out of sympathy for people who want to participate as
defined in the group’s charter and posting rules, than a desire to maximize
the number or quality of members. Perhaps I have given up too much on the
hope of attracting highly valuable contributors. Maybe the group could be
great and could provide lots of intelligible, insightful, explicit postings.
I hardly dare hope for that — it’s an investment that seems like a long shot.

Also a factor is the highly controversial nature of the group, and the public
exposure in it: that forces some of the most valuable members to just lurk and
not express their wishes for the group. I must take more into consideration
the wishes of the lurking scholars. However, I doubt I want to invest the
time to fully moderate the group. Time is the most limited thing — not the
quality of other members’ postings. Even if people want me to moderate the
group more, I’m not sure I’d be willing to spend the time.

I will take into some consideration how on-topic and in-scope people want the
postings to be. I know that many people would rather I lead more discussions
about the struggle to attain personal self-management and practical
self-control, but that is not where my interest and time commitment is lately,
even though it’s on-topic.

Truth communicated vaguely is only a little better than falsity or silence.
The only thing I want and love in a theory of transcendent knowledge is truth
expressed unambiguously, literally, directly, and without room for
misunderstanding, and this discussion group’s charter and posting rules
reflect that love for specificity and clarity as opposed to the reigning mode
of explanation which is limited strictly to poetic and metaphorical
expressions that could be taken multiple, unspecified ways.

The world has more than enough poetic expression of truth. This group is a
haven for that poor beleaguered other mode of expression of truth, the
scientific and rational mode. There are 99 groups that are perfectly well
suited for beautiful poetic postings about truth, and this group for that
microscopic minority, the 1% of researchers who are dedicated to explicitly
systematizing higher insight. If the poets block that project, then the poets
should be moderated.

Such moderation is not a significant censorious block on posting truth;
everyone is free to start their own group, just as Coraxo encouraged me to do.
Anyone who doesn’t accept this group’s charter is enthusiastically encouraged
to start their own group or join those other 99 groups that revel in today’s
all-too-common mode of thinking which is limited only to the poetic mode and
incapable of using language skillfully enough to also communicate intelligibly
in the literal and specific mode.

Those who disagree about the possibility of explaining mystic insight are
welcome to post intelligible and specific arguments for their case, but
posting vague and poetic commentary or vague denials of the rational
communicability of mystic insight can only be considered as an active,
willful, deliberate interference with the work of this group, just as Coraxo
said in his discussion group.

If I don’t moderate such postings when numerous people complain about them,
I’m being negligent and failing to follow through on the group’s stated
charter. I’m mad at being put on moderation on various groups, but I fully
respect and support the moderators for having the character and vision to
uphold a specific concept for their group.

Unmoderated discussion groups concerning higher religion usually degrade into
the kind of soft, formless, shapeless noise and essentially social
interactions that is typical of spirituality discussion groups. Those groups
that are a negative definition of what my favored, structured approach to
transcendent knowledge is all about.

That kind of vague expression and informal communication, and that denial of
rational communicability, is the very problem that I have always been
committed to overcoming in the field of transcendent knowledge or mystic
experiencing.

If there are further unintelligible poetic postings in this group, it’s likely
I’ll moderate them, especially if multiple people complain about them.

The subject of whether mystic insight is rationally explainable is centrally
on-topic and fair as a subject of *intelligible* debate here. Those who
aren’t willing to debate the issue by writing clearly and unambiguously and
intelligibly are refusing to follow the fixed rules of structured debate that
govern posting. What position you take is optional, but the mode of
communication is not optional.

Most discussion groups are mostly for socializing and they recoil in fear at
the sight of ongoing structured debate. But this group is designed to not be
like most groups. Here, it’s all about structured debate and clear, detailed,
specific communication. Truth is not something to be moderated, but it’s the
most reasonable thing in the world to moderate words, which may be an
expression of truth that meets or fails to meet the criteria of the posting
rules.

Writing this has made me appreciate how rare and precious a rational approach
to mysticism is, and has strengthened my commitment to making this group a
haven for those very few people who are committed to the power of clear,
explicit communication in this field that is so put upon by the majority who
like thinking of truth as eluding elude straightforward rational
comprehensibility.

Despite what everyone says, recourse to poetry is not necessary or the best we
can do for explaining mysticism. The dominant view I’m out to disprove is
that poetry can express mysticism but rationality and language cannot.
Rationality can fully explain mysticism, and poetry such as mythic figuration
can add high art to mysticism. It’s a deep, common fallacy to think that only
art can adequately address mysticism, while rationality and language cannot
comprehend mysticism.

Art and poetry without fully developed rationality and language skills fall
short of being transformative. A posting here may or may not contain art and
poetry, but it must contain developed rationality and language skills. Those
who are slack in their commitment and effort at the latter will be moderated,
in the spirit of commitment that defines the group.

The world of spirituality is grotesquely imbalanced, inundated with misty haze
and fog, always promoting an extreme overkill of art and poetry combined with
disparagement of rationality and language. This group is a sanctuary and
haven for the beleaguered few, the minority who want to, for once, give
rationality and clear language a chance.

People who like misty haze and fog, art and poetry but not clear
communication, are encouraged to find a group — all too easy to do — where
that mode of expressing truth is the accepted norm.

— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

Correction:

>The simple perfection of reason that shows no-free-will

[should be “free will”]

>to be as nonsensical and unlikely as literalist religion, combined with the

experience of no-free-will, is not an absolute proof of no-free-will.
However, the ego-death experience is a real phenomenon to be explained — it
is the king of the mythic archetypes.


Free will is seen as being as nonsensical as a literalist reading of the
supernatural aspects of the Bible. A rational mystic experience is that of
seeing two paths suddenly open up before your eye: either miracles and all
kinds of Bible nonsense are admitted as possible and freewill is admitted as
possible, or, every last miracle and bit of Bible supernaturalism is purely
allegorical and there is no free will. The possibilities cleanly split into
these two exclusive groups.

Transcendent rational justification for returning to using the irrational ego
after discovering its essentially illusory nature

>>When a mind intellectually appreciates and feels what an elegant solution

this is, or amounts to, or would be, then the practical problem of
self-control arises, and ego death occurs, and rationality concludes that
ordinary perfect rationality must leap into transcendent perfect rationality
to regain, and to discover a rational justification for, the illusion once
again of being a free-willing egoic control agent with an open future.

>There is much too much mind control suggested by those words. What brings

one out of [the control-system breakdown that results upon attaining ordinary]
perfect rationality, a perfect rationality which is better understood as
truth, is not clear at all. There is no ability on the part of the mind to do
any such thing; it happens all on its own, with the sense is that it is all
regulated by motion. There is no choice in that process at all, and to hint
at any type of control on the part of the mind is untruthful.


There is an unaccustomed leap of thinking involved when the mind moves from
ego-shaped, ordinary perfect rationality (at the end of its rope, followed to
the end of the road) to transcendent perfect rationality or perhaps
“trans-rationality”. The mind, though it is actively moving, experiences
being passively lifted into the higher mode of thinking.

This transformation or central moment of regeneration is initiated by the
frozen spacetime block or some hidden controller outside that block, rather
than being attributed to the ego as prime director. This is the moment of
feeling lifted up to receive a new worldmodel descending from on high.
Passive language predominates here.

The mind changes from containing a worldmodel that is shaped as an ego
actively perfecting its rationality (and thereby ultimately and metaphysically
losing control of self-control), to being shaped as a relatively passive
member of the Ground of Being through which a transcendent rationality is
conveyed from a hidden source that is emphatically not the egoic agent.

This is the moment of the mind’s conversion from thinking in terms of being an
active ego to being a passive member of the Ground or the One, or the timeless
block universe. There are mental actions all throughout this, but what
changes is the attribution of action.

One moment I sense that I as ego am working on my near-perfect rationality,
and I bring it to perfection, but thereupon, I die and lose the scepter of
self-control, now seeing myself as only conventionally being an ego-agent that
is driving and controlling the action.

This is often a frightening unstable mental state, this postulation of frozen
future and no individual self-control, during which the hidden higher
controller could inject any idea into the loose and flexible mind, and all the
mind’s egoic control efforts are recognized as being futile — it doesn’t make
any logical sense to try to stop the thought-injection, any more than a puppet
could act against its controller.

The mind may thrash about, grasping at its donkey of rationality to try to
save and restore the mind’s stability, but no egoic rational action can fix
the instability problem that was created by following rationality to its
logical end point. That kind of action-oriented perfected egoic rationality
concludes that there is no way for it to save itself.

Something higher is needed, and then, that higher thinking cannot be
considered to be the property of the ego: higher, transcendent, restabilizing
and “saving” rationality appears in the mind but the mind doesn’t attribute
that move, that discovery of the transcendent potential, to the ego. The
transcendent potential is experienced as descending like a crown or new
operating system from above, from outside the ego/world system.

The mind is given control again; not that the egoic mind *takes* control
again. The mind receives the higher worldmodel. Speaking exactly, the mind
does create the higher worldmodel — but during this creative act, the mind is
not ego-shaped, so the mind does not give the active ego agent, now seen as
essentially illusory, credit for discovering the higher worldmodel.

The lower mind brings itself to an end as an actor taken for real, and the
higher mode of the mind lies waiting in the timeless future, waiting for the
donkey to arrive or arise to the requisite high state. This can be pictured
as a sinner climbing up, then the demons falling out of him while he is lifted
up and crowned by the savior. It’s not hard to find parallels in other
religions, concerning activeness becoming passiveness while grappling with
demons and compassionate deities.

This issue of the order of salvation is central to theological debate. In
what sense does the sinner actively “accept” the faith and grace to be
passively saved? An action of transformation or turning occurs in the moment
of salvific regeneration, and it has something to do with the will of the
regenerate sinner, but Reform theology doesn’t want to give any credit to the
ego as an active agent causing its own salvation.

Action happens in the mind. Thoughts move in the mind during the moment of
satori, enlightenment, or salvation, or mentally reentering the holy land.
The contested key issue is whether those thoughts are to be credited to an
ego-agent or to something that transcends the ego agent and is somehow over or
underlying or prior to the ego agent.

One way to express this is to say that the egoic mind is the lower mind and is
accustomed to crediting the mind’s movements to the ego, but during
transformation, the lower mind’s work of reason disproves the logical
integrity and viability of the model of control that defines the lower mind.
At that point, the higher mind kicks in or drops in or is manifested.

How active is this higher mind that the mind discovers in itself? The first
thing and main thing to be said about the activeness of the higher mind is
that it is *not* the kind of egoic independent prime-mover, self-mover action
that characterizes and defines the lower mind. Can we say that there is no
action the mind can do to attain higher rationality and regain control? That
way of talking doesn’t work and can’t explain the dynamics.

The better way of talking that can explain the dynamics is to break the
individual mind into lower mind and higher mind. There *is* a choice that the
individual higher mind can make, and there *are* actions that the higher mind
can make, but it is most important to remember that the mode and origin of
this kind of choice and action are specifically not imagined to be that of the
freewilling, self-driving ego-agent.

This higher mind possesses control of a sort, but remember that all relevant
mental constructs regarding space, time, self, and control are redefined and
reconfigured in the transcendent mental worldmodel, compared to the egoic
mental worldmodel. Transcendent control exerted by the higher mind is most
emphatically not the kind of control imagined in the egoic mind, so the word
“control” has a less correct and more correctly conceived meaning.

The egoic mind has an inferior notion of what its control involves. In
reality, there is no control of that kind. But in the resurrecting mind,
that’s being lifted up, control is happening there and choice is happening
there — it’s just no longer credited to the essentially illusory ego-agent.
The concept of control and choice is deeply revised.

I take all this for granted, having essentially explained it before. The
point I was elucidating in my original posting was that the salvific moment of
regenerative transformation of thinking (centered around the will), involves
moving from one kind of perfect rationality to a more transcendent kind of
perfect rationality. Ordinary, lower perfect rationality, when brought to
completion, kills the ego that was the donkey the mind rode in on. “The law
kills.”

I was focused on comparing the two kinds of “perfect rationality”, not the two
states of control or seeming control. Transcendent, higher perfect
rationality takes into account something fatally important that lower
perfection failed to account for: the need for imperfection and illusion and
convention; the practical need for the ego illusion.

The *truly* perfected rational mind must willingly re-embrace a lie, the lie
or convention of egoic agency, to regain the practical sense of being a stable
control-agent. “Love, mercy, and forgiveness saves.” We have sacrificed the
illusory lower self, but we have forgiven its error and we continue to use it,
with that lie of ego being now redeemed, cleansed, made righteous and fully
rationally and morally justified.


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

May ones construct be the bounds of ones self
May ones self be the illusion of ones being
Attraction governs the fruit of existence
The change of life moving through death
The infinite uni
Experiencing alignment
Centre of the divide
All time as a moment
No memory
Only construct
Experiencing existence
Part of the hole
Being of self
Forever indifferent
Riding attraction
Through poles of the divide
Consistently following
Perfect alignment of being
One with the infinite
The existent uni
All parts being one
Existing at once in time
Without beginning nor end
Ever present
Parentless
A permanence of existent energies
Forever in motion
Aligned in the divide
Oh perfect one
IN resonance with the universe
Only experiencing consciousness
Limitless
Pure essence of existence
Perfectly constructed
Sub consciousness
Vastly adorned
Open and indifferent
Unto all substance
For one perceives directly
The true experience of existence
Be ing
An existent subjective
Flowing free through the fountain
Bounded by one ness
Drifting through the currents and tides (attraction)
Traveling a thousand roads
Picking a thousand flowers
Perfect alignment in attainment
Achieving the diamond self
Perfect
Immortal
A thread existent
Unto all spheres ƒ
Driven to withstand universal energies
Creating the pearl of great price
Expanding unto the great expanse
Returning all that is immanent
The balance of poles
Unto all existent spheres
Compounding the diamond essence
Flowing the motion of nature
Through the existent
Pushing the threshold
Driving attraction
Positioning of alignment
Nirvana to creation
Forthwith expanding energies
Into the extra infinite universes
Creating the individual
A sphere of conception

The self
Filled with the waters
Pure existence
Axioms of intelligent threading
Sparks aligned in light rays
Fluid matter in the flux
Sheets tied to the great ones
Exchanging every movement
Momentary ties
To the great beyond
Expelling the matrices
The inner/extra dimension
Fearless unto the all
Foreseeing experience
Experiencing Existence
As true as today
At this very moment

—
http://www.oraganon.IsDangerous.com/

Hi,
I joined this group some time ago. When searching, I apparently
have never posted here, although I believe I carried on a brief e-
mail chat a few years ago about Rock Lyrics (old Yardbird fan) It
seems I have had other correspondance at one time or another, but
cannot remember specifics.

When reviewing the messages here, the books the resources etc., I
find that much of the ideas expressed are along similar lines
to “my,” own “thinking.”

While it seems that much of the deconstruction going on here focuses
on the western models, my particular orientation has been in the
Buddhist mode. I have been busy for some time trying to communicate
to buddhist “larvels,”—pushing the “Entheogenic Origins of
Religions,” theory amonst literalistic Mahayana Buddhists. This has
put me in the position of trying to unravel/deconstuct Buddhism and
get to the heart of the explanations and tearing down dogma—
needless to say I have been confronted with nasty words and had for
some time toyed with people, whose attention span is very short and
who are generally very literalistic.

Of course Nichiren Buddhism had/has a broad appeal in Japan (third
largest political party and member of the present coalition
government) and in the west in the late sixties and up through the
seventies. I basically resigned my function headquarters level
function when I saw a schism coming, in 1982 and and then by the
nineties they fell into frightening and massive schisms stemming
from an argument between the High Priest of Nichiren Shoshu and the
giant and highly political lay group, the Sokagakkai, lead by
Daisaku Ikeda in Japan. Sokagakkai is worth around 125 billion in
terms of money, just to give you an idea of it’s size. In the Us
there was at one tie around 200,000 members, today it is
considerably smaller and far le4ss active in terms of conversion
rate. The goal is enlightenment and “World Peace.” Although they
are accused of being a cult and some call them “dangerous,” this is
not really true—exceot to themselves and their own unity. In
recent years they have become more democratic and less rigid, but
the core still falls into the trap of following literalistic
behavior, since they recruti from all ares of society, and has that
tendancy to be old-school Japanese, very hierarchy oriented etc.
Their schism spilled out across the oceans and into the lay groups
of in over 125 countries.

After my heavy duty experiences with LSD and STP in the late
sixties I became involved with Nichiren Buddhists, since the content
of the Saddharma Pundarika Sutra (Jap. Myoho Renge Kyo) best
resonated completely with my experiences. When I had first become
involved in the west coast group, I was naive enough (at 20 years
old–fresh from psychdelic-Buddhahood of my own) to imagine that all
these young people must have had similar experiences as I had had.
It didn’t take long to discover that whatever the catylst was for so
many westerners to get involved with Nichiren Buddhism, in the west,
the psychedelic experience factor has only been a subliminal cause.

Many in the west who joined in the sixties had perhaps used LSD only
to the point of the initially breaking down existing belief systems
and creating a hypersuggestibile state. Few of them had a previous
Buddhist study or practice background and in my 34 years of
involvement with Nichiren Buddhists I have yet to run across anyone
who had had extensive inner experiences.

Nichiren (1222-1282) was quite a guy though and living at a time of
totally corrupt Buddhism, intertwined with perverse and bizarre
tantric rituals, military ands government control—he was a
passionate and heavily persected fellow.

In my experience, with many Buddhists and being a upper leader of
the group in So California, for many years till 1982, there was a
time when it was really an incredible phenomena, that was spreading
at an incredible rate. Today they are pretty insulated and spend
lots of time arguing with themsleves on the internet…..myself
being the single voice trying to get them to deconstruct the
Japanese cultural accretions and see that real Buddhism goes beyond
dogma and distinctions about sects and superficiality or guru-style
worship.

