... Mystics Under the Microscope. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
For what it's worth, this is pretty much in accord with my own experiences. Psilocybin was my favorite hallucinogen, and I took it usually in its natural form: mushrooms. (Just for the record, I experimented with these sorts of things for about 20 years, from about 1969 to 1989; in 1989 I went straight for good.) Anyway, I liked shrooms the best because the high seemed more natural (there was always something inorganic about the LSD experience), and there is no doubt that set and setting are crucial, and that one tends to interpret - or even have - the experience in terms of the religious tradition one is most familiar with. I certainly have come to think that all the great religions are takes on the same transcendent dimension of being (if I can put it so) from different angles of approach.
I've always maintained, since studying comparative religion in my teens and 20s, that at the heart of every institutionalized religion is a similar mystical experience. The differences between the religions, as they grow up, are local and regional, based on the filters of local culture through which the mystical experience is perceived and interpreted. Religion grows out of the mystical experience, although it is also renewed by later mystical experiences.
ReplyDeleteThis is supported by reading all the mystics from every worldwide tradition. My insight, which I do not claim was original, was the product of a search, begun when I was 13, for what I termed the original religion: whatever it was that lay, ancient, behind all the religions the world currently knows.
The article does note that their experience might have been colored by using people all of the same religious tradition. That's a valid point. But the experience is still universal.