The images and words brought back from these journeys—visits with the souls of the dead and unborn, visions… — Michael Pollan
The images and words brought back from these journeys—visits with the souls of the dead and unborn, visions of the afterlife, answers to life's questions—were powerful enough to compel belief in a spirit world and, in some cases, to serve as the foundation of whole religions. Of course, plant drugs are not the only technologies of religious ecstasy; fasting, meditation, and hypnotic trances can achieve similar results. But often these techniques have been used to explore spiritual territory first blazed by the entheogens.
What a natural history of religion would show is that the human experience of the divine has deep roots in psychoactive plants and fungi. (Karl Marx may have gotten it backward when he called religion the opiate of the people.)
p. 144Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
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Aldous Huxley did his best to argue us out of the view that a chemically conditioned spiritual experience is false—and he did so long before we knew anything about cannabinoid or opioid receptor networks….He points out that mystics have always worked systematically to modify their brain chemistry, whether through fasting, self-flagellation, sleeplessness, hypnotic movement, or chanting.†
†Huxley suggests that the reason there aren’t nearly as many mystics and visionaries walking around today, as compared to the Middle Ages, is the improvement in nutrition. Vitamin deficiencies wreak havoc on brain function and probably explain a large portion of visionary experiences in the past.
p. 171
But is this wonder the real thing? At first glance, it wouldn’t seem to be: a transcendence that’s chemically induced must surely be fake. Artificial Paradises was what Charles Baudelaire called his 1860 book about his experiences with hashish, and that sounds about right. Yet what if it turns out that the neurochemistry of transcendence is no different whether you smoke marijuana, meditate or enter a hypnotic trance by way of chanting, fasting, or prayer? What if in every one of these endeavors, the brain is simply prompted to produce large quantities of cannabinoids, thereby suspending short-term memory and allowing us to experience the present deeply?…From a brain’s point of view, the distinction between a natural and an artificial high may be meaningless.
p. 170
There are a lot more roses and tulips around today, in a lot more places, then there were before people took an interest in them. For a flower the path to world domination passes through humanity’s ever-shifting ideals of beauty.
p. 79