In the process, I have written a great deal of stuff that is
considered too radical and trying to explain the Entheogenic Origins
of Hinduism and Buddhism is generally like talking to Bodhidharma’s
brick wall.

Nichiren had created a Great Mandala called the Gohonzon, to which
his followers recite a chapter and a half of the Lotus Sutra. He
himself had had some heavy experiences, first when he was twelve—
some kind of “swoon.” (ergot poisoning?) where he said he had had a
vision of “Bodhisattva Kokuzo,” who presented him with a “gem of
singular importance,” and then later, when practising the
meditation style of Tien-t’ai (7th century) the Chinese Buddhist
who taught the theory of “Three Thousand life states in a single
moment,” and mutual possession, which of course is much like the
holographic mind theory, Nichiren came out of a period of seclusion
and announced the mantra Nam Myoho Reege Kyo to the world, renaming
himself “Sun Lotus,” (Nichiren)
The Gohonzon, Nichiren taught, was the depiction of the 16th Chapter
of the Lotus Sutra, wherein the Buddha reveals his “eternal life”

Over the years in studying archeoastronomy and Entheogen use, I was
able to do a basic disection of the Great Madala (gohonzon) and the
calligraphic characters upon it and have basically deconstucted it
in a piece I have worked on called “In the land of the Rose Apple,”
which breaks down those hindu, buddhist and shinto dieties
inscribed upon it and the fictitious or imaginary bodhisattva
functions, in terms of astronomical objects ala de
Santiliana’s “Hamlets Mill.” It is a work in progress.

I wonder if you folks would be interested in this?

My present and recurring interest at this point in my life seems to
be the idea of promoting the idea that “Freedom of Religion,” should
include Entheogen use. This is nothing new, but I find it
interesting (and absurd) that the “theory” of the “Entheogenic
Origins of Religion,” has yet to go to the Supreme Court—if you
know what I mean. Seems to me that a well thought out and
rationally presented case, backed up by so many “scholar’s
scholars,” such as Huston Smith, RA Zechner, Gordon Wasson, Aldous
Huxley, Wendy Donniger, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, John Allegro and
many, many others, even Albert Einstein and possibly even
Shakespeare, who has suggested this “theory,” could prove that
making entheogens illegal really is violating the first ammendment
to the constitution. Of ocurse this would take some kind of
cohesive (but illusive) effort by many who are usually absorbed in
their own goldfish bowls of reality.

Well, thats all I have to say at the moment, just felt the need to
communicate on this board, since as I saod, it echoes many of my
own long time ideas and directions.

One last thing. Has anyone here purchased and studied the 2
expensive (hundredsof dollars each and hard to buy) volumes by David
Spess that elaborate on his little Book “Soma the divine
hallucinogen?”

David Cole

Ojai, Ca.

Toward a viable model of how religious literalism overshadowed entheogenic
mysticism and the entheogenic origin and vital fountainhead of myth-religion.

According to the entheogenic non-literalist theory of the origin and
development of religions, pretty much all the religions began from entheogen
use, not from a literal founder, and always retained a strong tradition of
entheogen use and purely esoteric, non-literalist thinking, though this has
consistently been obscured by the official religionists and by the
thick-headed cluelessness and shallow literalism of the modern era’s
sensibilities.

We’ve been trained to see literalist religion everywhere, but must learn to
instead see entheogenic religion everywhere.


This article defines the main outlines for an entheogenic non-literalist
theory of the origin and development of religions.

I’m committed to the axiom that religion is really about entheogenic
experiencing and entheogenic insight rather than literalism, ethics, and the
supernatural. This may seem at first to be problematic and therefore
unthinkable. However, recall that worldviews are a dime a dozen.

Nothing is easier than constructing a worldmodel that is consistent according
to its innate version of what consistency means, and logical according to its
own built-in conception of what it means to be logical, and well supported by
the evidence, according to its own, characteristic, built-in conception of
what constitutes evidential support. Every interpretive framework has
strengths and weaknesses.

Literalist Christian history, including the New Testament version of the
history of the origin of the Christian religion, is strongly accepted even
though it is deeply improbable by the standards of the skeptical minority, and
even when reasonable people scientifically discard the supernatural miracles,
they still accept the New Testament version of history overall.

So improbability, even gross improbability, has never been a serious
impediment to adopting a worldview. A battle between interpretive frameworks
is a largely even contest; both sides have elements that can be considered
strengths and weaknesses, evidence and counter-evidence.

The theory that religion is really about entheogens rather than literalism is
no different than the literalist, New Testament-based theory, that religion
originates like a big bang at a point in time from the immensely great and
innovative deeds and teachings of a founding figure, an original religious
superstar.

Literalist Christianity has had many years to explain away its difficulties
and highlight its reasonableness and put into place the standards of
assessment that are optimized to favor literalism. The entheogen theory of
the origin of religions has hardly had a year or two to begin — a strong
candidate for the start of the building of this case, as far as Christianity,
is John Allegro’s 1967 book The Sacred Mushroom & The Cross — and that was
just an isolated theory about one religion in isolation.

Who before me has made a general proposal that the real meaning and origin of
all the religions is entheogenic? McKenna seems to propose something like
that, but that doesn’t come across clearly.

I have my own particular model of entheogens and religion and myth, and am
bound to raise the question in a way that favors my own theory, but I ask:
what scholar has proposed that basically, all religion originates, and all the
religions originated, from entheogens? Did Wasson propose that? Leary? The
assertion requires qualification, of course.

No doubt, many things that can be called religions did not proceed from
entheogens directly, and many individuals who are conventionally considered
religious are oblivious to entheogens. So clarifying the assertion or
proposal is a main step in erecting this interpretive framework. The proposal
in short is that “religion and religions are really, essentially, originally
entheogenic, not Literalist”, or more tersely, “religion is really
entheogenic, not literalist”.

This proposal can be called “the entheogenic theory of the origin of
religions” and particularly applies to Christianity as well, and implies a
rejection of the default counter-proposal that currently is dominant, which
may be called “the literalist theory of the origin of religions” and takes it
for granted that Buddha started Buddhism, just like the Buddhists say, and
Jesus Christ started Christianity (together with Paul) just like the New
Testament says, and Mohammed started Islam, and Moses and Abraham started
Judaism.

Much scholarship has been done by Christians and skeptics to examine and
account for the weaknesses of the literalist theory of the origin of
Christianity. Almost no scholarship has been done to examine and account for
the weaknesses of the entheogenic theory of the origin of Christianity. First
of all, we need to start defining what these weaknesses are.

The origin, essence, inspiration, and source of Christianity is really
entheogens rather than the literalist factors such as the big bang New
Testament story, where the causal explosion event is held to be the
resurrection, Jesus’ incredible and stunning ethical innovation, or Paul’s
incredibly and unbelievably rapid proselytizing.

But why is there so much credence given to the literalist theory and so little
evidence for the entheogen theory?

Why are the predominant religions so averse to psychoactives?

Why does the typical religionist — Buddhist, Christian, and others — take
such offense to any positive role of psychoactives as the historical source of
inspiration for their religion?

We need to work to gradually clarify how entheogens may have been used as a
source of early Christianity, and how they reinvigorated early Christianity.
On the other side, we need to clarify the main varieties of the literalist
theory of the origin of Christianity: there are perhaps three main versions:
Supernatural Literalism, demythified literalism, and gradual-coalescence
literalism.

Supernatural literalism as a theory of the origin of Christianity is the
proposal that Jesus existed, and was crucified, and miraculously was raised to
life by God; the disciples became apostles and Paul did as well, as reported
in Acts. Between half and all of the Bible miracles are true, particularly
the great deeds of Jesus. The Holy Spirit descended on a particular
historical day, mysteriously and inexplicably.

Jesus will literally return and battle the forces of evil, and all souls will
be judged and sorted into heaven and hell. N.T. Wright holds this position.

Demythified literalism accepts many of the above scenario aspects, but removes
all the supernatural or miraculous elements, and soft-pedals hell and heaven,
and holds an awkward stance of accepting that some miracles could happen, that
the overall history of the start of Christianity as told in the New Testament
is true. Jesus and the other characters in the New Testament existed, but
either didn’t rise after his crucifixion, or was never fully dead, and was
resuscitated and may have gone to India.

This view normally assumes that a historical Jesus played an important and
necessary role; Christianity as we know it couldn’t have started without some
historical Jesus. This view is considered liberal, but certainly not radical
to any degree. This view tends to assume that Christianity began as a mostly
single, unified religion, though often besieged by breakaway sects and various
dissenters or deviants.

Gradual-coalescence literalism still hangs onto many of the above elements,
usually taking for granted the historicity of a single Jesus figure and of
Paul and of some of the New Testament characters. However, it doesn’t hold
the existence of Jesus to be necessary for the origin of Christianity. It
holds that the driving force behind Christianity at the start was the various
schools or sects, with various combinations of Hellenistic high philosophy,
Jewish sects, and gnostic groups.

Christianity began in extreme diversity and multiplicity, and was only brought
together into an apparently single religion around 313. This viewpoint is
promoted definitively by Burton Mack, who doesn’t challenge the assumption
that there was a single historical Jesus, but whose theory is entirely
independent of whether there was such an individual. This is considered
moderately radical.

Those are the three main frameworks that currently reign. Any big bookstore
has several books promoting each view. The gradual-coalescence view is the
most cutting-edge relative to mainstream scholarly consensus. Supernatural
literalism is a huge popular market which supports the constant publication of
many books upholding that set of assumptions about the nature of the origin of
Christianity.

Demythified literalism is mainstream in the Churches. By defining and
differentiating between these three existing, mainstream views, we have
several points of view which help to define the position of the entheogenic
theory of the origin of Christianity.

We also at the start of this project need to differentiate possible main
variants of the entheogenic theory: Jesus as an entheogenic hierophant, and
Jesus as purely a personification of the entheogen, like Dionysus. Mainstream
scholars mention Allegro’s theory by incorrectly describing the scenario as
“Jesus was the leader of a mushroom cult.”

Allegro’s theory actually held that Jesus was the mushroom, not the leader of
consuming mushrooms. Allegro assumes that Christianity was originally
singular, and later branched. The same mode of thinking happens if you assume
Buddha used mushrooms: you accept the premise of a literal founding figure
who, in big bang fashion, started a single original version of the religion,
that later branched.

The several main literalist and entheogenic views of religious origins must
also be defined for Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism. What are the three main
literalist views of the origin of those religions? What are the two or three
main entheogenic models of the origin of those religions? Was Buddha the
leader of a mushroom cult? Or was Buddha strictly the mushroom consumed?

Was Moses a user of mushrooms? Or instead, was Moses a traditional mythic
figure that was explored by mushroom users in the Jewish tradition? I see two
main entheogenic theories of the origin of any religion: either the founder
used entheogens, or the founder didn’t exist but is a personification of the
use of entheogens or of the experience-cycle resulting in the life of a
follower by using entheogens.

These positions can be called the literalist entheogenic position, and the
purely entheogenic position. So at a high level we have two paradigms to
compare: literalist versus entheogenic, but at a more detailed level, we have
five paradigms to compare.

I use the words “conservative”, “liberal”, and “radical” with caution: it’s
all relative. I use the terms here in the conventional, consensus sense,
though I point out that they are tricky and full of assumptions; in general,
one man’s “radical” is another man’s “conservative”.

The most radical of the literalist theories, gradual-coalescence literalism,
is very compatible with viewing entheogens as the origin of some sects, but
probably not of all sects. That acceptance and compatibility makes the
first-order approximation, “literalist versus entheogenic”, problematic.

The most conservative of the entheogen theories, the “literalist entheogenic”
position in which the founding figure consumed entheogens, is very literalist
while being entheogenic as well, which again makes the first-order
approximation, “literalist versus entheogenic”, problematic.

We can see my two first-order groupings touching: Burton Mack could accept
that some of the earliest schools of what would become Christianity utilized
entheogens, and Jesus’ own group may have done so as one of those diverse
groups — that’s the “Jesus tripping with the Essenes at Qumran” scenario,
which is very popular with the entheogenists, who wish to gain Jesus as a
powerful political ally in the drug policy reformation movement.

Even in the entheogen camp we can see the forces of literalism at work:
gaining mundane power is often helped by a literalist rather than purely
mystic framework of assumptions.

The two groups and the five subgroups I’ve identified, as theories of the
origin of Christianity, are:

Literalist theory:
Supernatural literalism
Demythified literalism
Gradual-coalescence literalism

Entheogenic theory:
literalist entheogenic
purely entheogenic

My theory is that Christianity and the religions are really entheogenic and
not literalist. My main problem is that there is so much evidence for
religions being about literalism and so little evidence of religions being
about entheogens.

The main work, in putting forth a viable theory of the entheogenic origin of
religions, is to explain why, if religions are really about entheogen use and
originate from entheogen use, there is so little evidence of that, and so much
evidence that suggests a literal founding-figure origin and especially an
intensely literalist tradition.

Two possibilities instantly come to mind together: that there really isn’t
much evidence for a literal founding-figure, and there really isn’t much
evidence that the later tradition was so literalist as we in the modern era
have thought.

So we have a puzzle developing, with some complexity and flexibility. First
we find that there is no single literalist version of a religion or literalist
model of the start of a religion, and there is no single entheogen-compatible
model of a religion’s origin or later tradition. These latter points indicate
another distinction we must address: there are two periods to distinctly
debate: whether a religion was *originally* about entheogens or literalism,
and whether that religion was *later* about entheogens or literalism.

I am committed to defining and promoting the most extreme view, that all the
religions, in their origin and their later development, we about entheogen
use, and, they were neither started by a literal founding figure nor later
based on the assumption of a literal founding figure. All the religions began
as non-literalist entheogenic initiation rites and continued as non-literalist
entheogenic initiation rites.

This is the opposite in every way of the conservative Christian assumptions
about the religions: they assume that all the religions were founded by a
literal founding figure and didn’t involve entheogens. Literalist
anti-entheogenists have a literalist anti-entheogenic theory of what all
religions are about and how they started.

Literalist entheogenists (“Jesus and Buddha took mushrooms, and so did the
most esoteric of their later followers”) have a literalist entheogenic theory
of what all religions are about and how they started. Purist entheogenists
must now work to create an equivalent model. It’s not a matter of whether it
can be done. Any model, interpretive framework, paradigm, worldview, or
worldmodel can be constructed and defended, and it’s not that difficult.
Self-consistent systems are a dime a dozen.


Just as the most conservative literalist saves his credibility by grudgingly
admitting that some religion is nonliteralist and entheogenic, so should the
purist entheogenist admit that not all religion is purely entheogenic and
nonliteral. These two camps are arguing then about the relative size of the
two kinds of religion models, or histories.

As a purist entheogenist, I argue that religion has always “really” been about
entheogens and not literalist elements. Much of the work of paradigm
definition concerns defining what exactly is meant by that “really”. This
includes addressing the question not of *whether* drugs were used in
Christianity or other religions, but only *how commonly* and how influentially
or how importantly.

A purist entheogenist theory of the origin of religion can be a purist
entheogenic theory of what all religions are about and how they started. By
“purist”, I mean emphatically and definitely rejecting the literalist
explanations of the origin of religions. “Purist entheogenist” means an
entirely entheogenic, and not at all a literalist, model of the origin of the
religions.

We need a model of how religious literalism overshadowed entheogenic
mysticism, at least overshadowing it according to the official histories.
This suggests another piece of the puzzle, the distinction between the
official histories of religions and the actual, perhaps popular or mystic or
radical histories and actualities of the religions. Certainly, Christianity
is portrayed in the great majority of books as literalist and not entheogenic.
Let’s change what we’re defining a bit:

The “purist entheogenic theory of religion” holds that a religion was *both
originally and later* really about entheogen use rather than literalist
concerns.
The “purist entheogenic theory of the origin of religions” holds that a
religion was *originally* about entheogen use rather than literalist concerns.
The “purist entheogenic theory of the development of religions” holds that a
religion was *during the main, central part of its history* about entheogen
use rather than literalist concerns.

Spelling out the first of those three theory-names, the most extreme theory is
the purist entheogenic theory of the origin and development of religions. I
may be the first to formulate such an extreme and uncompromising model. This
theory holds that generally, all the religions were originally about
entheogens, not literalist concerns, and were later about entheogens, not
literalist concerns.

It is practically easiest to formulate this extreme theory, and then later
ease back and see how much compromise must be admitted and how much ground
must be conceded to the literalist views of origins and developments of
religions.

I am willing to grant that Joseph Smith existed as a single, historical
individual who used Amanita and started the Mormon church, perhaps somewhat
like Tim Leary existed and consumed psilocybin and then LSD and started the
LSD cult, exemplified by the League for Spiritual Discovery.

There may be many combinations:
The founder did/didn’t exist. The founder did/didn’t take entheogens. The
original members did/didn’t use entheogens. The later followers did/didn’t
take entheogens.


Permutating the combinations:

0000 The founder didn’t exist. The founder didn’t take entheogens. The
original members didn’t use entheogens. The later followers didn’t take
entheogens. (Typical no-historical-Jesus position)

0001 The founder didn’t exist. The founder didn’t take entheogens. The
original members didn’t use entheogens. The later followers did take
entheogens. (The “later deviant esotericists” position)

0010 The founder didn’t exist. The founder didn’t take entheogens. The
original members did use entheogens. The later followers didn’t take
entheogens.

