Psychedelic Christians

Updated 2 years ago

Alex Grey Cosmic Christ

Genesis 1:29
“Then God said Behold, I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth.
But what about enlightenment upon ingestion of these plants? Is a religious experience with God possible through the plants that He has given us?

Ancient Israelites burned cannabis as part of their religious rituals, an archaeological study has found.

Higher being:
Can legalizing drugs bring us closer to God?

By Katharine Mieszkowski
Aug. 4, 2000

Huston Smith, 81, speaks slowly with the deliberate enunciation and wry playfulness of a serious scholar who is used to having what he says deeply considered. Seated in his Berkeley, California, living room, the authority on world religions takes out a letter he’s just received from a reader of his most recently published book.
The letter recounts a spiritual epiphany. “It is so moving,” Smith intones warmly and begins to read it aloud with evident respect:”It was like I traveled into myself and broke through to the other side, and I was in the presence of God. I was in communion with all that ever could be, and experienced love beyond measure. I experienced a person loving me. Being love. Being all. Total peace. The end of all fear. Eternal joy.
I was in union with an infinite person who had nothing but perfect love for me and in whom I was in union and it was ALL, capital A, double L …”
The letter describes a “theophany,” nothing less than a vision of the divine. It is also a 51-year-old man’s remembrance of an LSD trip at age 18. The teenager, who got more than he bargained for when he dropped acid, grew up to be a Catholic priest.
For reasons that require no explanation, the priest never told his church superiors about this formative religious drug trip, as he confides in the letter.
He’s written to Smith in response to the religious philosopher’s provocative new book: “Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals.” In this collection of scholarly essays on drugs and spirituality written over the past 40 years, Smith explores and entertains a venerable yet now taboo topic: how mind-altering drugs have led to divine revelation.
Though Smith himself participated in Timothy Leary’s famous drug experiments at Harvard, it wasn’t until a maverick think tank called the Council on Spiritual Practices approached him that he decided to do the book.

Shawn Hocking 3

Founded by a former vice president of Oracle, the council is no collection of fly-by-night Castaneda-heads who have tried to turn an appreciation for hallucinogens into a higher calling.
Robert Jesse, 41, who once worked full-time with techie marketers and engineers, now spends his days with religious scholars, spiritual leaders and scientists whose work addresses “primary religious experiences.”
Rather than being content to just hear about the divine secondhand, these thinkers focus on ways that individuals come to perceive it, feel it and see it directly.
The Council suggests that these transcendent experiences can be triggered by a diverse variety of influences, ranging from a monk’s holy visitation after days of prayer and fasting to a Native American roadman’s vision after a potent hit of peyote.
The Council funds academic research, publishes books, hosts speakers and has even held a conference about the nature of such religious experience.
And although they are sincerely interested in any activity — be it meditation or dancing or gobbling magic mushrooms — their stance on the relationship between drugs, or as they put it “certain plants and chemicals,” and enlightenment puts them square in the middle of the raging culture war over the legalization of drugs.
While the loudest criticisms of U.S. drug laws have come on political, social and medical grounds (with the proponents of medical marijuana most vocally grabbing the limelight), now Huston Smith has dared to make a religious freedom argument.
“I was extremely fortunate in having some entheogenic experiences, while the substances were not only legal, but respectable,” he said of his early experimentation with LSD.”It seemed like only fair play that since I value those experiences immensely to do anything I could to enable a new generation to also have such experiences without the threat of going to jail.
“Were this statement to come from almost anyone else, it would not stand a chance of being heard. But Smith is that rare living person who adjectives like “great” and “renowned” and “acclaimed” accrue to without a tinge of overstatement. His 12 books of religious scholarship and philosophy include “The World’s Religions,” which has sold some 2.5 million copies around the world over more than 30 years.
He has taught at Washington University, MIT, Syracuse University and most recently the University of California at Berkeley.
Over his long career — he got his Ph.D. in 1945 — Smith has become that notable academic who also reaches a popular audience. He’s even the subject of a five-part Bill Moyers PBS documentary called “The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith.”
This side of a religious leader, Smith probably couldn’t have a bigger voice in the popular cultural conversation when it comes to spiritual questions. Who else could get to use the platform of National Public Radio to discuss the religious importance of illegal substances?
At a recent bookstore reading, Smith himself touched on his odd circumstance.”Many people do ask why someone of my honorific age would risk something of a reputation to move into a topic that is this controversial,” he quipped, drawing appreciative smiles from the audience.
Here’s a respected scholar with no less than 11 honorary degrees, publicly jumping into the fray of the war on drugs, and better still, all in the name of religion. It’s enough to utterly stump the most “compassionate conservative.”
But before anyone breaks out in choruses of “Right ons!” be clear that Smith’s interest in mind-altering substances is explicitly limited to their “philosophical and spiritual,” not “recreational” use. Indeed, both Smith and the Council take great pains to distance themselves from the hedonists who indulge in drugs without the divine in mind.
They employ the neologism “entheogenic” — meaning roughly “God-enabling” and coined in 1979 to replace “psychedelic.”

