Psychedelics and Species Connectedness
Extended Mind — POSTED BY David Luke on February 8, 2010 at 12:15 pmEvidence suggests that at the very least the consumption of psychedelic substances leads to an increased concern for Nature and ecological issues. On one level we can understand that this may be due to a basic appreciation of place and aesthetics that accompanies the increased sensory experience, or that since psychedelic plants come from Nature we are forced to enter its realms when we search them out. However, on a deeper level we can also appreciate that a communication with Nature may on occasion occur through the phenomenological properties of the psychedelic experience, some of which have been hailed by experients as life-transforming and spiritually renewing, even “mystical.”
By Dr. David Luke & Dr. Stanley Kripner
With the aid of mescaline Aldous Huxley came face to face with such a mystical experience, even though the Oxford Theologian R.C. Zaehner (1957) denigrated his experience of “nature mysticism” as somehow inferior to the “genuine” theistic mystical experience. Yet the irony remains that the very split from Nature that some Christian theologians claim occurred in the Garden of Eden may lie at the heart of many people’s current sense of separateness from their ecology. Whereas, under specificircumstances of substance, set, and setting, psychedelics are capable of augmenting such a reunion. Despite Zaehner’s derisions, Huxley (1954) reportedly witnessed this reunion through his experimental uses of mescaline: “I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of creation – the miracle, moment by moment of naked existent.”
Is it this naked existence that reconnects the natural environment to the mental capacities of those psychedelically-inspired experients? This type of experience forges a way of thought that is filled with ethical, ecological implications, and which is reflected in the work of shamas, alchemists, and other practitioners who respected nature. The patriarch of psychedelia, Albert Hofmann, demonstrated this by reporting that a mystical
experience he had had when he was young prefigured his discovery of LSD. He stated that “…my mystical nature experience of nature as a child…was absolutely lik an LSD-experience…. I believe I was in some fashion born to that.”
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1 Comment
“The fact that this issue of the MAPS Bulletin is given over solely to ecology suggests that at the very least the consumption of psychedelic
substances leads to an increased concern for Nature and ecological issues. ”
Circular reasoning?
“Evidence suggests that at the very least the consumption of psychedelic substances leads to an increased concern for Nature and ecological issues. ”
Where is the evidence? Links, references?
It’s just an opinion, which unfortunately doesn’t become true no matter how much it is repeated.
When someone writes “The consumption of psychedelic substances leads to… “, I take it as evidence that they don’t really know what they’re talking about, no offense meant.
Millions and millions of hits of LSD have been consumed since “the patriarch” (ugghh) ACCIDENTALLY discovered it. Somehow overall sensitivity to the plight of nature has failed to increase in proportion.