0011 The founder didn’t exist. The founder didn’t take entheogens. The
original members did use entheogens. The later followers did take entheogens.
(The purist entheogenic theory of the origin and development of religion,
“Pretty much all the religions began from entheogen use, not from a literal
founder, and always retained a strong tradition of entheogen use and purely
esoteric, non-literalist thinking, though this has consistently been obscured
by the official religionists and by the thick-headed cluelessness and shallow
literalism of the modern era’s sensibilities”)

0100 The founder didn’t exist. The founder did take entheogens. The original
members didn’t use entheogens. The later followers didn’t take entheogens.

0101 The founder didn’t exist. The founder did take entheogens. The original
members didn’t use entheogens. The later followers did take entheogens.

0110 The founder didn’t exist. The founder did take entheogens. The original
members did use entheogens. The later followers didn’t take entheogens.

0111 The founder didn’t exist. The founder did take entheogens. The original
members did use entheogens. The later followers did take entheogens.

1000 The founder did exist. The founder didn’t take entheogens. The original
members didn’t use entheogens. The later followers didn’t take entheogens.

1001 The founder did exist. The founder didn’t take entheogens. The original
members didn’t use entheogens. The later followers did take entheogens.

1010 The founder did exist. The founder didn’t take entheogens. The original
members did use entheogens. The later followers didn’t take entheogens.

1011 The founder did exist. The founder didn’t take entheogens. The original
members did use entheogens. The later followers did take entheogens.

1100 The founder did exist. The founder did take entheogens. The original
members didn’t use entheogens. The later followers didn’t take entheogens.
(“Jesus was secretly using mushrooms, but his followers never understood
this.”)

1101 The founder did exist. The founder did take entheogens. The original
members didn’t use entheogens. The later followers did take entheogens.

1110 The founder did exist. The founder did take entheogens. The original
members did use entheogens. The later followers didn’t take entheogens. (The
popular literalist entheogenist theory of an originally entheogenic and later
degenerated, placebo tradition – “Jesus was an entheogenic hierophant on top
of whom Christianity later developed in a distorted way, lacking the
psychoactive sacrament Jesus used with this disciples”)

1111 The founder did exist. The founder did take entheogens. The original
members did use entheogens. The later followers did take entheogens. (“Jesus
started Christianity as a mushroom cult and is has remained so among his true
followers in the esoteric semi-suppressed tradition”)


Combination 0011 is the purist entheogenic theory of the origin and
development of religion, which I advocate and am defining.

I leave it as a fun exercise for the reader to add parenthetical
characterizations of the remaining permutations of assumptions above.


The above is the top-level outline of the challenge. The detailed work
remains, to explain exactly and in detail how it was that each religion
started with entheogen use, and didn’t start with a literal founder, and
continued with a strong tradition of entheogen use and a strong tradition of
purely esoteric, mystic-state, allegorical understanding of the religion’s
mythic framework.

It remains to explain exactly how those strong entheogenic, allegorical-only
origins and traditions were not clearly reflected in the literature and
artwork that is commonly available. Books about mysticism and entheogenic
religion always have half a page explaining rather carelessly and casually
that the officials naturally wanted to retain control, so suppressed those who
sought and promoted direct experiential knowledge of the sacred realm.

But if such books want to effectively promote their view of mysticism and
entheogens, clearly a whole chapter and book are required to explain exactly
and in detail how the suppression of the mystics and the suppression of
entheogen use worked in practice.

If a huge number of original and later members of the religion were mystics
(whether literalists or anti-literalists) and entheogenist mystics (whether
literalist or anti-literalist), why is there so little evidence for the
existence of the mystic version of Christianity, and why is there so little
evidence for the use of entheogens in the beginning and later development of
the religions?

Why exactly was the mystic version of each religion suppressed so much and so
effectively, and why exactly was the common use of entheogens suppressed so
determinedly and so effectively?

To gain insight on how suppression and distortion works with regard to
mysticism and entheogens, look for comparable examples from the current era.
Consider the suppression of LSD references in rock from 1965 through the 1970s
and beyond, how it forced the creation of covert encoded lyrical allusions to
LSD phenomena instead.

Also look at how drug prohibition has distorted history, museum exhibits,
cognitive science, psychotherapy, and religious practice, making a perfectly
complete and extreme mockery of the claim to allowing religious freedom (you
can practice any fake, placebo, ineffective, nontransformative religion you
want).

Another strategy that must be used in this project is to consider the
religions both as a group and individually, striving to find and assert the
commonness of entheogenic anti-literalist features in the start and
development of every religion. By now, there are a couple books that make the
case for the presence of entheogens in each religion, and there are a handful
of good books on the mystic, psychological, symbolic, esoteric reading of
Christianity, as well as such books about other religions.

A couple of the Christian mysticism books advocate the purely mystic,
anti-literalist view of the origin of Christianity (Alvin Huhn’s book Rebirth
for Christianity, Freke & Gandy’s books The Jesus Mysteries and Jesus & The
Goddess), or assert that the later Christians were entirely concerned with the
allegorical archetypal psychological, esoteric Christ, and unconcerned with
the historical Jesus (Watts’ book on Christian symbolism).

Dan Merkur’s books Mystery of Manna and Psychedelic Sacrament reveal
entheogens in Jewish religion. This is the first time enough books exist so
that a theorist can focus on gathering their fruits to begin to formulate a
sweeping theory that all religions started and remained entheogenic and not
literalist. I’m really pushing the edge here. I really doubt that anyone
else has brought these ideas to this logical culmination point.

This is a paradigm shift, in that a minority hold the New Testament to be all
fictional, a minority holds the Old Testament to be all fictional, a minority
holds that entheogens are present at the start of some religions, a minority
holds that entheogens were present at the start of most religions including
Christianity, and a minority hold that entheogens have always been
significantly present in all religions.

It’s time to combine and resolve these epicyclic corrections or Newtonian
spacetime incongruities into a theory that can better accommodate all of them.

Another element in this framework formation is to examine the ongoing dynamic
tug-of-war between official literalism and mysticism, including entheogenic
mysticism. Look at the relations between official literalism and mainstream
mystics, and consider that relationship to be present even more pronouncedly
between the official religionists and the entheogenic mystics. Was there
really such a thing as non-entheogenic mystics, or does it finally turn out
that basically all mystics used entheogens?

Something similar happens with regard to the debate about the freedom of the
will in both philosophy and religion, as well as in quantum mechanics and
artificial intelligence or consciousness research. Treat this as a related
distinct case of suppression and distortion and potential paradigm shift, a
hot, ever-contested pivot point of concern to mystics and officials.

Free will is discussed so much but yet so little, and always so contentiously.
Concern with the subject of the freedom of the will always turns out to be as
central in theology as the Eucharist, and is a standard concern of mysticism,
but it still isn’t discussed in popular religion. It is truly amazing that no
one has written a book on the history of determinism — it is a subject so
hot, so widespread, so close to us that it doesn’t occur to look and see that
the subject is very common and widespread.

The strong entheogen theory of religion requires seeing something everywhere,
in the center of the picture, where before we kept seeing it scattered here or
there as isolated heresies or deviance off to the side.

It is a revolution in perspective to stop painting literalism in the middle of
the religious scene, with mystics and magic plants off to the side demoted to
scattered heresies, and instead start painting the historical picture with the
literalists demoted to the role of annoying deviants and scattered minor
cults, with entheogenic mysticism in the middle.

I am concerned that many would-be progressive scholars do themselves a
disservice by taking too many conventional assumptions for granted, and
questioning one piece in isolation. These baby steps won’t go anywhere; they
are band-aids and stopgaps. Let’s begin from the maximal postulate that all
religion is really about entheogens rather than literalism. A wholesale
paradigm shift is much faster than incremental change, and there are now
enough books to begin making the maximal theory viable.

Any paradigm can be built up and supported; let’s try this one and see how
much ground were are forced to conceded when looking through this lens and
using this framework’s standards of assessment of what’s plausible and what’s
implausible. From the vantage point this system entails, it is implausible to
have a religion in which entheogens aren’t central, both in the origin and
later development.

Entheogens are powerful, reliable, and widespread; people have every reason to
make entheogens the center of religion, and no reason not to, except for
reasons that are outside religion, such as moralism, social convention, and
political contention.

The latter suggests some useful main categories for explaining how entheogens
have been largely suppressed from the official, false history of religion.
Religion appears literalist rather than entheogenic because of reasons that
mainly include (bad and distorting) reasons in various domains such as
political, social, moral, and psychological.

McKenna provides an example in the latter field: he expressed clearly the
proposal that popular spirituality rejects entheogens because people are
afraid of the very intensity and religious experiencing that they think they
are seeking.

Most popular religion functions mainly as a substitutive protection against
actual religious experiencing: “actual religious experiencing is too strong
and upsetting, yet you naturally desire transcendence — the solution is to
kid ourselves by using a harmless substitute, like playing violent video games
or watching violent movies instead of beating on each other with sticks.

Popular religion is a harmless substitute for real religion, which we desire
but are apprehensive of. This may help to explain more convincingly the
puzzling question of why people go to church even though it is in fact so
obviously completely untransformative. Theology books are packed from cover
to cover with talk about Christianity as a religion of powerful inward
transformation, yet nothing could be less transformative, obviously, than
sitting listening to a sermon and eating crackers and drinking grape juice.

Such popular religion is essentially safe placebo substitute religion,
providing an inert placebo to temporarily gratify one’s innate desire for
transcendence and awakening of the higher mind, while protecting from the
travails of actual psychic death and rebirth.

Popular religion is a make-believe to satisfy one’s higher drive while safely
avoiding paying the price and experiencing the downfall — a way to have your
religious drive satisfied, somewhat, for awhile, while keeping your egoic
worldmodel safe and sound and comfortable, at the same time. It’s a religion
of comfortable substitute gratification for drives that would otherwise lead
to uncomfortable actual transformation — because real initiation does have
aspects that are deeply uncomfortable.

Such safe, comfortable, placebo substitute religion staves off that annoying
inner drive toward actual transcendence. Ken Wilber’s early book The Atman
Project explains this drive and futile, temporary substitution. I would
define Boomeritis as being exactly this placebo religiosity, rather than some
nebulous psychology-speak like Wilber’s vague label “narcissism”.

Most spirituality is placebo religion, a substitute to protect the egoic mind
from ego death which would happen in actual, real, genuine religion. The
issue or right move isn’t one from “religion” to “spirituality”. The way
those are contrasted usually means rejecting the lowest form of religion and
embracing a somewhat higher (middle) level of religion.

We could describe this more accurately as progressing from substitute religion
to substitute spirituality to real religion. Today’s “spirituality” is
nothing but substitute, literalist, supernaturalist religion minus the
supernatural and authoritarian elements; it doesn’t have anything more
positive to contribute than the official/literalist/supernaturalist versions
of the religions.

Like Protestantism was created largely by subtracting from an often-empty
Catholicism, so was today’s “spirituality” created largely by subtracting from
Protestantism, and then sprinkling on some decoration. Today’s “spirituality”
isn’t significantly more transformative than official literalism; at best, it
is less inauthentic, rather than more authentic.

Even mysticism, as officially portrayed in the regular Christian books,
wouldn’t be significantly more transformative than the official religion of
supernaturalist literalism, ceremonies and sermons. I don’t intend to
disparage people who have used entheogens and respect them as fully legitimate
and chose to meditate without them.

It’s a lie that non-augmented meditation is more legitimate than entheogens.
It’s a false history to claim that entheogens were deviant rather than
essential and central within the best part of a religious tradition. The
official literalists would claim that entheogens are the worst part of their
religious tradition, contributing only negatively; but actually, entheogens
are the best and most definitive part of a religious tradition.

To gain one degree of authenticity, leave the literalists and go to the
mystics; to gain two degrees, leave the anti-entheogen mystics and go to the
entheogenic mystics. Then you will have arrived at the heart, origin, and
foundation of the religion, joining the true hidden Church of which the
literalist church is a poor imitation.

Someone told me that he liked Jewish mystic contemplation until it actually
started to succeed at producing cognitive changes — then it was uncomfortable
and frightening, so he quit.

I’d be satisfied if today’s spiritualists would admit that they are
apprehensive of the negative effects of the actual transformative religious
state of cognition, and are knowingly and intentionally settling for a lite,
safe, comforting, denatured, domesticated, neutered, ersatz, make-believe,
cargo-cult, placebo, substitute version of religion — one designed to satisfy
one’s natural thirst for transcendence, without providing any actual
transcendence, which includes uncomfortable aspects.

As usual, prohibition complicates and distorts the picture — some people
would like to use entheogens or wish others would be allowed to use them, but
are forced to settle like Grof for far less effective and reliable triggers of
the mystic state, such as meditation. Prohibition promotes disparagement of
entheogens and treating them as isolated, unfortunate deviations within
religious traditions.

Prohibition, official literalist religion, and popular spirituality all work
together to distort and suppress the role of entheogens in religious history
and to strongly disparage their use.

This widespread systematic distortion and suppression helps to explain how
we’ve ended up with the opposite of the truth, bolstering the literalist
theory of the origin and development of religions, which only serves to
obscure history and block actual religious transformation, when we should be
uncovering the entheogenic theory of the origin of religions.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

This proposal can be called “the entheogenic theory of the origin of
religions<<<<<


This is intersting to read, because to succintly state there is such
a thing as the “entheogenic theory of religion,” has as you are
saying has not completely cystallized, except in a wide variety of
suggestions from various scholars.

Interesting you are using this same exact phrase I have been using
to Buddhists for quite a while.

I have been compiling a list of people who have been suggesting this
idea. The list is growing.

When I first took basic Comparative Religion class in the 9th of
10th grade I had three books assigned. One by Huston Smith, one by
RA Zechner and one by Joseph Campbell. I realized later, that all
three of these “scholar’s scholars” had suggested, in those pages
and in later works or interviews one can find online, this
Entheogenic basis to religion. Gradually in my mind, this
phrase, “Entheogenic Origin of Religions,” began to formulate. Now
I see I am not the only person using this phrase exactly.

On a simplistic level, we have some basic choices as to which model
of explanatory thinking we like or believe.

1. Divinity, divine beings, messiahs, Buddhas, Special Gurus.
2. Space Aliens, Ancient astronauts etc.
3. Entheogenic theory of religion

The funny thing, is that of these three choices….the Entheogenic
Theory of relgions, is the most logical and the least speculative or
superstitious….although people will beg to differ. it appears
that most people are shocked and offended upon hearing that religion
actually comes from eating plants. They would prefere to believe in
Divine Omnipotent beings, specially chosen messengers, or
intervention by Aliens. I find this ultimately humorous.

I am trying to locate the quote from Albert Einstein, where he
implied that religion had an entheogenic basis. I think this view
has been there and passed over or not crystllized. Clearly, someone
like McKenna or Leary of course believed it but maybe they didn’t
propose it as directly as it needs to be proposed.

Huston Smith definately said it, So did RA Zechner, but in more of a
anthropological way. Many others as well. I know that I myself
have said it many times to people over the last 39 years, but really
only in the past 5 years have I began to see it in terms of a
specific or formal “theory,” that needs to be officially postulated
academically. I think even the suggestion of this being a “theory,”
implies the possiblity that it is possibly not true. Afterall the
word “theory,” implies soemthing that needs testing or proof, when
in reality, I had all the proof of this I’d personally ever need,
when I was 19 years old. So to postulate this theory, one is really
attempting to convince others in an academic mode.




dc

>>>>>>>As a purist entheogenist, I argue that religion has

always “really” been about entheogens and not literalist elements.
Much of the work of paradigm definition concerns defining what
exactly is meant by that “really”. This includes addressing the
question not of *whether* drugs were used in Christianity or other
religions, but only *how commonly* and how influentially or how
importantly.

A purist entheogenist theory of the origin of religion can be a
purist entheogenic theory of what all religions are about and how
they started. By “purist”, I mean emphatically and definitely
rejecting the literalist explanations of the origin of
religions. “Purist entheogenist” means an entirely entheogenic, and
not at all a literalist, model of the origin of the religions.<<<<<


This is clearly delineated and well defined. It can also be
admitted that altered states, can apparently also come from severe
disruptive forces, not necessarily involving the use of entheogenic
plants. Near Death experiences, severe austerities, such as long
term fasting and meditation, may alter brain chemistry and produce
similar effects, yet it seems logical to assume that this is too
impractical and uncontrolled, to be considered as a replacement for
entheogen use.

My last reply mentioned three general models:

1. Divinity, divine beings, messiahs, Buddhas, Special Gurus.
2. Space Aliens, Ancient astronauts etc.
3. Entheogenic theory of religion

I failed to add one last general theory i usually add to this list:

4. Schizophrenia.

I worked 18 years in the deepest Psych backwards and heard many
kinds of ideations. It is also of interest to differentiate between
schizophrenic visons and actual “religious,” visions. There is of
course a biological connection, but the inherent inability of
schizophrenics to process things in a stable fashion seems to be a
glaring difference between a schizophrenic and a person who has had
profound Entheogenic experiences or experiences during austerity
practices coupled with deep and prolonged meditation.

Two other factors that I keep returning to, is first, that in my own
entheogen experiences, there was a period when I believed my
experiences were “special.” That I was somehow different from
others. While my friends in the sixties would drop acid and roll
donuts across the floor at Winchells Donuts, I was going through a
distinct “religious process.” Following meditation manuals. So it
is true that a phase of entheogen experience, bolstered the
perception of Messiahship. For me that was only a brief, almost
mechanical phase, I passed through. I can see how a person in the
past who may for instance, have accidentally ingested entheogens,
would declare themselves to be a “Messiah,” and think they had
become a divine messenger. Some schizophrenics also seem to be
locked into this kind of specialness.

Secondly, I return to the idea that in my own experiences I finally
went beyond the dualities and began to sense the mechanical nature
of these archetypal religious experiences. That was when I began to
see that my inner experiences were more mechanical regurgitations of
imprinted imagery/imprints, and biological phenomena, rather then
actual signs of divinity or special enlightenments.