Alex Grey Spiritual Energy1

Among the spiritually minded, “entheogenic” can refer to the likes of mescaline, psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, peyote, MDMA (aka ecstasy) when they’re approached as a religious sacrament and not just as a way to get high.
If it sounds like a tough distinction to draw, consider that the Pentagon itself has come to grasp it. When the military formally allowed Native American soldiers to use peyote in religious services, a Pentagon spokeswoman told the Associated Press in 1997: “If they’re using peyote in their religious practice, it’s a sacrament, not a drug, just as sacramental wine is not considered a drug.”
While peyote remains a “Schedule 1” controlled substance today, a 1994 amendment to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1974 created an exemption for Native American use of peyote in their traditional religious ceremonies. It’s the only such exemption, where an otherwise illegal substance is legal for use by a designated group in the U.S. on grounds of religious freedom.
The Brazilian government has gone even further with regard to ayahuasca, a substance which, like peyote, has a long history of religious use. First provisionally in 1986, and then permanently in 1992, Brazil legalized the religious use of the substance.
Smith’s essays in “Cleansing the Doors of Perception” range from scholarly to personal and some even revel in Smith’s own drug experiences. One piece, “Empirical Metaphysics,” recalls his time with Timothy Leary in the early 1960s. “We felt like we were on the cutting edge,” he writes of his Harvard cohort. “On the new frontier to new knowledge about what the human being is and can be.” There was no need to go “underground,” he explains. “Getting down to business, we pulled out our date books to schedule a session with mescaline.
“One essay details a mescaline session at Timothy Leary’s home, reprinted from the official trip report Smith wrote in 1961: “The experience was momentous because it showed me a range upon range of reality that previously I had only believed existed and tried without much success to imagine.” The essays reveal the impact that Smith’s own primary religious experiences — “occasioned,” as he would say, by “entheogens” — had on his spirituality.
They took him to a place where some 20 years of meditation had not. “I was a pretty flat-footed mystic,” he confided to the amusement of a bookstore audience, adding that he still meditates today.
But the collection also plunges into the most difficult philosophical questions surrounding the use of mind-altering substances:
What is the real religious import of drugs?What does it mean to have such a religious experience triggered by a mind-altering substance?
Does that make that experience somehow less authentic?
What role have these substances played historically in other faiths, from the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece to the use of peyote by the Native American Church?
And what role might these substances have played in the formation of other traditions that have since been lost to prehistory?
And perhaps most importantly, how can such a religious experience be carried over into living a more religious life?

