CANNABIS CULTURE –
The Immortality Key is a bestselling book, which suggests a entheogenic role in the ancient Christian Eucharist, that originated with and was passed down from the cult of Dionysus and the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece. In this article Chris Bennett, who has written about some of these same themes and areas of history offers his views on where the book wins and fails.
Warning, biases ahead….
To be clear, this is as much of a ‘response’ and ‘discussion’ about
The Immortality Key as a ‘review.’ With that said, this article is in no way intended to dissuade the interested reader away from
Was the vision of the burning bush a psychedelic experience? Did use of drugs inform early Christianity? Scholars who linked the emergence of religion to altered states of consciousness once paid a heavy price, but that may be changing
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Religious experiences can be had by many methods; meditation, fasting, feats of endurance, the list goes on. One method in particular, however, has proven consistently reliable – psychedelics. In the 60s, a generation of young people were gifted direct religious experiences thanks to the discovery of LSD. This led to a fascination with Eastern religions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism, that had maps for such experiences. Many uncovered the mystic strands in the faiths of their culture of origin. Many questions arose. Why did these substances evoke religious experiences? Could they have played a role in the development of religion? If so, why was this strand of psychedelic gnosis ultimately lost?
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Posted on December 23, 2020 | Views: 955
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by Dr. James Cooke: Religious experiences can be had by many methods; meditation, fasting, feats of endurance, the list goes on…
One method in particular, however, has proven consistently reliable – psychedelics. In the 60s, a generation of young people were gifted direct religious experiences thanks to the discovery of LSD. This led to a fascination with Eastern religions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism, that had maps for such experiences. Many uncovered the mystic strands in the faiths of their culture of origin. Many questions arose. Why did these substances evoke religious experiences? Could they have played a role in the development of religion? If so, why was this strand of psychedelic gnosis ultimately lost?