Thus, the idea that these experiences are “divine,” was replaced by
the idea that they are simply causal processes at work, that can be
explained in a moore advanced, scientific way.

I found also that in my own experiences when my skeptical mind would
ask skeptical questions, of myself, during these intense states,
such as trying to analyse “who is this self or voice talking in my
mind” or “if this is really the milky way, then where is the sun?”
it would be at those times I would find the workings of the extremes
of the dualities—thus pointing me to find the “middle way.”

One last point I would like to mention before I head off to work, is
that besides the Entheogenic theory of religion, there is also
another, very connected point regarding the origins of religion. It
is how ancient peoples looked at the sky, while in enthogenic states
and the movement of celestial bodies and how they named these bodies
and saw them as gods and beings, as one sees imagery in clouds, but
in a more intense way, attributing to these celestial movements, as
god beings going to war, having intercourse, unseating one god for
another and the image of a giant, turning, Celestial mandala that
was one with consciousness, as in the “Hamlets mill” theory of de
Santillana and Von Dechend.

dc

Although poetry is not encouraged here and that is respected, they still are
words that come from deep within…..This one is shared in reflecting upon
world events.

More often than not,
in the midst of earthquake ruins,
where shattered glass
is scattered everywhere,
there remains a doorframe standing,
for eyes to remember
the threshold.



Norma

Poetry is off-topic and not allowed unless there is an *explicit*,
comprehensible tie-in to the stated topics. For example, acid-rock lyrics
without analysis are off-topic. Acid-rock lyrics *with* specific and clear
commentary connecting them to the forum topics are on-topic.

Poetry can be included in postings, but in most cases, there needs to be
accompanying prose commentary.

A posting is off-topic if it doesn’t state what the tie-in it has to the
in-scope discussion topics. Postings must clearly and comprehensibly state
their relevance to ego death, personal control, mystic experiencing, and the
other intended topics.

This discussion group was never intended for open-ended reflection on world
events, particularly not *unspecified* world events. That would be a
worst-case posting. It would be better, though still probably off-topic, if
such a posting stated what events were intended, and preferably, included URLs
for further information.

Off-topic postings are subject to deletion from the Web-based archives.
Please tell me what I can possibly do to make the posting rules any clearer.
I am not going to rigidly enforce the rules, that’s not the first line of
action for guiding a discussion group. The first thing moderators should do
is be absolutely crystal clear, with no room for misunderstanding, about the
scope of the group and requirements for postings.

The first person to blame for off-topic postings is the moderator, for not
making the guidelines clear enough. I will make the posting guidelines much
clearer and more stringent — rather that taking action on moderating
individual postings.

If open-ended commentary on general world events were to be considered
on-topic here, the discussion group would lose too much focus, and I may as
well post all those drug policy reform postings I’m often tempted to post. I
have to remind myself that this group I started was never intended as an
activist forum discussing drug policy reform as a topic unto itself.

I’m restricting what I post here, and everyone else should to, because that is
the founding vision for the group; otherwise, it will become just another
social hangout accomplishing no particular goal. If people want to comment on
world events independently of the ego-death topics, they will find it more
enjoyable in other discussion groups.

This is a strictly on-topic discussion group. I will make this *absolutely*
clear in the posting rules, and may even go so far as to moderate off-topic
postings. It should already be clear enough that any topic is allowed *if* it
is *explicitly* tied into the defined topics. Every two weeks, this is stated
in an automated posting: “It is possible to write on most any topic and have
it be relevant for this Egodeath discussion group if you show how the posting
is related to the in-scope topics for this discussion group.

This group is not formally moderated, but it is consistently focused on the
defined topics, including peripheral topics if the writer explicitly connects
them to the core topics.”

I have now reasonably clarified my vision for this group and the concomitant
requirements for posting. This issue does warrant the serious reflection I
have given it; online discussion is complex and it can be a challenge to have
*productive* discussion that advances knowledge and understanding, rather than
just having random discussion that goes to no planned and focused and
structured destination, or neglects to integrate with the main goals of the
discussion group.

I may clarify the posted posting rules, but I’m not going to give this subject
more consideration. These are not difficult posting requirements to meet. If
you don’t care for the group’s focused vision and the necessary, concomitant
posting rules, start your own group and post there instead — I did, and I’m
glad I did. It is not time for me to be impatient about these points; it is
time for me to make up my mind about group policy and vision and commit to
upholding it.

I should have foreseen this challenge and prevented it from arising —
discussion groups related to mystic-state insight are, as a rule, dominated by
unfocused activity rather than structured, focused, goal-oriented activity.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

Mushrooms and Mankind: The Impact of Mushrooms on Human Consciousness and
Religion
James Arthur
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1585091510

The Psychedelic Sacrament: Manna, Meditation, and Mystical Experience
Daniel Merkur
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/089281862X

Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics
Allan Hunt Badiner (Editor), Alex Grey (Editor), Stephen Batchelor, Huston
Smith
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0811832864


Michael wrote:

>>Who before me has made a general proposal that the real meaning and origin

of all the religions is entheogenic?

James Arthur wrote:

>I published the following at http://www.jamesarthur.net in 1997:

>”Information on this space explores the possibilities and evidence supporting

the concept that the unique states produced by these plants are intricately
connected to the development of mankind and that the plants have multiple
connections to the evolution of religious thought and symbolism on our planet.
… Every indigenous culture used these plants and each culture had a person
or group of people they looked to for spiritual leadership and they were the
plant-knowers (among the myriad of names you can ascribe to them). … The
Amanita muscaria mushroom can be found at the roots of most of the religious
writings our planet has to offer. … These writings have dealt with the use
of such substances by spiritual practitioners in most every religion formed on
the planet.”

>Does this seem vague? Am I not clearly stating that the origins of religion

is the use of drugs?


Not as clearly as is needed in this foolish, upside-down era that habitually
forces ideas into the status-quo framework unless jarringly awakened and
interrupted. Your points need to be greatly amplified. The main point I am
trying to magnify and amplify more than has been done previously is that
*even* the main religions, *even* in their later development, *not only* in
their earliest expression, involved, in a very important way and to a very
important extent, the use of entheogenic plants.

For example, Amanita and likely other psychoactives were not only used in some
of the various diverse groups which eventually coalesced into Christianity,
but were also used by some groups and individuals in Christendom during all
later periods up to and including today’s American Christianity, forming what
certainly should be considered a venerable ongoing tradition, even if
semi-suppressed.

My recent emphasis on the need for emphasis concerns my resolution on the
delicate subject of the legitimacy of meditation on today’s popular
spirituality. It was hard to find a way to pound home a certain forceful
rejection and condemnation of meditation, while also doing so in a viable,
reasonable way.

Common thinking keeps on reverting to ordinary ways of considering the role of
meditation versus entheogens, and it was time for someone to stop and shout
“No, no, no! Enough! That’s wrong, and I must insist more clearly than clear
that it is deeply wrong, the opposite of the truth.” There is a great
difference between simply stating truth, and clearly and effectively
communicating truth.

These points about the presence of entheogens must be pushed home far more
forcefully, far more broadly, far more emphatically. We’ve got to forcefully
disrupt the status quo, which is reflected in the book Zig Zag Zen. Sure, Zig
Zag Zen has a little, it touches on the point that entheogens weren’t entirely
lacking from all of the Buddhist groups — but that’s the problem, that
tepidness, that *imbalance*.

The status quo that we must battle with all our energy to overthrow now is the
Huston Smith types who gently assert that entheogens were present in the most
ancient origins of ancient religion, and are a valid simulation of meditation
that should be considered as legitimate and authentic as meditation. To hell
with that imbalanced picture! With friends of entheogens so tepid as that,
who needs enemies?

Quit all the excuses and apologetics and just look, in Zen reality-attuned
fashion: *clearly* and *obviously*, New Age American Buddhist Meditation is
placebo bullshit pretending to be the real thing, when obviously it’s nothing
of the sort. Entheogens are the real method; meditation is merely an
adjunct — *not* the other way around like Zig Zag Zen and all the rest of the
old status quo scholarly “defenders” of entheogens would have it!

It takes a certain boldness and shaking oneself awake to throw off the
dogmatic slumber of humble respect for meditation. Screw meditation! It can
jump off a cliff! It is effectively an obstruction to actual intense
religious experiencing. It doesn’t require that one try meditation before
earning the right to reach this inevitable conclusion. The most elementary
and simple reasoning in the world shows it.

The emperor of meditation has no clothes, just look and see. Almost everyone
reports that *meditation doesn’t work* as a way of triggering intense
religious experiencing, while almost everyone reports that entheogens work
very well to trigger this.

Only the most stick-in-the-mud apologists for repressive, evasive orthodoxy
could possibly hold that meditation is more effective for triggering intense
mystic experiencing — in fact, even the most obstinately in-denial
anti-entheogen meditation proponents are not so utterly foolish as to claim as
much — instead, like weasels and eels, they play a cheap shell game of
redefining the goal.

They say “Ok, we admit that entheogens totally run circles around meditation,
toward the goal of triggering the intense mystic state. Then we’ll save face
and prestige by conceding that ground and claiming that we didn’t want it
anyway. Now we’ll redefine the goal of meditation in a way so that we’ll be
unaccountable. So, the new purpose of meditation, is, um, mindfulness and
lovingkindness, yeah, that’s the new story!

Meditation is way more effective than entheogens for this one true spiritual
goal, of gaining in mindfulness and lovingkindness.” That’s the low, pathetic
argument the obstinate stick-in-the-mud Buddhists have stooped to in the book
Zig Zag Zen, associated with Tricycle magazine. It is high time the
entheogenists cry out, What total, stinking bullshit, deliberately shifting
the goal of meditation to a nebulous, vague, New Age empty-speak that could
never possibly be measurable and accountable.

That’s just as bad as the Christians. How dare these American New Age
Buddhists think they are one bit better than the most fork-tongued Christian
literalist officials who preach about regeneration of the sinner, while
offering exactly nothing but theological verbiage and crackers and grape juice
to effect the regeneration. No wonder the only growing part of Christianity
is the Pentecostals — people have had it with empty, placebo, cargo-cult
Christianity.

If you don’t make a detailed, emphatic, forceful, unambiguous statement that
entheogens are *everywhere* in *all* religions, in *all* eras, you will be
steamrollered by the status quo and absorbed into it just as the feeble
entheogenic scholarly status quo has been eaten alive and absorbed helplessly
into the totally bunk, completely fake and inert false religion of New Age
American Buddhist meditation, or dogmatic meditationism such as falsely taught
by the pandit Ken Wilber.

The Wilberian method *doesn’t work*! Not, at least, by any useful, practical
definition of “work”. Wilber is exactly the same as a Protestant theologian:
he talks about transformation but tells you to attain it by a method that
works so poorly, it actually serves to prevent transformation. He preaches
the Devil’s gospel that salvation is difficult. That’s the most powerful
interpretation of “works salvation”.

Wilber preaches a works salvation in that he says enlightenment is difficult,
slow, intangible, ethereal. Dan Merkur’s Psychedelic Sacrament is essential
for pointing out that there is another view: what in Buddhism is the vajrayana
“lightning path”. There are two gospels, two religions, two attempts at
salvation and enlightenment: the hard path of salvation through works, and the
easy, short, lightning path of salvation through faith, which amounts to
consuming the real, entheogenic flesh of the savior, Dionysus.

When all is said and done, Wilber preaches a false gospel of works-salvation,
like Merkur’s non-entheogenic Jewish mystics with whom he contrasted the
rational, entheogen-using, fast-track, short-meditation-session mystics. My
gospel or teaching is the lightning tradition: enlightenment and salvation are
easy, fast, simple, rational, entheogenic.

The others like Wilber spread another gospel or teaching, the slow, hard,
works tradition: enlightenment is difficult, slow, complicated, beyond
rationality, and non-entheogenic. Wilber has ingested MDMA a few times and he
reports one non-consenting, probably LSD experience in college.

Regardless of his own personal experience with meditation and entheogens, he
only needs to read the massive evidence of the reports, to reach a better
conclusion than he has: the reports clearly indicate that meditation works
very poorly, while entheogens work very well, to produce experiences that
people report as intensely mystical and life-transforming.

So he has to do a complicated, elaborate dance to elucidate in “integral
theory” fashion how entheogens are important, yet much less important than
meditation. Wilber is Mr. Epicycles, starting by building an infinitely
elaborate system, before he has grasped how utterly straightforward, fast,
simple, and easy the bulk of enlightenment is, in the truly traditional
entheogen path.

The straightforward core of effective initiation is completely lost and
scattered in his baroquely comprehensive system. He manages to put
transformation ever beyond reach by approaching it through the works-salvation
stance in which transformation is considered hard, complicated, and slow.

We need to use a much bigger hammer and pound much harder to forge an
entheogen theory of religion that doesn’t get instantly swallowed into the
dominant middle-level religion worldview, that swamps the theory in mediocrity
and defuses and assimilates reductively the immensely effective power of
entheogens compared to meditation and conventional ordinary-state Jungian
psychological mysticism.

Middle-level religion defuses and neuters the entheogenic tradition by damning
it with faint praise and falsely reasserting the meditation path, with its
gospel of slow, lengthy, difficult, rare, non-rational enlightenment. We must
amplify the entheogenic position and theory so that this pattern of absorption
is forcefully and finally disrupted.

We must throw down the gauntlet to the official histories of religion and the
mainstream proponents of meditation and assert that they are totally full of
shit and are telling the opposite of the truth — our mistake has been to play
along with them and affirm their way of painting the picture and balancing its
elements. It’s time to stop playing along with the meditationists and the
official historians of mysticism, and declare that their picture is
*completely false*. The meditation dogma is completely false.

The official mysticism portrayal is completely false — just as the portrayal
of Gnosticism as a later deviation from the original pure Christianity is
completely false.

Researchers overemphasize the presence of the entheogens at the temporal
beginning of the religions, at the expense of pointing out their presence in
the continued later development of the religions.

Your quotes could be interpreted as covering this ground, but they are
abstract and I had to read them twice and hunt down, to bring out, the meaning
that I’m looking for. After reading your site and your book, I did *not* come
away with any idea of a maximal, strong hypothesis that psychoactives have
been a thriving, though beleaguered, ongoing de-facto tradition from the start
of Christianity to present-day Christianity.

To communicate your ideas you need to express your points vividly — the
quotes are not a vivid expression of the radical proposal that, say, the
Christian mystics were tripping on Datura, that the Central American Catholic
indigenous were integrating entheogenic visions into Catholic iconography.
You convey your points about Amanita Christmas very clearly — there is no way
someone could read you without coming away with Amanita=Christmas.

But it is too easy to read you without coming away with “Christianity in all
eras = Amanita”.

The quotes below don’t clearly express the maximal entheogenic theory of
religion: that essentially all religions have always really been about
entheogens, from the start through their later developmental eras, and never
were really held to be about literalism.

A most fascinating revelation is that all civilizations always held the earth
to be round; it was never held to be flat — we were just *told* by
self-aggrandizing 19th-century science-promoter/propagandists that we were the
first to not hold backward views — like white man claiming to discover
medicinal drugs, when he’s really just co-opted timeless indigenous plant use.

To make progress in this field, we must almost overstate the case, such as
overstating it and then clarifying and qualifying.

Your quotes below, by themselves, are too genteel, soft-spoken, and complex to
push the point home that Christian mystics of the Middle Ages were tripping on
psychoactive plants, and that Christian theology is actually based on the
intense mystic altered state induced by entheogens, more importantly than it
is based on any other sources such as non-augmented flagellation or
contemplation.

I think we must consider Middle Ages Christianity and its equivalent in other
religions as three populations: the officials, the mystics, and the populace.
Who used entheogens? Most mystics, many of the populace, and some officials.

We must do better than merely asserting that the temporal “origin” of
“religion” is drugs. Entheogen religion researchers must claim *far* more
ground, in the number of eras and in the number of religions covered by the
theory.

Both the origin and all of the later eras of all the religions, certainly
including Christianity, Judaism, Hellenistic mysteries, ancient
philosophy-religion, indigenous religion and shamanism, Islam, Hinduism,
Buddhism, Mormonism, Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestantism, *all*
contained the venerable de-facto tradition of using psychoactive plants to
trigger intense mystic-state experiencing, and that *all* the literalist
history embodied in the religious stories is entirely allegorical mythic
metaphor expressing the psychological and cognitive phenomena experienced
during the entheogenic mystic altered state.

Entheogens were used routinely; they were ever-present and *not* just at the
origin — so the literalist officials today cannot use the dispensationalist
cop-out of saying, “Well, the founders or early heretics used these, but these
plants have no proper place in our later tradition.” Gentle qualified
statements that there were some plants at the beginning leave the literalist
officials far too much weasel-room.

This is why we have yet to express the maximal theory in a way that
successfully communicates it forcefully and unambiguously.

It has been hard working up, forcefully enough, these ideas, pointing out in
fiery detail with vivid condemnation just how intensely and radically opposite
of the truth the official portrayal of the history of the religions is.

We’ve got to light the entheogen theory on fire, really highlight and
emphasize it, stop soft-pedaling it, come out and clearly make a very forceful
statement — taking all of your statements several notches up and expanding
them several degrees to emphatically cover all religions, all eras — and only
after, qualify and smooth out the assertions. I don’t think you have
explicitly, effectively expressed the maximal entheogen theory.

It’s too easy to read your quotes and still discount entheogen use as safely
limited, scattered deviations that happened at a few points in the past.
That’s too amenable with the official story — “Oh, those were just isolated
heresies that sometimes popped up here or there, out on the far periphery —
never mind those, they aren’t important to the core tradition.”