Alex Grey Jesus

Smith is not out to proselytize the spiritual benefits of hallucinogens: “The first thing that is very clear to me is that these substances are not for everybody” he says.
“So, the last thing I do in this book is to advocate.”
In fact he calls the drug culture that grew out of the ’60s “wild, chaotic and irresponsible” and in part blames it for the current anti-drug “hysteria” of today. But the issues raised in the book will resonate with many whose own drug use falls somewhere between “recreational” hedonism and rigorous spiritual practice.
At their most subversive, Smith’s essays invite questions:
What do the spiritual insights that many casual drug users report have in common with an authentic apprehension of the divine?
Who’s to say where recreation ends and spirituality begins?
After all, if we have real religious freedom in this country, then just as we should have the right to use mind-altering substances for religious rites, so too then should we have the right to define the very nature of our spiritual practices and beliefs.
These contentious issues have been debated since so-called recreational drugs went mainstream in the ’60s. Until the Council on Spiritual Practices dug up these essays and presented them to Smith to consider republishing, most of them had been yellowing in obscurity in aged scholarly journals in university library vaults.
Now, they’re once again in circulation, this time in a much more mainstream context, published in the Tarcher/Putnam imprint of popular publisher Penguin Putnam. “This can be seen as something of a coming out,” says Jesse of the Council on Spiritual Practices. “Huston has never been secretive about his early experiences with mescaline and other entheogens, but he wrote about them in the early ’60s, and those accounts were published in journals where not a lot of people saw them.
Since that time, Huston’s own public exposure has grown enormously.” So, why is he stepping into the limelight now? Smith’s position is that given the current state of our society we really need to keep all our options for religious experience open.
“I am convinced that we live in the most secular, reductionistic, consumeristic, this-life-now-is-all-there-is society,” he says.
“There has never been in human history a people for whom transcendence — or another world — has been so occluded. Our culture is living in Plato’s Cave. We have been stripped — and I hold the universities and intelligentsia in every area responsible for this — we have been stripped of belief in a reality outside the cave of mundane ho-hum, more-of-the-same life. The only ideals we have that are operative are success and maybe fame.”
He adds, “We need all the help we can get to resist this tidal wave of materialism and stand up to it. Now, for some people, they not only find themselves told that there is another world waiting, but they are actually ushered out of the cave and see it.”
Today, the experiences that ushered Smith out of that cave are obviously forbidden by law. Jesse puts it simply: “I do not know of a mechanism now that would allow what happened for Huston in 1961 to happen in the year 2000 or 2001.” Yet they persist underground. Of course, it’s virtually impossible to divine exactly how many people are having their sacred practices criminalized.
But a perusal of the Net finds scads of descriptions of experiences under the influence of various substances which the writers clearly deem religious.
Some even explicitly address the religious freedom issues at stake.

Visionary 3

Of course, most imbibers are not willing to speak openly about their unusual spiritual practice for fear of legal or social reprisal, maybe even from their own church. Complicating the issue is the fact that by no means do they all approach the drugs through religious traditions that have long histories of using the sacrament, like the Native American Church or the Santo Daime in Brazil.
From pagans to Christians, the covert takers of entheogens for religious purposes would appear to range all over the Thomas Riedlinger, now a mental health counselor in a hospital in Olympia, Wash., is the rare person who is willing to talk about his own religious experiences while under the influence on the record.
While a student at Harvard Divinity School in 1994, he took LSD on Good Friday and went to church.
“I don’t feel that I’ve been a reckless user of these substances. For me it was an exercise in religious freedom,” he says. “I was fully aware of the risks involved.” In a kind of homage to the 1962 Good Friday Experiment at Marsh Chapel on the campus of Boston University, which Smith has a chapter on in his book, Riedlinger and two other divinity school students went to the same chapel on Good Friday on acid. “Most mainstream Christians will tell you that they have a personal relationship with Jesus. I always found Jesus to be rather aloof,” he says.
“What happened in Marsh Chapel is I suddenly saw a different way to interpret the phenomenon of Jesus. After that I felt much more comfortable embracing my Christian faith tradition.”
Riedlinger gave a talk on the experience at a conference organized by the Council on Spiritual Practices about “psychoactive sacraments” and he’s written an essay that the council will publish later this year in book form with the other talks from the conference. “
I don’t see that I have the right to deny any other individual the opportunity to utilize substances like the classic psychedelics as part of their faith journey,” says Riedlinger. Smith echoes this sentiment, quoting the epigraph from Aldous Huxley at the beginning of his book: “
‘The mescaline experience is without any question the most extraordinary and significant experience available to human beings this side of the Beatific Vision,” Smith says: “We, the people who have religious concerns have the right to demand of our government: why are they debarring us from this most important experience available to us short of the Beatific Vision?”
It’s still hard to imagine any government official having the basic knowledge of the topic to even begin to take this question seriously. But neither Smith nor the Council on Spiritual Practices is actively lobbying anyone, trying to get a specific law changed or influence an election. In fact, Jesse tells me, he wouldn’t condone the legalization of drugs like cocaine.
Instead, their work remains in the realm purely of ideas — encouraging the exchange of research, information and scholarship on a practically verboten subject. Yet their views are so contrarian from accepted religious norms that they often seem like their polar opposite.
While mainstream religious leaders rail against the scourge of drugs in their communities as all but a sign of the devil, these spiritual optimists imagine a world where drugs are accepted as a tool for ethical religious ends.
“A lot of organized religion in Western society anyhow is organized around social service and community, and not always around profound religious experience,” says Jesse.

