Brainwaving » Stan Kripner http://www.brainwaving.com Mon, 04 Jul 2011 18:37:28 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Psychedelics and Species Connectedness http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/02/08/psychedelics-and-species-connectedness/ http://www.brainwaving.com/2010/02/08/psychedelics-and-species-connectedness/#comments Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:15:19 +0000 David Luke http://www.brainwaving.com/?p=991 Evidence 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.”

Read the full article by clicking on the link below:

Species Connectedness

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