We need to emphasize more the *continuity* and *ubiquity* of *many*
entheogenic plants in practically *all* the religions, even in the extreme of
Middle Ages Catholicism. Many more Christians — officials, mystics, and
populace — were aware of the entheogenic nature and essence of theology and
Christian myth, than the 20th Century modern-era mainstream assumed.

To put forth a new paradigm, one must show a new balance of emphasis of
various points. The maximal entheogen theory of religion would be expressed
more in your quotes if they compensated more for today’s biased assumptions.
The reigning bias that I’m out to overthrow by framing the maximal theory with
a new balance of emphases is the recent assumption that entheogens were
present at the origin of Christianity but not in its later development.

I’m encouraged in this change of emphasis by Dan Merkur’s study of entheogens
in later Judaism, not just in ancient days of the early scriptures. I have
never read, as I recall, any proposal that the Christian mystics used
entheogens — except by implication in the article about the lily as Datura in
Entheos journal.

If you or anyone has written that, it failed to make a conscious impression on
my thinking, and needs to be hammered home as effectively as your Amanita
Christmas research — at this point, all that’s needed is a crystal clear
proposal, showing the general plausibility, not evidence toward proving it.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

>After all the word “theory,” implies something that needs testing or proof,

… So to postulate this theory [the entheogen theory of the origin of
religion], one is really attempting to convince others in an academic mode.

That’s not as true as you say.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=theory

A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or
phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely
accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena. The
branch of a science or art consisting of its explanatory statements, accepted
principles, and methods of analysis, as opposed to practice: a fine musician
who had never studied theory. A set of theorems that constitute a systematic
view of a branch of mathematics. Abstract reasoning; speculation: a decision
based on experience rather than theory. A belief or principle that guides
action or assists comprehension or judgment: staked out the house on the
theory that criminals usually return to the scene of the crime. An assumption
based on limited information or knowledge; a conjecture. [Late Latin theria,
from Greek theri, from theros, spectator : probably the, a viewing + -oros,
seeing (from horn, to see).][F. th[‘e]orie, L. theoria, Gr. ? a beholding,
spectacle, contemplation, speculation, fr. ? a spectator, ? to see, view. See
Theater.]

1. A doctrine, or scheme of things, which terminates in speculation or
contemplation, without a view to practice; hypothesis; speculation.

Note: “This word is employed by English writers in a very loose and improper
sense. It is with them usually convertible into hypothesis, and hypothesis is
commonly used as another term for conjecture. The terms theory and theoretical
are properly used in opposition to the terms practice and practical. In this
sense, they were exclusively employed by the ancients; and in this sense, they
are almost exclusively employed by the Continental philosophers.” –Sir W.
Hamilton.

2. An exposition of the general or abstract principles of any science; as, the
theory of music.

3. The science, as distinguished from the art; as, the theory and practice of
medicine.

4. The philosophical explanation of phenomena, either physical or moral; as,
Lavoisier’s theory of combustion; Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments.

Atomic theory, Binary theory, etc. See under Atomic, Binary, etc.

Syn: Hypothesis, speculation.

Usage: Theory, Hypothesis. A theory is a scheme of the relations subsisting
between the parts of a systematic whole; an hypothesis is a tentative
conjecture respecting a cause of phenomena.

n 1: an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of
circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena; “true in fact and
theory” 2: a concept that is not yet verified but that if true would explain
certain facts or phenomena; “he proposed a fresh theory of alkalis that later
was accepted in chemical practices” [syn: hypothesis, possibility] 3: a belief
that can guide behavior; “the architect has a theory that more is less”; “they
killed him on the theory that dead men tell no tales”

Most recently I’m emphasizing “the entheogenic theory of the origin *and
ongoing development* of religions”.

>This is intersting to read, because to succintly state there is such
>a thing as the “entheogenic *theory* of religion,” has as you are
>saying has not completely cystallized, except in a wide variety of
>suggestions from various scholars.

Right, it hasn’t formed as a clear system.

>Huston Smith, RA Zechner, Joseph Campbell … suggested this
>Entheogenic basis to religion.

But Zaehner is a Catholic official, committed to fitting drugs into his
official Catholic framework, entailing — and this is the real problem to
battle now — taking every opportunity to disparage entheogens without being
caught making any statements that are so blatantly false that his efforts
backfire.

For example, if you preach orthodoxy and insist that entheogens never produce
any experience that is in any way mystic, you’d be dismissed as an
embarrassment who is inadvertantly calling orthodoxy into doubt. That stance
would imply that the only way to deny the potency of entheogens is by throwing
away all credibility, and willfully ignoring what is plain to everyone.

He knows it is hopeless to deny the effectiveness of entheogens, and that
doing something that willfully reality-denying would call *all* of his dogma
into question as being nothing but propaganda.

Zen, Drugs, and Mysticism
R.C. Zaehner
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0819172669


I’d like to see a quote from Einstein.

>On a simplistic level, we have some basic choices as to which model of

explanatory thinking we like or believe.

>
>1. Divinity, divine beings, messiahs, Buddhas, Special Gurus.
>2. Space Aliens, Ancient astronauts etc.
>3. Entheogenic theory of religion

You leave out the most important one, that’s currently the most effectively
deceiving position: New Age American Buddhist entheogen-disparaging
meditationism, and the Jungian/Campbellian myth-psychology-archetype theory
that myth reflects mundane, ordinary-state pychology.

The supernatural paradigm and the crackpot paradigm are not nearly as serious
a threat to the entheogen theory of religion as the tepid, mediocre,
middle-level popular “spirituality” that’s as empty and misguided as liberal
Protestantism’s reduction of religion to mundane ethics. The most serious
challenge to real religion is the religion which *seems* most credible but
stops just short of delivering the goods.

It is disturbing how the best books on religious myth are so much better than
literalist religion that they *seem* to deliver truth, without actually
delivering it. They portray myth as allegory for mental phenomena, and they
are correct in that, but still they utterly lack religion proper: myth is
allegory for *altered-state* mental phenomena, particularly of the
entheogen-triggered intense mystic altered state — *not* of ordinary-state
mundane mental processing.

>The funny thing, is that of these three choices, the Entheogenic Theory of

religions is the most logical and the least speculative or

>superstitious….although people will beg to differ.

Yes, that’s a point I’ve tried to emphasize, that the least speculative and
most *plausible* theory of religion… especially, *the simplest* theory of
religion, is that it reflects entheogenic mental phenomena and insights. I
worship simplicity and follow that star where it leads my thinking.

For example, whatever you think of the no-free-will hypothesis, it’s a strong
candidate for being the *simplest* explanation, and simply equating ego death
and rebirth with the experience of the temporary suspension of the sense of
free will may be controversial, but one thing for sure: it’s the simplest
theory possible, sort of like Zen perception is the simplest perception
possible — so simple, it’s beyond the capability of the normal, busy mind.

I need to amplify how much I’m against the mid-20th Century psychology
paradigm or interpretive framework. Psychology *claims* to offer a logical
alternative to religion, but it doesn’t. Consider Wilber’s definition of
Boomeritis as “narcissism” — that’s meaningless psychology-speak, where the
Psychology conceptual framework actively impedes understanding, rather than
providing understanding.

>It appears
>that most people are shocked and offended upon hearing that religion
>actually comes from eating plants. They would prefere to believe in
>Divine Omnipotent beings, specially chosen messengers, or
>intervention by Aliens.

Or, even more importantly lately, they would prefer to believe that religion
comes from thirty years of long meditation sessions, with a success rate of a
fraction of a percent. This is the real devil that we need to turn our sights
on now.

Ken Wilber advocates this view, rather than the entheogen initiation view
which holds that for all intents and purposes, five to ten entheogen sessions,
combined with a college course on systematic theory of ego death, brings a
mind to perfection and sacrifices the child-thinking for adult-thinking —
with any remaining development being nonessential refinement.

>I find this ultimately humorous.
>
>I am trying to locate the quote from Albert Einstein, where he
>implied that religion had an entheogenic basis. I think this view
>has been there and passed over or not crystllized. Clearly, someone
>like McKenna or Leary of course believed it but maybe they didn’t
>propose it as directly as it needs to be proposed.

Absolutely — the theory needs to be stated much more sweepingly and
forcefully, and today’s new dogmas like meditationism and psychologism need to
be unequivocally rejected and condemned as false and obstructive theories.

>Huston Smith definately said it,

He does everything wrong, stating this case in the standard weak and tepid way
that has enabled the status quo to ignore it — the old 1960s view that
ancient religion and exotic religions had entheogens, but the European
religions didn’t. The 60s advocates of entheogens, in their frenzy to fully
disparage “Christianity”, totally missed out on the opportunity to rewrite the
only history that matters at all, the history of Christianity.

They avoided the only battle that matters at all, and failed to recognize that
Christianity has always been an entheogen-centered religion, in all eras.

Similarly, they painted the dominant entheogen-disparaging, false consensus
view of Buddhist history as well, relegating entheeogens forever to a minor,
minimal bit part in Buddhist tradition, so that like the psychedelic culture’s
co-optation by the establishment, so was the great entheogen tradition in the
two most currently important religions, Christianity and Buddhism, co-opted
once again, as it so often has been, and robbed of its symbolic jewels while
being insulted and relegated by being integrated as a minor deviance, when the
entheogenic tradition completely deserves to be portrayed as the heart, soul,
core, source, and ongoing inspiration of Christianity and Buddhism, per the
maximal entheogenic theory of the origin and later development of the
religions.

>So did RA Zechner, but in more of a anthropological way.

What do you mean by “anthropological”? Zaehner is an official Catholic
theologian committed a-priori to defusing the entheogen threat by diminishing
the stature of entheogens as much as possible.

>Many others as well.

>I know that I myself
>have said it many times to people over the last 39 years, but really
>only in the past 5 years have I began to see it in terms of a
>specific or formal “theory,” that needs to be officially postulated
>academically. I think even the suggestion of this being a “theory,”
>implies the possiblity that it is possibly not true. Afterall the
>word “theory,” implies soemthing that needs testing or proof, when
>in reality, I had all the proof of this I’d personally ever need,
>when I was 19 years old. So to postulate this theory, one is really
>attempting to convince others in an academic mode.

— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

>>>>>Meditation is way more effective than entheogens for this one

true spiritual
goal, of gaining in mindfulness and lovingkindness.” That’s the low,
pathetic
argument the obstinate stick-in-the-mud Buddhists have stooped to in
the book
Zig Zag Zen, associated with Tricycle magazine. It is high time the
entheogenists cry out, What total, stinking bullshit, deliberately
shifting
the goal of meditation to a nebulous, vague, New Age empty-speak
that could
never possibly be measurable and accountable.>>>>

I agree 100%. The weak experiences of meditation and the pious
gurus just have never cut it…..I think what you are saying here is
that you feel that the Gurus who say, “Psychedelics are just a brief
glimpse….that never lasts”…etc. Are just trying to keep their
flock and really have no idea what they are talking about. But, I
will say that meditating on entheogens, produces far more profound
experiences then party people, dropping eveything in site, without
even trying to concentrate. I would say that “meditation” is really
is really a practice meant originally as a way to best use
Entheogens.

Regarding your comment on Huston Smith or others scholars who have
suggested the Entheogenic theory. This is documentary proof that is
useful. I don;t think attcking his stuff is wise because here in
trying to communicate, the Entheogenic Theory of relgion is is great
to have back up from well known people. I see that as
practical….something that would stand up in court more then your
words or my words. Validation of well known scholars only helps the
case…. short of putting LSD in the world’s water supply as a way
to make the point. NO one who is needed to understand this from a
legal, religious or psycholigical point of view will listen to “acid
heads.” It is a good thing to be able to pull out the books and
say, “See what he said…” “You can call us acid heads but what
about him?”

The practical factor will be there, unless you can come up with a
way to aim an Entheogen Raygun at people’ brain and zap them.

dc















— In egodeath, “Michael Hoffman” <mhoffman@e…>
wrote:

> Mushrooms and Mankind: The Impact of Mushrooms on Human

Consciousness and

> Religion
> James Arthur
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1585091510
>
> The Psychedelic Sacrament: Manna, Meditation, and Mystical

Experience

> Daniel Merkur
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/089281862X
>
> Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics
> Allan Hunt Badiner (Editor), Alex Grey (Editor), Stephen

Batchelor, Huston

> Smith
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0811832864
>
>
> Michael wrote:
> >>Who before me has made a general proposal that the real meaning

and origin

> of all the religions is entheogenic?
>
> James Arthur wrote:
> >I published the following at http://www.jamesarthur.net in 1997:
>
> >”Information on this space explores the possibilities and

evidence supporting

> the concept that the unique states produced by these plants are

intricately

> connected to the development of mankind and that the plants have

multiple

> connections to the evolution of religious thought and symbolism on

our planet.

> … Every indigenous culture used these plants and each culture

had a person

> or group of people they looked to for spiritual leadership and

they were the

> plant-knowers (among the myriad of names you can ascribe to

them). … The

> Amanita muscaria mushroom can be found at the roots of most of the

religious

> writings our planet has to offer. … These writings have dealt

with the use

> of such substances by spiritual practitioners in most every

religion formed on

> the planet.”
>
> >Does this seem vague? Am I not clearly stating that the origins

of religion

> is the use of drugs?
>
>
> Not as clearly as is needed in this foolish, upside-down era that

habitually

> forces ideas into the status-quo framework unless jarringly

awakened and

> interrupted. Your points need to be greatly amplified. The main

point I am

> trying to magnify and amplify more than has been done previously

is that

> *even* the main religions, *even* in their later development, *not

only* in

> their earliest expression, involved, in a very important way and

to a very

> important extent, the use of entheogenic plants.
>
> For example, Amanita and likely other psychoactives were not only

used in some

> of the various diverse groups which eventually coalesced into

Christianity,

> but were also used by some groups and individuals in Christendom

during all

> later periods up to and including today’s American Christianity,

forming what

> certainly should be considered a venerable ongoing tradition, even

if

> semi-suppressed.
>
> My recent emphasis on the need for emphasis concerns my resolution

on the

> delicate subject of the legitimacy of meditation on today’s popular
> spirituality. It was hard to find a way to pound home a certain

forceful

> rejection and condemnation of meditation, while also doing so in a

viable,

> reasonable way.
>
> Common thinking keeps on reverting to ordinary ways of considering

the role of

> meditation versus entheogens, and it was time for someone to stop

and shout

> “No, no, no! Enough! That’s wrong, and I must insist more

clearly than clear

> that it is deeply wrong, the opposite of the truth.” There is a

great

> difference between simply stating truth, and clearly and

effectively

> communicating truth.
>
> These points about the presence of entheogens must be pushed home

far more

> forcefully, far more broadly, far more emphatically. We’ve got to

forcefully

> disrupt the status quo, which is reflected in the book Zig Zag

Zen. Sure, Zig

> Zag Zen has a little, it touches on the point that entheogens

weren’t entirely

> lacking from all of the Buddhist groups — but that’s the problem,

that

> tepidness, that *imbalance*.
>
> The status quo that we must battle with all our energy to

overthrow now is the

> Huston Smith types who gently assert that entheogens were present

in the most

> ancient origins of ancient religion, and are a valid simulation of

meditation

> that should be considered as legitimate and authentic as

meditation. To hell

> with that imbalanced picture! With friends of entheogens so tepid

as that,

> who needs enemies?
>
> Quit all the excuses and apologetics and just look, in Zen reality-

attuned

> fashion: *clearly* and *obviously*, New Age American Buddhist

Meditation is

> placebo bullshit pretending to be the real thing, when obviously

it’s nothing

> of the sort. Entheogens are the real method; meditation is merely

an

> adjunct — *not* the other way around like Zig Zag Zen and all the

rest of the

> old status quo scholarly “defenders” of entheogens would have it!
>
> It takes a certain boldness and shaking oneself awake to throw off

the

> dogmatic slumber of humble respect for meditation. Screw

meditation! It can

> jump off a cliff! It is effectively an obstruction to actual

intense

> religious experiencing. It doesn’t require that one try

meditation before

> earning the right to reach this inevitable conclusion. The most

elementary

> and simple reasoning in the world shows it.
>
> The emperor of meditation has no clothes, just look and see.