Chay Chayjesus


“There’s potential with the entheogens to be able to offer people a direct experience of the divine, instead of only hearing about the divine. So, the entheogens could become a tool which would allow organized religion to become more concerned with religious experience.”
By the same token, religious institutions could play a role in inspiring the users of entheogens to translate what they learned during their experiences back into their daily lives. Imitating an imbiber, Jesse enthuses: “‘You should see what I saw! The universe was big! And I watched the Big Bang happen!'”
Now switching into his own voice: “And they come back from that experience and there’s not really any evidence that it improved their relationships with their family, their spouse and their coworkers.”Is there any hope of any of this becoming a socially acceptable reality? Does, for example, the relative success of the medical marijuana movement signal a change in attitudes toward drug laws? Jesse is skeptical: “The medical marijuana movement has generated resistance in some quarters because of the perception of mixed motives,” he says.
“Some of the political and volunteer expertise that goes into getting those initiatives through may come from people whose first or deepest motive is not relieving the pain and suffering of AIDS and cancer patients. Instead, some of those resources have come from people who see this as the loosest brick in the drug laws.”
Even the most vocal anti-drug law crusaders, like Rick Doblin of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies say that the pro-legalization crowd who fund ballot initiatives on everything from medical marijuana to lightening the sentencing of drug offenders, aren’t likely to take up the cause of the religious use of drugs anytime soon. “Most voters might think that it could easily be abused,” he says. “

Cameron Gray 2

My intuition is that the poll numbers are not good enough when it comes to protecting the religious freedoms in the area of the use of psychedelics. As a culture, we’re suspicious of direct religious experience.”The more likely change could come in the courts.
A practicing religious sect or individual could mount a religious defense or bring a civil suit if it came under criminal attack for its use of banned substances. Doblin says he’s aware of two civil cases involving U.S. branches of Brazilian churches using ayahuasca, in the early stages. According to Graham Boyd, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s drug policy litigation project, there’s also a religious case currently in the U.S. courts.
A Rastafarian returning from Hawaii to the U.S. territory of Guam was arrested for marijuana possession and has mounted a religious defense, which the Guam Supreme Court is currently considering.
But for Smith and the Council on Spiritual Practices, which he supports through a special edition of his new book, the “cause” is more about the circulation of ideas than petitions, the filing of research findings not law briefs. Smith and Jesse are not sign-waving sloganeers trying to compress the difficult questions of the hows, wheres, whys, by-whoms and at-what-costs into a three-line chant. “I am more a philosopher than an activist,” writes Smith.
While some activists may wish he were more willing to work on the political ramifications of his views, the fact that he has raised these issues at all is remarkable.

And in the end, perhaps it could only be a philosopher who could whisk drugs out of their lair in the underground, and put them under a divine spotlight.

* * *

Martina Hoffman Healing Spirit

And now, a dialectic about Christianity from two antheists:


Atheistic Lead-in: That ingestion of psychedelic plants can give one a powerful spiritual experience doesn’t mean either that it will or that it is a religious sacrament. Anything has the potential to provide spiritual experience. A sunset, a drug, a lover’s eyes, or a pile of dung.
The spiritual aspect comes from a person’s understanding and perception.
Psychedelic plants could certainly become a religious sacrament, by being incorporated into a religious context much as wine, fly agaric, psilocybin, mecaline, ayahuasca (DMT), ibogaine, and salvia already are.
But in a country where religious freedom is not protected, like the US, such incorporation is highly unlikely.
There is a bit of confusion here. By definition, what is achievable without divine intervention isn’t grace.
Not everyone is a Christian or cares about “grace.” What is achievable by the individual, here and now, is of paramount importance to each of us.
That some many paths are curtailed because they lead to personal understanding instead of reliance on some church’s dogma is the crime of the millennia.
The right to seek direct experience of the divine is what the protestants died for when they broke free from the catholics. Now they commit the same crime.
Freedom of religion isn’t about more than one kind of Christian church.
It is about the right to be a spiritual being unmediated and unshackled so long as one doesn’t cause direct harm to others.

