Altered states exist on a spectrum, from enhancing human flourishing to perpetuating dangerous delusions. Daniel Pinchbeck’s recent comments on our book inspire Julian’s journey into psychedelics, the 2012 prophecy, the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, and the brain typologies that underlie visionary religious experience. Tune in for practical advice and guidelines about drugs, awareness practice, cults, and staying sane.
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If psychedelic plants have been revered in multiple traditions as sacraments because of the altered states they induce, what about those people who accessed similar insights but without taking any kind of psychedelic sacrament?
You see, there's an assumption about this question that is central to New Age culture.
It goes like this, plant medicines give us a glimpse of what the saints and sages, the great mystics, have awakened fully into experiencing as an ever-present reality all the time.
Boomer generation American popularizer of Eastern spirituality, Ram Dass, would tell the tale of giving his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, at his request, heroic doses of LSD, which appeared to do nothing to him.
So deeply expanded was the Guru's mind already.
That being on three tabs of acid was basically normal.
Now, I've a hunch there are probably more plausible explanations for what happened there, but we don't really know.
Nonetheless, in Ram Dass' conception, which really influenced me in my 20s, Psychedelics give one a glimpse of the mountaintop, but then slow and gradual dedicated spiritual practice over years or decades is required to really live there.
Okay, so we've talked about spiritual practitioners and we've talked about ceremonial plant sacraments.
Thanks.
But what about those people without any deliberate spiritual practice or aspiration who experience powerful altered states which they describe in ways very similar to psychedelic trips but without having taken anything?
These descriptions very commonly contain claims of religious revelation, plenty of apophenia, mythopoetic language, but also sometimes paranoia, and a kind of scrambling of figurative versus literal language in relation to reality.
One of the first books I ever read about psychedelics, right on my parents' bookshelf, was Henri Michaud's 1974 book, The Major Ordeals of the Mind, in which he proposed, along with the fascinating artistic novelty of certain experiences, that psychiatrists might do well to take these drugs in order to more empathetically understand their schizophrenic patients.
Now I have in some previous episodes also mentioned my personal hero, the neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran.
I can't recommend his book The Tell-Tale Brain highly enough.
He's been called the Sherlock Holmes of neurology because of his ability to solve complex brain injury cases from around the world that have completely stumped other professionals.
There's a case history featured in a documentary based on his 1998 book, Phantoms in the Brain, which involves a young man who would have spontaneous and overwhelming religious experiences despite not seeking them out or even being a believer.
His accounts of these experiences are filled with mythopoetic, supernatural, metaphysical imagery, ideas, and powerful emotions.
They include feeling that he himself was God, or that God was talking directly to him, or that the most mundane everyday objects or events were supercharged with extraordinarily important spiritual meaning.
His visions and thought process at those times include believing that he was a prophet like Noah who could avert a coming disaster like the flood.
Ramachandran explains to the young man and his father, who has supported him while in the midst of these experiences, that a condition called temporal lobe epilepsy creates an electrical storm that overloads connections in the brain between emotional centers and sensory areas.
This results in an escalating emotional significance of sensory input, climaxing In a sense that it all simply must be an ultimate intelligence communicating the deepest truths.
This new and overwhelming context for experience becomes the filter through which all thoughts and emotions are then being processed.
Now This is fascinating.
It turns out that some people with temporal lobe epilepsy have three features in common.
They have seizure experiences, often with no visible external symptoms, in which they feel God must surely be talking to them.
They then have a compulsion to write obsessively about these experiences, endless pages, and their implications.
And quite often there's a sense of disgust toward sexuality.
Or, less commonly, there's hypersexuality.
These are manifestations of this electrical storm and the brain areas that it is connecting in very, very intense ways.
Now, there are other kinds of spontaneously arising altered states, like bipolar mania, for example.
Or schizophrenia.
That may also have religious overtones, probably because of similar brain pathway overloads.
But here's the question.
Is it plausible that historically the rare and revered visionary religious prophet of their time May have had temporal lobe epilepsy.
They may have experienced God talking directly to them.
They may have written very long books about what God said.
And they may have preached about sexuality as inherently sinful.
Because isn't it the case that most devoutly religious people who long for these kinds of personal visionary experience, this kind of confirmation of the presence of God, simply never experience it for even a moment and rely instead on the virtue of faith?
Isn't it the case that the most dedicated yogis and meditators can practice for decades While idealizing the accounts of mind-blowing mystical awakenings that they've read, say, in Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi, but without that kind of profound enlightenment experience ever presenting itself.
Now, there's a whole industry in the New Age built around selling seekers on whatever the next step might be toward finally fulfilling that longing to awaken.
And that industry relies on it never really happening.
Psychedelics alter consciousness radically while present in the brain.
And they present an opportunity to reflect and perceive one's mind temporarily free from everyday habit patterns, learned reactions, limiting beliefs, or psychological baggage.
Precisely because your brain chemistry is so profoundly different for that window of time.
They also heighten thought processes around the paranormal, supernatural, the hidden meaning of it all, and perceiving synchronistic patterns, which is also called apophenia.
Now, besides being exhilarating and novel, this can also take on a darker, more paranoid tone, sometimes referred to as a bad trip.
So, in terms of my thesis, there's a small number of people who have psychiatric or neurological conditions, combined as well, crucially, with personal charisma, eloquence, and the kind of intelligence that can produce a prophet whom seekers believe is in direct communication with the Divine.
But there are many more people who can induce experiences of a similar nature temporarily via psychedelics, especially when those are taken in an explicit spiritual context.
Some of those people may either take enough of the drugs Or just be labile enough to have those experiences produce a full-blown conviction of having traveled to another world, or having communed with deities or extraterrestrials, perhaps having downloaded a prophetic vision crucial for all of humanity to understand.
In either case, There's a much larger number of earnest seekers that may gather around their faith that this chosen one has been to the mountaintop and brought back the higher spiritual truths about life, the universe, and everything.