Almost everyone

> reports that *meditation doesn’t work* as a way of triggering

intense

> religious experiencing, while almost everyone reports that

entheogens work

> very well to trigger this.
>
> Only the most stick-in-the-mud apologists for repressive, evasive

orthodoxy

> could possibly hold that meditation is more effective for

triggering intense

> mystic experiencing — in fact, even the most obstinately in-denial
> anti-entheogen meditation proponents are not so utterly foolish as

to claim as

> much — instead, like weasels and eels, they play a cheap shell

game of

> redefining the goal.
>
> They say “Ok, we admit that entheogens totally run circles around

meditation,

> toward the goal of triggering the intense mystic state. Then

we’ll save face

> and prestige by conceding that ground and claiming that we didn’t

want it

> anyway. Now we’ll redefine the goal of meditation in a way so

that we’ll be

> unaccountable. So, the new purpose of meditation, is, um,

mindfulness and

> lovingkindness, yeah, that’s the new story!
>
> Meditation is way more effective than entheogens for this one true

spiritual

> goal, of gaining in mindfulness and lovingkindness.” That’s the

low, pathetic

> argument the obstinate stick-in-the-mud Buddhists have stooped to

in the book

> Zig Zag Zen, associated with Tricycle magazine. It is high time

the

> entheogenists cry out, What total, stinking bullshit, deliberately

shifting

> the goal of meditation to a nebulous, vague, New Age empty-speak

that could

> never possibly be measurable and accountable.
>
> That’s just as bad as the Christians. How dare these American New

Age

> Buddhists think they are one bit better than the most fork-tongued

Christian

> literalist officials who preach about regeneration of the sinner,

while

> offering exactly nothing but theological verbiage and crackers and

grape juice

> to effect the regeneration. No wonder the only growing part of

Christianity

> is the Pentecostals — people have had it with empty, placebo,

cargo-cult

> Christianity.
>
> If you don’t make a detailed, emphatic, forceful, unambiguous

statement that

> entheogens are *everywhere* in *all* religions, in *all* eras, you

will be

> steamrollered by the status quo and absorbed into it just as the

feeble

> entheogenic scholarly status quo has been eaten alive and absorbed

helplessly

> into the totally bunk, completely fake and inert false religion of

New Age

> American Buddhist meditation, or dogmatic meditationism such as

falsely taught

> by the pandit Ken Wilber.
>
> The Wilberian method *doesn’t work*! Not, at least, by any

useful, practical

> definition of “work”. Wilber is exactly the same as a Protestant

theologian:

> he talks about transformation but tells you to attain it by a

method that

> works so poorly, it actually serves to prevent transformation. He

preaches

> the Devil’s gospel that salvation is difficult. That’s the most

powerful

> interpretation of “works salvation”.
>
> Wilber preaches a works salvation in that he says enlightenment is

difficult,

> slow, intangible, ethereal. Dan Merkur’s Psychedelic Sacrament is

essential

> for pointing out that there is another view: what in Buddhism is

the vajrayana

> “lightning path”. There are two gospels, two religions, two

attempts at

> salvation and enlightenment: the hard path of salvation through

works, and the

> easy, short, lightning path of salvation through faith, which

amounts to

> consuming the real, entheogenic flesh of the savior, Dionysus.
>
> When all is said and done, Wilber preaches a false gospel of works-

salvation,

> like Merkur’s non-entheogenic Jewish mystics with whom he

contrasted the

> rational, entheogen-using, fast-track, short-meditation-session

mystics. My

> gospel or teaching is the lightning tradition: enlightenment and

salvation are

> easy, fast, simple, rational, entheogenic.
>
> The others like Wilber spread another gospel or teaching, the

slow, hard,

> works tradition: enlightenment is difficult, slow, complicated,

beyond

> rationality, and non-entheogenic. Wilber has ingested MDMA a few

times and he

> reports one non-consenting, probably LSD experience in college.
>
> Regardless of his own personal experience with meditation and

entheogens, he

> only needs to read the massive evidence of the reports, to reach a

better

> conclusion than he has: the reports clearly indicate that

meditation works

> very poorly, while entheogens work very well, to produce

experiences that

> people report as intensely mystical and life-transforming.
>
> So he has to do a complicated, elaborate dance to elucidate

in “integral

> theory” fashion how entheogens are important, yet much less

important than

> meditation. Wilber is Mr. Epicycles, starting by building an

infinitely

> elaborate system, before he has grasped how utterly

straightforward, fast,

> simple, and easy the bulk of enlightenment is, in the truly

traditional

> entheogen path.
>
> The straightforward core of effective initiation is completely

lost and

> scattered in his baroquely comprehensive system. He manages to put
> transformation ever beyond reach by approaching it through the

works-salvation

> stance in which transformation is considered hard, complicated,

and slow.

>
> We need to use a much bigger hammer and pound much harder to forge

an

> entheogen theory of religion that doesn’t get instantly swallowed

into the

> dominant middle-level religion worldview, that swamps the theory

in mediocrity

> and defuses and assimilates reductively the immensely effective

power of

> entheogens compared to meditation and conventional ordinary-state

Jungian

> psychological mysticism.
>
> Middle-level religion defuses and neuters the entheogenic

tradition by damning

> it with faint praise and falsely reasserting the meditation path,

with its

> gospel of slow, lengthy, difficult, rare, non-rational

enlightenment. We must

> amplify the entheogenic position and theory so that this pattern

of absorption

> is forcefully and finally disrupted.
>
> We must throw down the gauntlet to the official histories of

religion and the

> mainstream proponents of meditation and assert that they are

totally full of

> shit and are telling the opposite of the truth — our mistake has

been to play

> along with them and affirm their way of painting the picture and

balancing its

> elements. It’s time to stop playing along with the meditationists

and the

> official historians of mysticism, and declare that their picture is
> *completely false*. The meditation dogma is completely false.
>
> The official mysticism portrayal is completely false — just as

the portrayal

> of Gnosticism as a later deviation from the original pure

Christianity is

> completely false.
>
> Researchers overemphasize the presence of the entheogens at the

temporal

> beginning of the religions, at the expense of pointing out their

presence in

> the continued later development of the religions.
>
> Your quotes could be interpreted as covering this ground, but they

are

> abstract and I had to read them twice and hunt down, to bring out,

the meaning

> that I’m looking for. After reading your site and your book, I

did *not* come

> away with any idea of a maximal, strong hypothesis that

psychoactives have

> been a thriving, though beleaguered, ongoing de-facto tradition

from the start

> of Christianity to present-day Christianity.
>
> To communicate your ideas you need to express your points vividly –

– the

> quotes are not a vivid expression of the radical proposal that,

say, the

> Christian mystics were tripping on Datura, that the Central

American Catholic

> indigenous were integrating entheogenic visions into Catholic

iconography.

> You convey your points about Amanita Christmas very clearly —

there is no way

> someone could read you without coming away with Amanita=Christmas.
>
> But it is too easy to read you without coming away

with “Christianity in all

> eras = Amanita”.
>
> The quotes below don’t clearly express the maximal entheogenic

theory of

> religion: that essentially all religions have always really been

about

> entheogens, from the start through their later developmental eras,

and never

> were really held to be about literalism.
>
> A most fascinating revelation is that all civilizations always

held the earth

> to be round; it was never held to be flat — we were just *told* by
> self-aggrandizing 19th-century science-promoter/propagandists that

we were the

> first to not hold backward views — like white man claiming to

discover

> medicinal drugs, when he’s really just co-opted timeless

indigenous plant use.

>
> To make progress in this field, we must almost overstate the case,

such as

> overstating it and then clarifying and qualifying.
>
> Your quotes below, by themselves, are too genteel, soft-spoken,

and complex to

> push the point home that Christian mystics of the Middle Ages were

tripping on

> psychoactive plants, and that Christian theology is actually based

on the

> intense mystic altered state induced by entheogens, more

importantly than it

> is based on any other sources such as non-augmented flagellation or
> contemplation.
>
> I think we must consider Middle Ages Christianity and its

equivalent in other

> religions as three populations: the officials, the mystics, and

the populace.

> Who used entheogens? Most mystics, many of the populace, and some

officials.

>
> We must do better than merely asserting that the temporal “origin”

of

> “religion” is drugs. Entheogen religion researchers must claim

*far* more

> ground, in the number of eras and in the number of religions

covered by the

> theory.
>
> Both the origin and all of the later eras of all the religions,

certainly

> including Christianity, Judaism, Hellenistic mysteries, ancient
> philosophy-religion, indigenous religion and shamanism, Islam,

Hinduism,

> Buddhism, Mormonism, Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox, and

Protestantism, *all*

> contained the venerable de-facto tradition of using psychoactive

plants to

> trigger intense mystic-state experiencing, and that *all* the

literalist

> history embodied in the religious stories is entirely allegorical

mythic

> metaphor expressing the psychological and cognitive phenomena

experienced

> during the entheogenic mystic altered state.
>
> Entheogens were used routinely; they were ever-present and *not*

just at the

> origin — so the literalist officials today cannot use the

dispensationalist

> cop-out of saying, “Well, the founders or early heretics used

these, but these

> plants have no proper place in our later tradition.” Gentle

qualified

> statements that there were some plants at the beginning leave the

literalist

> officials far too much weasel-room.
>
> This is why we have yet to express the maximal theory in a way that
> successfully communicates it forcefully and unambiguously.
>
> It has been hard working up, forcefully enough, these ideas,

pointing out in

> fiery detail with vivid condemnation just how intensely and

radically opposite

> of the truth the official portrayal of the history of the

religions is.

>
> We’ve got to light the entheogen theory on fire, really highlight

and

> emphasize it, stop soft-pedaling it, come out and clearly make a

very forceful

> statement — taking all of your statements several notches up and

expanding

> them several degrees to emphatically cover all religions, all

eras — and only

> after, qualify and smooth out the assertions. I don’t think you

have

> explicitly, effectively expressed the maximal entheogen theory.
>
> It’s too easy to read your quotes and still discount entheogen use

as safely

> limited, scattered deviations that happened at a few points in the

past.

> That’s too amenable with the official story — “Oh, those were

just isolated

> heresies that sometimes popped up here or there, out on the far

periphery —

> never mind those, they aren’t important to the core tradition.”
>
> We need to emphasize more the *continuity* and *ubiquity* of *many*
> entheogenic plants in practically *all* the religions, even in the

extreme of

> Middle Ages Catholicism. Many more Christians — officials,

mystics, and

> populace — were aware of the entheogenic nature and essence of

theology and

> Christian myth, than the 20th Century modern-era mainstream

assumed.

>
> To put forth a new paradigm, one must show a new balance of

emphasis of

> various points. The maximal entheogen theory of religion would be

expressed

> more in your quotes if they compensated more for today’s biased

assumptions.

> The reigning bias that I’m out to overthrow by framing the maximal

theory with

> a new balance of emphases is the recent assumption that entheogens

were

> present at the origin of Christianity but not in its later

development.

>
> I’m encouraged in this change of emphasis by Dan Merkur’s study of

entheogens

> in later Judaism, not just in ancient days of the early

scriptures. I have

> never read, as I recall, any proposal that the Christian mystics

used

> entheogens — except by implication in the article about the lily

as Datura in

> Entheos journal.
>
> If you or anyone has written that, it failed to make a conscious

impression on

> my thinking, and needs to be hammered home as effectively as your

Amanita

> Christmas research — at this point, all that’s needed is a

crystal clear

> proposal, showing the general plausibility, not evidence toward

proving it.

>
>
> — Michael Hoffman
> http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and

rebirth

> experience

We are always dealing with the general connotation of a word, when
communciating to people. Non-experienmced people are by far a
majority. The word “theory,” even among scinetists, generally means
something being asserted, that is not yet accepted as fact, because
it is not yet proven to them. Of course the only way to REALLY
prove this “theory,” is for people to have the experience
themselves. Then they know it is no longer just a “theory.”
Whatever technical definitions of a word, one may use, if the mind
set orf the person you are communicating with, uses the word to
mean a theory that is proposed but not accepted yet, then they want
to see proof. In this case all the documentary or theoretical
proofs are just considered speculative, unles they too can share the
experience. For instance, trying to explain gravity to people who
always lived in weightlessness, would require many words, and
formulas, but not until someone falls under the sway of gravity how
could they understand it? Very few people are equipped to
understand what they have not yet experienced, no matter how
exceptional the explanations. To ask people to accept what one says
on blind faith, is what most religions have tried to do.

For a person with a little bit of help and guiding, to totally
change their view about entheogens, would require a large dose and a
little bravery and seeking mind. First find brave people, then find
those with a seeking mind. That is asking alot from the kind of
population that we fo=ind around us.

Even in the 60’s with many people experimenting, only a small
percentage of those experimenters, 10 years later, would defend the
use of entheogens. I knew many people who had semi-heavy
experiences, but ten years later they were party people doing
budweiser and coke and 20 or 30 years later they repudiate
Entheogens, as though their experiences meant nothing. Some one had
written (I don’t remember who) that 2-4% percent of people who
experiemented with Entheogens in the sixites, had the kind of life
changing experience that they would say were religious experiences.
Most of them, even those who became religious due to LSD experience,
tend to deny that entheogens as just temporary–they buy into the
guru chatter about “real” meditation, or later actually denouce it
as “drug induced,” fantasy.

To me their were many reasons for this. Dosage, polypharmacy–
washing down “acid” with budweisers. Rolling donuts across the floor
at Winchells Donuts instead of focusing while using the entheogen,
distractions, inability to let go of ego, setting, etc. all those
things.

dc

>>>>>But Zaehner is a Catholic official, committed to fitting drugs

into his official Catholic framework, entailing — and this is the
real problem to battle now — taking every opportunity to disparage
entheogens without being caught making any statements that are so
blatantly false that his efforts backfire.>>>>>

Of course, Zechner will say that Hinduism and Buddhism was
entheogenic. At least int he case of Hinduism it is easy to prove.
But in the case of Buddhism it is tougher to prove using
documentation, and in the case of Christianity, Judism and Islam is
is even more difficult. At least to people who are inexperienced.

I know its true, but only based on experience. It doesn’t make
Zexhner the enemy, if you can quote that he says those pagan Hindu
religion came from the use of Soma. Well fine. Now show how other
religions came out of the more primitive.

As far as Merker is concerned. His book on Manna just isn;t a s
believable as it would need to be and John Allegro, is still called
a “crank.” Even though we know he was no crank. But take all of
these people as part of the argument and piece together history and
then the documentary case starts to shape up. Even Freud made
comments about Religion having a basis is shamanistic entheogen
use. The rest of their ideations are not as important, except in
that they have credibility to academics or people who think it is
crazy to suggest that religion, came from, “drug use.”

dc

The Status Quo is very diverse in their beloefs. They are busy
dividing themselves into dogma gangs, whether religious gangs,
scientific gangs, psychology gangs, military gangs, Crack gangs,
etc…
To the real Entheogenicist…(lol) it is all the “status quo,” but
each of these persons within each kind of gang speaks different
languages ands have differnt terms.

The task of changing things should first start with the basics that
are accepted, such as “relgious freedom,” at least in most modern
countries that claim they support “religious freedom.” if the idea
that entheogen use is “religious,” is a huge start. Use “political
correctness,” to our advantage for a change.

It would be great if people thought it was “politically incorrect,”
to condemn the use of Entheogens for “religious,” reasons.

To me, even the word “religion,” is just a larvel term, but to the
masses it functions as a
major imprint. We have to use the imprints of society to talk to
society.

dc

In Mahayana Buddhism, there is the term, Sansho (Jap.), “The Three
Proofs.” The three are usually called 1.documentary proof,
2.Theoretical proof, 3. Actual proof. It is a basic criteria used to
judge, inferiority or superiority of a teaching.

The third point has been used in many erroneous ways, by what is
being referred to here on this group as low or medium level
religion. In the low level religious point of view, which reflects
the vast majority of believers of religion, Buddhism included,
people may say it is actual proof to increase material wealth, cure
their illness through divine intervention or just synchronistic
occurances and what is perveived as divine interventions. Medium
level religion, then would be referring to the attaining of various
levels of theoretical and psychological understanding, brief
experiences of transcendent states of consciousness which support
the particular religions dogma, or just gaining better self-control
over the stresses of daily life. Actual Proof in high religion,
would not be concerned with proving a particular sectarian view.
Actual Proof would be the actual experience of an altered state of
consiousness as a most comprehensive enlightenment.

Even in entheogenic use, the practitioner may go through low to high
phases of experience, depending on existing conditions, such as
current mindset and theoretical basis, set and setting, prior
experience, dosage, physical and mental preparation, especially
preparatory austerity such as fasting and the existing brain
chemistry, prior to intake of an entheogen, and the basics of yogic
meditation.

Although actual proof is most important, documentary and theoretical
proofs, are important during preparation and especially in
communication to others, during any conversion process. The
conversion process is an entrainment of breaking down the other
person’s existing mindset in order to help prepare the person for to
attain the most earth shaking kind of actual proof.

The level of difficulty of a teaching or its degree of appeal,
whether broad or narrow and how something in presented to another,
in buddhism, relates to another term, “Expedient Means,” a central
point of especially, the Saddharma Pundarika Sutra.

Generally, “expedient means,” called “the buddha’s mysterious and
secret means,” is best understood as a trick used by the “buddha.”
to get people to prepare and practice, by dangling the carrot
of “nirvana.” Once the people were lead to the point of
seeking “nirvana,” then that Nirvana (extinction) goal is removed
and the followers are told, that that was just a trick to get them
to aspire for their own “Buddhahood,” of a more profound kind. In
the Saddharma Pundarika one of the chapters tells a metaphirical
analogy, of a group of travelers on a long and difficult road,
becoming tired and the leader of the group conjures up a “transient
castle,” and points to it and says to the weary travelers, “there’s
not much longer to go. Don’t give up” Because they see the castle
on the horizon, they regain the strength to continue. When they get
there they find the castle is an illusion, but the act of getting
there allows them to achieve the real goal. The expedient of the
transient castle is related to the carrot of Nirvana and instead
of “Nirvana” as extinction, they attain immortality instead.

Another way to understanding the Buddhism way of differentiating
between high and low comes from Chih-I’s (Tien-t’ai)elucidation of
the ten basic Life States. The first 6 life states are the more
common life states of beings, the next four are the
higher, “Buddhahood,” being the tenth. The seventh life state is
the state of learning, the eigth, “Self realization,” the ninth
Bodhisattvaship. The Saddharma Pundarika contains the explanation
that these “three vehicles” are just and expedient as well.

It is difficult to prove with documentary evidence the use of
Entheogens-in buddhist sects, but not impossible. I have found many
documentary reason to believe these people who were the most advance
people in terms of Entheogenic knowledge, in India/Kashmir at the
time (between the 1st through the 4rd century AD) The authors of the
Saddharma Pundarika, are most derfinately those who were working at
the court of King Kanishka and his predecessors and includes,
Nagarjuna the ayurvedic physican and dialectician, Ashvaghosa, the
poet and psychedelic musician, Caraka the ayurvedic physican and
author of the Caraka Samhita of the 80,000 herbs, Patanjali the
apparent author of the Yoga Sutras and other later teachers, such as
Arya Asanga, Vasubandhu and Sthirimati. Tese people were not apart
of the traditon Buddhist orders and their Mahayana Sutras and
writings do not appear in the regular canon, even that which was
compiled by the fourth council whihc was sponsered by Kaniska
himself.