Alan Moore God Is Dead Book of Acts Arts and Letters 204
Alan Moore God Is Dead Book of Acts Arts and Letters 204

Retort from another Atheist:


Your quibbling about “meaningful act of psychological self-discovery” vs “grace” is completely meaningless until you produce a god who can demonstrate that there actually is a difference. Still a bit of confusion here. I didn’t chose the words “grace” or “sacraments.” They were part of the thread before I contributed. And thank you, but I’m not Christian.
Why I did suggest is that if one is going to make an argument that is supposed to influence law-makers, then one had best be careful about whether one’s claim is for religion or for psychology. Because they have very different statuses under existing law.
Whether, in an ideal world, they should have such different statuses is entirely irrelevant to my argument.
Similarly, I see it to be a self-defeating argument to accept such terms as “meaningful” and “self-discovery” while demanding some science-modeled standard of proof for the existence of God.
You can’t prove, in any scientific way, that anything is meaningful to you, or that you’ve ever made a self-discovery. All you can do is make claims about your subjective experiences. If you are going to insist on objective proofs, you’re stuck with a Behaviorist agenda.
And if you are going to claim a right to freedom of religion, you shouldn’t go around flaming belief in God.
In no way is a sunset on a par with psychedelics in qualifying as a “sacrament.” Some drugs in some religions had or have historical use as the equivalent of Christian sacraments and may reasonably be described as sacraments from a perspective in comparative religion.
Sunsets aren’t sacraments anywhere that I know of. What you are talking about is their comparison as psychological “triggers” of religious experiences, which may be a philosophically valid point.

Weigh in by a Psychedelic Christian:

I spent a number of crucial years (developmentally speaking) in Austin. It was here, as a young adult, that I was first able to see the world from a psychedelic perspective. I would credit these experiences as providing the motivation to look into the whole realm of “spirituality” which up til then had always seemed like a bunch of nonsense to me.
Sometime later, my life went through a dramatic change, when after many months of confusion and self-neglect, I was converted to Christianity. As one could imagine, I was quickly convinced that regardless of the positive effects that I might have felt I received from psychedelics, they were certainly not “of God.”
So I resolved to put the lingering memories of that “other world” I’d experienced behind me, and invested more time in studying the Bible and other sources of evangelical authority.
However, over the past couple of years, my confidence in evangelicalism as THE way to God has eroded and I have once again begun exploring the insights and potential benefits offered by psychedelic substances.
Thus, I’m very intrigued and encouraged to read about some of the work being done by MAPS and the Heffter Institute and other such groups who are taking a “legitimate” approach to creating a more mainstream climate in which drugs and psychedelia can be discussed.

Salvia Droid 1

What is “Psychedelic Christian?”


First of all, I am not a chemist, nor am I an expert in psychology orneurology. Therefore, I would do well to refer the reader to some better-informed sources if they seek to clarify the answers that these disciplines provide to the above question.
My response to what is psychedelic is based mostly on my own experience, as well as the scattered writings that I have read on the subject in the years since I discovered psychedelia.
So, basing all of this on my subjective impressions, let me tell you what I think “the psychedelic” is all about. It is the sphere of human existence that is discovered when, through the use of particular organic or synthetic chemical substances, we enter into a state of altered consciousness that allows us to view life from what I consider to be an enhanced, advantageous perspective.
It is, in short, a way of changing our consciousness for a short amount of time so that constructive or recreational objectives can be pursued.
This method is not without risks and the results are not always predictable, but I am firmly convinced that enough safeguards can be established so as to minimize the chances that undesired circumstances would develop from the pursuit of psychedelic modes of awareness.
This text represents an effort on my part to provide some potential safeguards, by linking psychedelic technique to an enlightened interpretation of central Christian beliefs and ethical principles.
I am familiar with the many links that exist between psychedelics and so-called Eastern schools of thought. My impression is that much less work has been done on this subject from a Christian perspective, particularly from those whose background rests in evangelical Protestantism.
This is my contribution to rectify that imbalance.

Alex Grey Godself

Drugs in Western Society

In most Western societies, the idea of taking “drugs” to attain genuine spiritual insight is widely distrusted, especially by those in positions of religious or governmental authority.
The official sanctions imposed by numerous cultural leaders have for the most part proven to be effective in establishing a broad social consensus that “drugs are not appropriate for general consumption.”
Even those who consciously violate the laws and other taboos established against drug use often do so with traces of guilt or shame regarding their choices. Those who have developed a personal rationale for their own drug use are typically reluctant to advise others to do the same thing without some disclaimer attached. I would count myself among this group.
Though I find that I must come down on the side that says “drugs have been an overall positive influence in my life,” I am willing to acknowledge that they also have their drawbacks, that many people are probably better off not using them and that the benefits they offer are mostly obtainable through other means.
Nevertheless, I oppose the current “war on drugs,” proposing that our society find more constructive ways than militarization and incarceration in dealing with the issues. In a techno-media culture such as ours,I find that drugs do indeed represent an exciting source of potential information and inspiration to many people who would otherwise be out of the reach or influence of traditional religious movements.
The rapidity of effects, and the openness they are capable of creating to new ways of understanding one’s self and role in society seem to mandate that we take a more constructive and optimistic look at what drugs actually do to our minds, rather than perpetuate the easily discredited fears and myths about their supposedly corrupting influence.

alienjesus

Aristotle Steps In

I appreciate and encourage your work in the direction of integrating Christian spirituality with the kinds of insights delivered by psychedelics. I think it has something to do with increasing the rate of the dialectic between dogma and material life. I mean, religions evolve by interacting with present historical contexts, becoming refined by them, but also picking up a lot of boring, annoying historical encumbrances.
Much like a child begins with a pure potential and becomes both refined and corrupted by experiences, religions often begin with a powerful experience of pure inspiration, expressed by one or a few articulate leaders, and then get beat to death by a history of followers squabbling over who has the right interpretation of the secondhand revelation.
By delivering what is experienced as firsthand revelation by many subjects, psychedelics stand to help religions cleave off unnecessary and outdated dogma faster, unfortunately, faster than a lot of economic and political institutions can adapt to the change.
However, hopefully, the most devoutly religious people will see that the purity and authenticity of their spiritual experience is more important than present and past historical contexts. I am one of those people who believe that the human race is headed very rapidly on a crash-course with its own self-destruction, and agree with many religious people that nothing short of a massive spiritual awakening is going to stop us from sterilizing all multicellular life off the surface of this planet over the next 100 years.
I think the awakening will involve an insistence that God start providing faith-validating experiences directly to everyone, rather than from sentences written or spoken by other people.
I mean, like, I’ve got a 33.6 modem, let’s at least give God an ethernet connection.

Horned God

This is a statement that I can easily agree with. I would add that in my review of the history of religions, there is a pretty constant tension between those who look for God (however they define God) to “break out” through the process of recreating some aspect f the original inspirational experience, and those who stress faithfulness to the tradition for the sake of purity or group coherence.
The “problem” with most renewal efforts is that because they incorporate new factors that weren’t present at the birth of the old religion, they tend to start new branches or altogether new religions themselves even though they were intended to recapture the essence of the original faith.
But anyway, it is an understandable temptation among the non-committed to remain aloof from the religious game altogether. It appears to be little more than needless hassles.
I’ve been seeing a spiritual director who has no experience in psychedelia but has been willing to hear me out non-judgmentally as I share my ideas. This has been very helpful in maintaining my confidence that Christianity and other traditional religions are redeemable and will contribute to the future development of human awareness.
They will also serve to hinder the search and create strife, I’m afraid. huh! I too think we are in for some really perilous challenges but I do have an intuitive optimism that is based on the idea that God is guiding this whole thing.
Since I’m using the G-word, I guess I’ll define it as “the One” that I encounter in states of psychedelic and other profound meditative states. This is where I get my direct revelation from. It does seem to be a massive tragedy that so many people in this world have been excluded from this vision but I also feel that the vision gets through to people at the right and necessary times, even if it’s just on their hospital death bed.
OK, I’m venturing into metaphysical speculation here. Enough for now.

Well, am I(?) misreading you in interpreting that you think genuine religious experience has to be “re-“created?
I mean, I believe in transcendent archetypes just as much as the next guy, but I don’t think there is any good reason to always talk about them in the past tense.
If God transcends time and space, then her creation and revelation is ongoing and dynamic. The Catholic and L.D.S. (latter-day saints, Mormons) churches are among the most recent to embrace evolution as an expression of God’s creation.
So, if both revelation and evolution are true, then the human capacity to experience revelation can play an adaptive role, and be positively selected in evolution. This means that revelation and creation can be more powerful and complex in the future.Beyond your intuitive optimism, what actual experiences lead you to believe that “God is guiding this whole thing?”
I personally have a hard time seeing myself as a passive vessel of God’s spirituality. If God has a “plan” and it’s all laid out in advance, then all of our actual existence– our goals, struggles, conflicts, uncertainty, and suffering– are ultimately a phony pre-scripted puppet-show in God’s imagination. If God were perfect “before” he created the Universe, then why go about creating it?
Why can’t God actually have a reason for creation, rather than just making up reasons for it?