I think that once Mahayana Buddhists are able to break down the
silly belief, that these Mahayana Sutras were words of Gautama, and
begin to realize that the authors of these cosmic sutras, were
entheogenicists, they would be forced to take another look at the
role of entheogens to their faiths.

dc

Has anyone read, “Breaking Open the Head” by Daniel Pinchbeck.
(A psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism)?

Comments welcomed/

Peace,
Kevin

Taking entheogens doesn’t automatically or inevitably result in religious
experiences. Entheogens are an extremely strong facilitator of religious
experiences, with a high correlation with religious experiences. Today’s
prohibition situation distorts and reduces the religious potential of
entheogens. Most of what is published about entheogen experiences is by
people who are young and barely educated, and by older people who have had one
or two experiences.

Only when we have a large number of highly educated people who have used
entheogens ten times or more can we start to give religious experiencing
through entheogens a fair chance.

Schizophrenics effectively have a frequent injection of entheogens, so their
mental structure neither stabilizes in the egoic mode nor shifts coherently to
the transcendent mode (two specific mental worldmodels with regard to self,
time, space, and control). The schizophrenic mind doesn’t have multiple
coherent personalities, but rather, dis-integrated and fragmented cognition
that doesn’t amount to even one personality.

The ideal path is from a stable egoic deluded worldmodel, through a series of
loose-cognition sessions, to a stable transcendent worldmodel that retains the
practical use of the egoic deluded worldmodel. The schizophrenic trajectory
is from a mostly stable egoic structure, to an incessant series of loose
cognition episodes, leading not to stable transcendent structure of
worldmodel, but to a chaotic mix of egoic structural fragments and
transcendent structural fragments.

Today’s typical young entheogen users have a stable ego, but don’t move on to
a stable transcendent structure, because of the lack of that higher stable
structure in the general population. Why does the modern era lack the stable
presence of the specific, stable, mental worldmodel among adults? Because of
the lack of entheogens and because of the half-hearted commitment to
rationality.

If you add high eduction, commitment to rationality, and serious use of
entheogens, with a goal of studying mental phenomena including personal
control, religious experiencing and religious insight result. Today, under
these conditions, it takes a particular mindset to use entheogens seriously in
combination with rationality: something like Douglas Hofstadter’s AI/Cognitive
Science approach including the interest in strange loops in consciousness.

At the same time as high worldmodels are lacking and impoverished, and not
integrated with rationality, so are the low worldmodels dominant. Ideally
we’d have the low worldmodel and the high worldmodel available in society.
Instead, the low worldmodel is overdeveloped and shuts out the actual high
worldmodel. Egoic thinking is so totally dominant, even in religion, which is
lowest-level religion or middle-level religion, that it becomes much harder to
break away into higher thinking.


— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

“Theory” has two meanings, as the definitions indicate: “hypothesis”, and
“systematic model”. I’m not so much a philosopher or theologian or mystic, as
a theorist and a constructer of models.


These factors you list are mostly just transient artifacts of a temporary
cultural situation. The culture treated the materials as a toy but as a
serious religious trigger as well. Even though most individuals disparaged
entheogens after using them in the 1960s, the fact remains that religion was
an unsurpassed theme. Also, *always ask* how today’s prohibition is
distorting your apparent data and evidence.

How can anyone know whether “most people” who used entheogens now disparage
them? That’s selective reporting bias. This culture promotes negative public
statements about entheogens, so you’ll hear lots of those, and punishes
positive statements about entheogens, so you’ll not hear many of those.

A list of reasons for entheogen users later disparaging and belittling
entheogens should begin with the most forceful reason: the chilling forces of
prohibition.

— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

>From: rialcnis2000

>We are always dealing with the general connotation of a word, when
>communciating to people. Non-experienmced people are by far a
>majority. The word “theory,” even among scinetists, generally means
>something being asserted, that is not yet accepted as fact, because
>it is not yet proven to them. Of course the only way to REALLY
>prove this “theory,” is for people to have the experience
>themselves. Then they know it is no longer just a “theory.”
>Whatever technical definitions of a word, one may use, if the mind
>set orf the person you are communicating with, uses the word to
>mean a theory that is proposed but not accepted yet, then they want
>to see proof. In this case all the documentary or theoretical
>proofs are just considered speculative, unles they too can share the
>experience. For instance, trying to explain gravity to people who
>always lived in weightlessness, would require many words, and
>formulas, but not until someone falls under the sway of gravity how
>could they understand it? Very few people are equipped to
>understand what they have not yet experienced, no matter how
>exceptional the explanations. To ask people to accept what one says
>on blind faith, is what most religions have tried to do.
>
>For a person with a little bit of help and guiding, to totally
>change their view about entheogens, would require a large dose and a
>little bravery and seeking mind. First find brave people, then find
>those with a seeking mind. That is asking alot from the kind of
>population that we fo=ind around us.
>
>Even in the 60’s with many people experimenting, only a small
>percentage of those experimenters, 10 years later, would defend the
>use of entheogens. I knew many people who had semi-heavy
>experiences, but ten years later they were party people doing
>budweiser and coke and 20 or 30 years later they repudiate
>Entheogens, as though their experiences meant nothing. Some one had
>written (I don’t remember who) that 2-4% percent of people who
>experiemented with Entheogens in the sixites, had the kind of life
>changing experience that they would say were religious experiences.
>Most of them, even those who became religious due to LSD experience,
>tend to deny that entheogens as just temporary–they buy into the
>guru chatter about “real” meditation, or later actually denouce it
>as “drug induced,” fantasy.
>
>To me their were many reasons for this. Dosage, polypharmacy–
>washing down “acid” with budweisers. Rolling donuts across the floor
>at Winchells Donuts instead of focusing while using the entheogen,
>distractions, inability to let go of ego, setting, etc. all those
>things.
>
>dc

Schizohrenia is a chronic affliction which lasts
from inception to the rest of ones life time. However,
schizophreniform is a short duration psychotic episode
that lasts from one to six months. It can be said that
a schizophreniform episode parallels an entheogenic
experience. It could be an even more powerful mystical
experience then entheogen users who boast that they
can handle it and maintain their ego while getting
lost in euphoria, Playing frisbee at the beach . How
many entheogen users are actually seeking a mystical
experience?. How many actually experience a true ego
death except by having a *bad trip* experience by
default that would mirror a psychotic episode.

Schizphreniform experiencers have included writers
Terrence McKenna, Philip Dick, Robert Anton Wilson and
Grant Morrison.

This is what Grant Morrison wrote concerning his
schizophreniform experience.

“A state of awareness in which unusual information and
insights seem to
download into the brain … a kind of ego annihilation
is followed by
euphoric reintegration and a sense of extended
understanding. There’s a
surge of creative energy, all time is understood to be
happening
simultaneously, weird synchronicities occur
constantly. A new relationship
with time, the self, and death [emerges].”


— Michael Hoffman <mhoffman@…> wrote:

> Taking entheogens doesn’t automatically or
> inevitably result in religious
> experiences. Entheogens are an extremely strong
> facilitator of religious
> experiences, with a high correlation with religious
> experiences. Today’s
> prohibition situation distorts and reduces the
> religious potential of
> entheogens. Most of what is published about
> entheogen experiences is by
> people who are young and barely educated, and by
> older people who have had one
> or two experiences.
>
> Only when we have a large number of highly educated
> people who have used
> entheogens ten times or more can we start to give
> religious experiencing
> through entheogens a fair chance.
>
> Schizophrenics effectively have a frequent injection
> of entheogens, so their
> mental structure neither stabilizes in the egoic
> mode nor shifts coherently to
> the transcendent mode (two specific mental
> worldmodels with regard to self,
> time, space, and control). The schizophrenic mind
> doesn’t have multiple
> coherent personalities, but rather, dis-integrated
> and fragmented cognition
> that doesn’t amount to even one personality.
>
> The ideal path is from a stable egoic deluded
> worldmodel, through a series of
> loose-cognition sessions, to a stable transcendent
> worldmodel that retains the
> practical use of the egoic deluded worldmodel. The
> schizophrenic trajectory
> is from a mostly stable egoic structure, to an
> incessant series of loose
> cognition episodes, leading not to stable
> transcendent structure of
> worldmodel, but to a chaotic mix of egoic structural
> fragments and
> transcendent structural fragments.
>
> Today’s typical young entheogen users have a stable
> ego, but don’t move on to
> a stable transcendent structure, because of the lack
> of that higher stable
> structure in the general population. Why does the
> modern era lack the stable
> presence of the specific, stable, mental worldmodel
> among adults? Because of
> the lack of entheogens and because of the
> half-hearted commitment to
> rationality.
>
> If you add high eduction, commitment to rationality,
> and serious use of
> entheogens, with a goal of studying mental phenomena
> including personal
> control, religious experiencing and religious
> insight result. Today, under
> these conditions, it takes a particular mindset to
> use entheogens seriously in
> combination with rationality: something like Douglas
> Hofstadter’s AI/Cognitive
> Science approach including the interest in strange
> loops in consciousness.
>
> At the same time as high worldmodels are lacking and
> impoverished, and not
> integrated with rationality, so are the low
> worldmodels dominant. Ideally
> we’d have the low worldmodel and the high worldmodel
> available in society.
> Instead, the low worldmodel is overdeveloped and
> shuts out the actual high
> worldmodel. Egoic thinking is so totally dominant,
> even in religion, which is
> lowest-level religion or middle-level religion, that
> it becomes much harder to
> break away into higher thinking.
>
>
> — Michael Hoffman
> Egodeath.com
>
>
>

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Today’s typical young entheogen users have a stable ego, but don’t
move on to
a stable transcendent structure, because of the lack of that higher
stable
structure in the general population. Why does the modern era lack
the stable
presence of the specific, stable, mental worldmodel among adults?
Because of
the lack of entheogens and because of the half-hearted commitment to
rationality.<<<<<<


There are also very immature, simplistic and reactive, unconscious
principles in effect. The same thing was going on in the sixites,
with the largest percentage of people.

I have been on psychedelic newsgroups of mostly young people, and in
trying to explain basic principle of wise and serious entheogen use,
been berated as an old fuddy duddy as they are downing their DXM in
copius quantities, every other day.

>>>>If you add high eduction, commitment to rationality, and serious

use of entheogens, with a goal of studying mental phenomena
including personal
control, religious experiencing and religious insight result. Today,
under
these conditions, it takes a particular mindset to use entheogens
seriously in
combination with rationality: something like Douglas Hofstadter’s
AI/Cognitive
Science approach including the interest in strange loops in
consciousness.

At the same time as high worldmodels are lacking and impoverished,
and not integrated with rationality, so are the low worldmodels
dominant. Ideally we’d have the low worldmodel and the high
worldmodel available in society.
Instead, the low worldmodel is overdeveloped and shuts out the
actual high worldmodel. Egoic thinking is so totally dominant, even
in religion, which is lowest-level religion or middle-level
religion, that it becomes much harder to
break away into higher thinking.


— Michael Hoffman>>>>>>>>>>>>

Very well said.

dc

>>>>>>How can anyone know whether “most people” who used entheogens

now disparage
them? That’s selective reporting bias. This culture promotes
negative public
statements about entheogens, so you’ll hear lots of those, and
punishes
positive statements about entheogens, so you’ll not hear many of
those.

A list of reasons for entheogen users later disparaging and
belittling
entheogens should begin with the most forceful reason: the chilling
forces of
prohibition.

— Michael Hoffman>>>>>

Granted, many succumbed to further cultural conditioning, but this
simply indicates the pratical reality that Entheogen use done
improperly in the first place, wihout a good support structure in
society, deos not bring on the desired effects. So in terms
of “rarity,” there is still the problem of “most people.”

This is why after many years of pondering just this issue, I think
the best course and the only one that will work is education in the
highest sense and to do this we have to first eliminate the legal
problem, by using factors in the social reality to our benefit
rather then just fighting with it. It is a reality that the ideal
of “relgious freedom” is a more evolved principle then in the past
or in many cultures today. The strange fact that “relgious freedom”
is on the law books, is a milestone in a series of baby steps and
this needs to be exploited using calm, rational words and in a
sense “baby talk,” using back up material inexperienced people can
understand.

Being able to transform difficult scholarly explantions into
essentially “baby talk,” is a very difficult art. The audience has
to be this lowest common denominator if the message is to be heard,
while at the same time using academia and legal jargon so that that
level can understand.

dc

— In egodeath, “Kevin” <kabbalahkev@y…> wrote:

> Has anyone read, “Breaking Open the Head” by Daniel Pinchbeck.
> (A psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism)?
>
> Comments welcomed/
>
> Peace,
> Kevin<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Hi, Could you do a little summation of that? Tell a bit about the
author?

dc

>>>>How can anyone know whether “most people” who used entheogens

now disparage
them? That’s selective reporting bias. <<<<<<

But I think it is more then anecdotal. As an idealistic and naive
kid I thought–even assumed that this awakening of society would
have tro happen now thay such a powerful agent for understanding
had been unleashed in the world.

In my case growing up in the So Cal area and seeing many of my
contempories, friends etc., as well as famous rock poets, using
entheogens, and exploring consciousness, during a three year
explosion of brilliance and then to see it all come crumbling down
so easily, was clearly a lesson. The 2-4% of people gaining lasting
benefit, later seemd to be a pretty accurate appraisal. Even the
rock lyrics reverted back to mundane boredom as most of the former
heros turned into drunken stooges for commercial enterprise and
former friends became PCP, alcohol and cocaine statistics or
retreated into cultish anti-entheogen thinking.

I saw a pretty widespread crossection in my realm of things.

dc

>I thought–even assumed that this awakening of society would
>have to happen now thay such a powerful agent for understanding
>had been unleashed in the world.
>
>In my case growing up in the So Cal area and seeing many of my
>contemporaries, friends etc., as well as famous rock poets, using
>entheogens, and exploring consciousness, during a three year
>explosion of brilliance and then to see it all come crumbling down
>so easily, was clearly a lesson. The 2-4% of people gaining lasting
>benefit, later seemed to be a pretty accurate appraisal. Even the
>rock lyrics reverted back to mundane boredom as most of the former
>heroes turned into drunken stooges for commercial enterprise and
>former friends became PCP, alcohol and cocaine statistics or
>retreated into cultish anti-entheogen thinking.
>
>I saw a pretty widespread cross-section in my realm of things.

Data can be interpreted into different interpretive frameworks. Entheogens
appear to have expanded consciousness for a few years, and then appear to have
petered out. Supposing that this pattern or apparent or effective pattern
happened, it remains to debate why it happened and what it means regarding the
potential of entheogens. I’m far more interested in the potential of
entheogens than the accidents of history of the late 1960s.

No matter how much anecdotal evidence there is from the 1960s, that is just
one source of data, one scenario, and one that is completely complicated and
dirtied as trustworthy evidence by the deceit-driven drug prohibition
enterprise. We really must reject *equating* the accidents of the late 1960s
with the whole of entheogen history and entheogen potential.

In the U.S., LSD was legally prohibited October 6, 1966. Before it was
prohibited, it was apparently good and expansive of consciousness; after it
was prohibited, it was apparently bad and not expansive of consciousness. Did
LSD change? Can we let the systemic foolishness of the people during a period
of five years in the late 1960s put a permanent negative stamp on entheogens,
which have been the source of religion and higher philosophy for a thousand
thousand years?

It is impossible to make a fair scientific conclusion about LSD and entheogens
based on the mass of anecdotal and research data collected since the mid 20th
Century. It is way to early to say that we know the limits and potentials of
the entheogens. What little we think we know since the late 60s is corrupted
as data by the darkening force of prohibition.

Most of what is written about entheogens now, by kids online, is an
embarrassment to any claim of entheogens being enlightening and consciousness
expanding — but why? That’s the question. Entheogens were shot down before
they were given half a chance in the 1960s, and if the result was
unenlightenment and disparagement of the entheogens, what is to blame — the
lack of potential of entheogens? Heaven forbid.

People’s actions and responses through the late 1960s and beyond may have been
lame, but it’s completely a matter of debate over whether this is the fault of
psychoactives or of the culture that prohibited them. We’ve taken one
pathetic shot at entheogens. We should not let one foolish, short era drive
us permanently to a false conclusion about the potential of entheogens.

Science correctly explains enlightenment by a strategy of deflation of the
egoically overinflated wishes for enlightenment.

The goal here is not to improve the world, but to define a model of
transcendent knowledge and establish that the entheogens are the most
effective way to fully grasp and experience that model of transcendent
insight. A key part of the strategy that makes the strategy so effective is
to define a model of enlightenment that is attainable and can be easily
secured, by reducing the stature of enlightenment and reducing the promises of
what benefits it can bring.

The good news is that enlightenment is vastly easier and simpler and a smaller
body of knowledge to attain than people assumed (and wished it to be). The
bad news is that it’s far smaller, plainer, and less world-changing. The
intellectual problem of transcendent knowledge and a rational model of
enlightenment is easily solvable, by reducing the problem.

Enlightenment has been now fully explained by science: it is really just
nothing more than using cognitive association loosening agents to temporarily
suspend the sense of free will and egoic control-power and individual egoic
separateness and thus switch the mental worldmodel from an egoic
trime-voyaging controller agent centered way of thinking, to a timeless,
frozen block-universe way of thinking.

Science has now explained also that all religion is essentially myth, not
literal history, and that all myth-religion reflects the aforementioned
process of using the loose cognition state to switch from the specific egoic
worldmodel to the specific transcendent worldmodel, requiring reindexing all
mental constructs regarding personal separateness, time, personal control, and
self.

Moral culpability shifts from being mentally attributed to the ego, to being
mentally attributed to the ground of being or a hypothetical responsible
controller of the ground of being. All theology easily maps to this model,
and all religious writings are more or less muddled expressions and metaphors
for these dynamics.

The Copenhagenist interpreters of Quantum Mechanics aren’t scientists, insofar
as they are busy interpreting; they are driven not by scientific goals but by
the popular project of defending egoic freewill at any cost, even of selling
out science’s reputation for striving for comprehensible models.

Einstein and Bohm were real scientists, promoting a hidden-variables approach,
compatible with determinism, and fairly visualizable, in which consciousness
doesn’t collapse the wave, but just the measuring instrument collapses the
wave, and the uncertainty is only uncertainty in the realm of knowledge, not
in the realm of the particles themselves.

The wave’s collapse is a collapse and resolution within the realm of
knowledge, not within the realm of actuality. That’s just a postulation, but
it is a superior postulation because it is comprehensible, unlike
Copenhagenism, which glories in, revels in, embraces, defends, loves,
advocates, and actively promotes incomprehensibility — a perfect perversion
of the spirit of science, positively delighting in undermining the entire
rational and reasonable character of science.

At the same time as the attainment at last of a rational and comprehensible
theory should be credited to the venerable name of Science (actually perhaps
the Engineering and Cognitive Science way of thinking), we must differentiate
between true and false science, between Bohm and Bohr. A single character,
the letter ‘i’ in a key word, split early theology into warring camps. Even
less separates true science from corrupt science: half a character — ‘m’ vs.
‘r’ in Bohm and Bohr, representing the Hidden Variables versus the
Copenhagenist positions.

Have your free will if you want it — but you must accept ESP, miracles, and
worst of all, Copenhagenism along with it, and also the endless
complexification of enlightenment.

Either:
ESP happens
There are miracles
There was a historical Jesus and Buddha
God’s kingdom refers to literal Jerusalem
Consciousness causes the quantum wave collapse
Individual personal free will is plausible and coherent
Enlightenment is complicated, difficult, and slow
Meditation is more effective than entheogens
Or:
There is no ESP
There are no miracles
There was no single Jesus or Buddha
God’s kingdom refers to the enlightened state
The quantum wave collapse is only a resolution in knowledge-space, not in the
particle itself
There is no individual personal free will
Enlightenment is simple, easy, and fast
Entheogens are more effective than meditation

Which set of axioms seems more plausible? Which one feels more satisfying and
comfortable? There are two mental personalities: those who love to embrace
the first set of suppositions, and those who seek the second set of
suppositions.

Many people positively cherish ESP, miracles, historical superhero religious
founder-figures, literalist exclusivist religion, magic thinking of
mind-over-matter taking over the mantle of Physics, and personal free will,
and have a love affair with the endlessly-receding romantic inflation of
enlightenment so that it is all the more sexy and appealing for being felt to
be out of reach, and are romanced as well by exotic and showfully *ascetic*
meditation.

People of that character feel too chilled by the prospect that there is no
ESP, that miracles are not to be held as maybe possible, that the devotional
figure of Jesus and Buddha simply aren’t there at all. It is disappointing to
them that there will be no conflagration and destruction of the world with
magic events happening in a wonderland of the Heavenly City, but that God’s
kingdom is nothing more than, well, the worst possible news in the world:
total defeat of the free will.

It is terrible, most unwelcome news to that type of mentality, that
enlightenment can be basically wholly attained, early in life, and that there
isn’t much to it at all, and it doesn’t change things much. It is devastating
to conclude that entheogens provide, relatively instantly and effortlessly,
what meditation manages to keep enticingly out of reach even after thirty
years of ascetic lifestyle.

This gospel is devastatingly disappointing, and tremendous great news. To the
egoic mind, enlightenment is the ultimate disappointment, the absolute and
total failure of their god, their religion, their spiritual worldview.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary
Shamanism
Daniel Pinchbeck
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0767907426
Sep 2002

It’s a journalistic approach, which often works very well.

Average rating 5/5 in 16 reviews is high, and this is also a high rate of
posting reviews.

I once posted a list of some top 5 or 10 books that would be most relevant.
Today’s books aren’t good enough, according to my way of thinking; I can only
recommend them with reservations. The problem is, I’d have to recommend
reading 100 books, because each one covers too few key topics, too weakly. I
need to write a great bibliography of 100 books that support my theory. It’s
more important to know about the books than reading them. See my book lists
at the website first, rather than trying to read these thick, half-clueful
books.

Mysticism in World Religions (not Geoffrey Parrindar’s; the out of print one)
Rebirth for Christianity – Huhn (no Historical Jesus; it’s all psychological
metaphor)
Myth & Ritual in Christianity – Alan Watts
Ken Wilber — Up From Eden is a readable early book, and has just enough
coverage of Hellenistic religion for me to show how utterly clueless Wilber is
there, omitting entheogens and supposing that Mr. Historical Jesus was,
inexplicably, far more advanced than his culture
Jonathan Ott: Entheogenic Reformation
Richard Double’s book showing the moralistic motives of freewillists and the
philosophical/scientific motives of determinists
Surely one of the very best is Elaine Pagels’ Gnostic Gospels — profound,
paradigm-changing, readable.
The Jesus Mysteries is also a real landmark — effectively simultaneously
disproves literalist religion and proves mystic religion.
An example of a book that is essential but only for establishing a couple
pieces of the puzzle: Dan Merkur’s Psychedelic Sacrament (entheogens in Jewish
mysticism)

I’d even have difficulty listing any books that show something *so basic* and
obvious as that the fundamental role of myth is to express the intense
entheogenic mystic altered state, not mundane default-state psychology, much
less how the external world works.

Books go out of print all the time, it’s terrible, including the very best
books. Even the very best books have just bits and pieces of the theory I’ve
pulled together, trivially simple though it may be. Knowing what topics and
interpretations to be alert for when reading is more important than which
books you read.

— Michael Hoffman
Egodeath.com

First, rationality is imperfect, being a mixture of foggy practical notions of
personal self-control power and moving through time. Then, in the mystic
altered state, rationality reaches one kind of perfection: realization of the
merit of postulating no-free-will, and frozen-time, and a few other key
points. This then raises a huge practical problem of self-control; at this
point one wrestles with an angel, and looks for a way to safely permanently
cast out the habitual demon of egoic imperfect thinking.

There is no egoic-type action that one can do as an egoic-type controller to
rescue and regain personal self-control stability. Only some transcendent
leap outside the system can return the mind to stability, but that leap isn’t
some egoic-type action that’s possible by an egoic-type controller-agent. The
mind experiences itself as being totally dependent on whatever it is that
timelessly injects thoughts into the mind, or sets thoughts in place in the
spacetime block.

What can one do to regain practical control and mental stability, when one is
seen to be frozen in an iron spacetime block? Ordinary perfect rationality
inexorably concludes that no such “move” is possible. At this point, ordinary
perfect rationality gives way to transcendent perfect rationality.

Mundane, muddled, normal-state egoic thinking isn’t ordinary perfect
rationality. The sequence is:

Egoic thinking (partial rationality, like child/animal)
Ordinary perfect rationality (only at the last moment of egoic life)
Transcendent perfect rationality (follows in 30 seconds, with sense of rescue)
Permanent transcendent mental worldmodel (transcendent thinking)

All one’s egoic reasoning finally adds up to a revision that brings about
ordinary perfect rationality, but that poses a huge problem, which is
immediately solved by leaping up to transcendent perfect rationality, which
may include, for example, a practical postulate of being controlled by a
compassionate, not just an impersonal, ground of being, or a compassionate
hidden controller that resides outside the ground of being and controls it
from outside.

Also, in a sense, the ego delusion is transcendently postulated, but now is
postulated in full light of the illusory, conventional nature of ego and the
sense of egoic free will and personal control-power. The mind builds up to a
perfect and problematic realization that it is a helpless puppet/slave rather
than a sovereign, and next solves that practical problem by learning to
falsely or transcendently postulate its sovereignty again.

Ordinary perfect rationality is only reached after developing egoic
rationality to the point of seeing how illogical it is, then revising it for a
more logical system — but at that point, a cybernetic control-stability
crisis immediately arises. At first, the mind flees for its egoic life,
falling back into “incarnation” and “rebirth”. But eventually the egoic mind
is strong enough to will its sacrifice, and is strong enough to be available
yet disengaged, or both affirmed and denied.

Finally the mind learns to say “I believe in the lie of ego, for practical
reasons of convention only.” I believe I am sovereign, though I know that I’m
not really sovereign; I am *virtually* a sovereign freewilliing agent. The
mind finally learns to think “I believe in my virtual-only ego, who commands
his own virtual-only individual free will.”

If it becomes practically necessary to postulate possibly meaningless things
such as a compassionate controller of the ground of being who is immune to
Fate and the power of frozen time, or to deliberately postulate ego and free
will only 30 seconds after having seen them to be essentially illusory, is
that perfectly rational, or less than rational?

It is a kind of coherent rationality that is more than perfect; it is
transcendent; it is rationality that includes the practical ability to fudge
to save your life as a practical, virtual self-controller agent who wields the
power of will even though the world is a frozen spacetime block.

The inevitable “mystery” that Reformed theology always leads to is a muddled,
inferior equivalent of this “paradox” of having to intentionally postulate
what you have just before managed to logically disprove: personal power, the
illusion of individual free will, the hoax of voyaging through flowing time
into an essentially open future.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

> I’d advise caution. There is no good reason to think that Siddhartha,

Zoroaster and Muhammud – for starters – weren’t historical figures.

Given how mythmaking works, and given the core purpose of myth-religion — to
reflect entheogenic mystic-state phenomena — there is no great reason to take
it for granted that they existed, either. Scholars have erred *way* too far
on the side of taking it for granted that the founding figures, such as Paul,
existed literally as individuals, though what myth is mainly about isn’t
historical individuals, but archetypal figures personifying the intense mystic
altered state.

I have read stacks of books against the Historical Jesus and other Christian
founding superheros, but not much regarding Buddha, Zoroaster, or Muhammud, so
I won’t press the nonexistence of the latter. Still, to say “Buddha existed
as a literal single person who founded Buddhism” is to put forward a grossly
misconceived and malformed model of what myth-religion is all about. The
primary source of myth-religion is the intense mystic altered state, not
founder-figures from long ago.

>One of the great strengths of early Christianity had to do with the fact that

the ‘cornerstone’ of the Church was the (absurd) Pauline belief in a literal,
historical ‘god’ who resurrected from the dead.


Early Christianity’s only claim to distinctiveness with respect to the other
mystery religions was the *claim* that Jesus was a historical literal
individual — it was a profitable claim.

Your above statement contains a weak assumption: the assumption or
interpretation that the Paul figure was made to preach a literal historical
literal death and literal resurrection of a single, specific historical
individual named Jesus. The Pauline writings express a purely Gnostic
interpretation, with the later Paul-attributed scriptures being used to
instead express anti-Gnostic viewpoints.

Only when the Pauline writings are read through Gospel-colored glasses can a
careless reader come away with the impression that those writings assume a
single, specific historical individual named Jesus.

>>We need a model of how religious literalism overshadowed entheogenic

mysticism, at least overshadowing it according to the official histories..

>Entheogenic mysticism suffered from esotericism from within and suppression

from without.

I’m extremely against secrecy of any sort, regarding esoteric knowledge or
practices. Prohibition makes this difficult, though. I’m also against the
lack of explicit explanation. Metaphor is good but is most helpful when
accompanied by explicit elucidation.


The official historians of religion, professional scholars of Christian
history, have manage to extremely entrench the view that orthodoxy has always
been actually the center of religion and that heresies have actually been
peripheral deviations. That view is so taken for granted that even the
would-be progressive entheogen scholars take it too seriously. The only
scenario that makes sense, given how intense the entheogen mood is in theology
and art, is that the officials had only very partial control, and that
heresies and entheogen use was quite commonplace.


— Michael Hoffman
http://www.egodeath.com — simple theory of the ego-death and rebirth
experience

>>>People’s actions and responses through the late 1960s and beyond

may have been
lame, but it’s completely a matter of debate over whether this is
the fault of
psychoactives or of the culture that prohibited them. We’ve taken one
pathetic shot at entheogens. We should not let one foolish, short
era drive
us permanently to a false conclusion about the potential of
entheogens.<<<

Agreed. But these “pitfalls,” are instructive. It is not the
entheogens that are to blame, althoug it remains to be seen as to
what will be discovered in the future….much of what happened in
the sixties, or now with the rave culture etc., and ecstacy….is a
recapitulation of distinct patterns emerging. And there is always
the “Manson effect,” (did I just coin a phrase–I don’t know) these
ding dongs that kidnapped the young girl, supposedly “found god with
ten hits of LSD in the desert.”

Back in the eighties I wrote a humorous/sarcastic song about
the “discovery” of “Unicorn” 10,000 times more powerful then
LSD…..with the line, “now ANYONE can do it now matter how stupid
they are!!”

Of course not only should entheogens be legal for religious use,
they shoulr be legal for research. The science is still very
primitive and that needs ot be kept in mind. Someone near and dear
to me, who is brilliant, against my conservative advice, went
through a period of frequent X-tacy use. She knows now how it
effected her neurotransmitter levels and has taken a few years for
her serotonin chemistry to normalize. Of course this requires much
more research.

Also, as far as to what the future can hold…we cannot just discard
the reality that the most ancient cuklutre have this cultural memory
of the “Elixer of Immortality,” in the future the potential may be
greater then anyone imagines—the enthoegenic properties are onky
the tip of the iceberg.

dc

>>>>>Still, to say “Buddha existed

as a literal single person who founded Buddhism” is to put forward a
grossly
misconceived and malformed model of what myth-religion is all about.
The
primary source of myth-religion is the intense mystic altered state,
not
founder-figures from long ago.<<<<<

( I tried to make corrections in my reply to this but Yahoo ate it.

You may have got it in email…so I will rewrite.)

Siddartha Gautama Sakyamuni was a real individual person. The
problem has been in the dating , which is all screwed up and the
belief that he was directly responsible for all but around 10% of
the sutras.

The dating problem is due to an error made by William Jones and Max
Muller, which placed in in the 6th century or 5th century BC,
deopending on two other factors. This was all based on the “sheet
anchor of Indian History” which placed the King Chandragupta Maurya
as contemprary with Alexander, when in fact it should be
Chandragupta Gupta. This revision would placed Gautama’s birth
at around 1887 BC. The only teaching he really taught was the 4
noble truths, and the Eight Fold Path. All the later Sutras were
much later and especially the Mahayana, which has no direct
connection to Gautama. That Gautama was a divine being God-man type
is internally inconsistent with the early sutra, which were really
his teachings. He was a Philosopher not a divinity. That idea is
silly and inconguous with the oldest sutras.

The Mahayana even admits the use of “expedient means,” (Upaya) and
in placing Gautama as the central figure in Mahayana Sutras was an
expedient as well. The reason for this is too complex to get into
right now.

If one believes what Barbara Thiering says, that Jesus is
the “wicked Priest,” from the Dead Sea Scrolls, then that would be
the best evidence he really lived. I tend to believe he did live.
Of course the mytholgoy is rampant. I like the story that Mother
Mary’s tomb is in Pakistan and Jesus traveled to Kashmir at the Time
of Kanishka. People who follow “Bodhisattva Issa,” claim he was
Jesus and actually participated in the writings of the
Mahayana…..I said I like that theory, but don’t necessarily
believe it…I am just open to it. Who knows what archeologists will
find in the future.

Zoroaster, was probably based in a real person or persons, but
evidence for this is simply without substantial proof.

Mohammed, was a real person. There is just too many real events of
his pre-visionary days passed down, although I am no expert on him
by any means. I have seen evidence of entheogen use, I believe its
on Erowid. This would be very interesting to prove…..especially
now.

dc

— rialcnis2000 <rialcnis2000@…> wrote:

> >>>>>Still, to say “Buddha existed
> as a literal single person who founded Buddhism” is
> to put forward a
> grossly
> misconceived and malformed model of what
> myth-religion is all about.
> The
> primary source of myth-religion is the intense
> mystic altered state,
> not
> founder-figures from long ago.<<<<<
>
> ( I tried to make corrections in my reply to this
> but Yahoo ate it.
>
> You may have got it in email…so I will rewrite.)
>
> Siddartha Gautama Sakyamuni was a real individual
> person. The
> problem has been in the dating , which is all
> screwed up and the
> belief that he was directly responsible for all but
> around 10% of
> the sutras.
>
> The dating problem is due to an error made by
> William Jones and Max
> Muller, which placed in in the 6th century or 5th
> century BC,
> deopending on two other factors. This was all based
> on the “sheet
> anchor of Indian History” which placed the King
> Chandragupta Maurya
> as contemprary with Alexander, when in fact it
> should be
> Chandragupta Gupta. This revision would placed
> Gautama’s birth
> at around 1887 BC.
>
>
>
> As with making the case for a historical Jesus there

are also similar problems with a historical Buddha. It
can be demonstrated that the Buddha is a composite of
godmen, legends and sayings. There is a host of
candidates for a historical buddha as there are for a
historical Jesus. There are about 25 buddhas who
appeared before Gotama. The name Gotama is a common
one in ancient India. So what proof is there that the
sayings of many Gotamas may not have been ascribed to
one person. There was a universal mythos in the
ancient world which resulted in religions based on
astrotheology and perhaps entheogen use. There is no
proof that there was a singular historical personage
for any of them. The only hope to find a single
historical figure for any of the ancient god men would
be to evemeristically lift up a common man to superman
status by mythos.


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