Alex Grey Wrathful Guardian

A Holiday Message from the Devil’s Advocate

From: A. Bishop A. Fry

In a nation with hundreds of thousands of pulpits using the devil for a whipping boy, it’s probably madness to be a devil’s advocate…yet it seems a bit unfair to blame today’s chaos and problems on a personage who was supposedly once next in brilliance to the creator himself.
Someone with Satan’s credentials would need to be stark raving stupid to cause all this chaos on purpose. Let’s look at a slightly different scenario which seems to escape the “fire & brimstone” set. First, let’s find out who the Devil really is.
We all know what the Hebrew’s history had to say about the subject, yet the Christian Bible was in part taken from older records – from civilization earlier. Any bible scholar with access to The Book of Enoch and The Book of Thoth can see how much of the earlier records were carried over.
All of the great scholars of ancient times were well aware of the many foundation works and only with the advent of the later church censorship did they get ignored. Enoch was popular during the time of Christ and both the Jewish & Christian bibles contained Enoch – until the church noted some things in it conflicting with their doctrines and pulled it.
The books of Thoth and Hermes were well respected in Egypt and later Greece. Along with ancient Sanskrit records…and even myths, they told a more detailed outline of the “gods.”The “gods” or “watchers” as Enoch calls them, came from distant dimensions or origins.
The leader of the first gods was called various names by various cultures. His mate or female counterpart was mentioned less, but known as Isis in Egyptian records.
Many accounts told of the Immortality if the first gods and a few of a later time when the gods lost their immortality. Later Egyptian priests used the immortality theme in a distorted form to later keep their position and the people’s loyalty.
What the records clearly show, is that the exiled “gods” set up ingenious domination systems to ensure the allegiance of the less intelligent “homo sapien” species here at the time.
At first, they used brute force & fear. Later, when they lost their regenerative abilities, they had to be reborn again themselves, so they gave humanity a sudden shot of knowledge and sciences…so they would have a better environment to come back to themselves. They invented languages and built awesome repositories for their knowledge across the entire face of the globe. Even with thousands of years of concentrated censorship and destruction of such records by later priests and religions, much of the evidence remains.
Before this time of course, humanity was in complete innocence, ignorance…and used instinct and tribal laws to govern themselves.
Humanity was in a “Garden of Eden” sitting under banana trees relying on nature. As the “devil” came on the scene there was a sudden change. The brain circuits were suddenly altered by the racial interbreeding. The Egyptians recognized the superior intelligence of this new “hybrid species.” The subjects of the first King or “god” (King Menes) were called men.
The progeny of a mating between gods & Men were called HuMens and only a Human was appointed to tasks such as record keeping by the later Egyptians.As thousands of years have spread genetic intelligence to every race and culture, we can clearly see the difference between our “cursed” species and the “animals” around us. Animals remain in paradise and perfection. They have inbuilt species knowledge that guides them to act for their survival automatically. If a dog’s food source or master is about to drown, the dog will pull their master out of danger, automatically, not because of any thinking or choice. Only we humans have choice. When the gods of intelligence were exiled to our planet, they enslaved our species and later contaminated us. Under the Creator’s laws of choice, our species now has the ability to rise up to the level of the gods who wrenched us from perfection.
Many of the great spiritual teachers have outlined this goal and philosophy. The trick has always been to retain enough balance and self-control to handle the responsibility. Gods who dominate other life forms for their own convenience are abridging the laws of choice and will not keep their power.
By following the “golden rule” and remaining ethical and open-minded, the brain circuitry can slowly adjust to the higher wattage of inspired thought. The intellect that we inherited from the devil, can then be bypassed by the inner inspiration of our soul and choice granting creator. Most persons have always rejected the responsibility of such self-control of course, they have preferred to live under such domination masters and “Devils.”
They have preferred to allow others to think for them and make upstate rules for them to follow. They have never understood what CHOICE and DOMINATION are about. Such persons have been in a classroom called life and have been given an unparalleled opportunity to become as “gods” or…sink back to an “animal” state again by their inaction. It is the devil’s doing that we are in such a situation. Yet while the domination systems of the world continue to tempt us and teach us it is the only way most of us will ever gain a true grasp of ethics & choice law. In such a sense…
Hooray for the devil…!

Here is a folder with various documents from the PsyChrist group related to Spirituality and Psychedelics. Yahoo Groups shut down on December 15, 2020.

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