Reflections After Entheogenesis Australis: “Australia’s Premier Psychedelic Symposium”
By: Caiyuda Kiora
Tags: Magic Mushrooms, Ayahuasca, Entheogens, Psychedelics, Spirituality

INTERWEAVING MYSTICISM, RELIGION, PSYCHEDELICS AND SCIENCE

(Reflections and summations of Erik Davis’ talk on ‘Psychedelics and Religions’)

When we take a look into the main religions, we recognise that they generally hold different belief systems, structures, and dogma on what their description of god is. The thing is, at the core of these differences is that one similarity: that ‘god’ actually exists.

Taking a deeper look, it becomes clear that god is not some bearded man dressed in immaculate white robes, but rather, points to a state of consciousness that one can attain, revealing a state of being that encapsulates the oneness of all; both everything and nothing; transcending time and space; experiencing the incomprehensible; the ineffable; a mystical type of experience that seems more real than real.

An experience that seems to defy rational explanation.

With the commonality of this mystical type experience that lays at the core of many of these religions, which many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people have experienced, it suggests that this is actually an experience inherently available to all. And by all, I mean all of those who’ve happened to find themselves walking around on this planet in a human meat suit.

If it’s an intrinsic, built-in, deep-rooted characteristic of the human experience, it would be ignorant to dismiss this as something without potential merit or meaning. Ahh… but yet here we are, on the cusp of 2018, with the current paradigm in the West being that of scientific materialism, which largely disregards this incredible metaphysical phenomena as something of little relevance or importance.

Is science not about investigation, exploration and discovery, by means of reliably reproducing results through testing, data collection, and the construction of theories? It seems kind of obvious that through the countless accounts and similarities of experience, even across different religions with different belief systems, that these mystical experiences can be reproduced with the right conditions.

What are the right conditions you ask?

Well, perhaps meditating in an ashram, or doing kundalini yoga for hours on end might not be the most reliable way to go about this, but two that I can think of off the top of my head are forms of breathwork, and, yes, you guessed it… entheogens!

(The literal meaning of ‘entheogen’ meaning — the divine within, for all you rookies out there.)

Psychedelics have the capacity to induce mystical states of consciousness that by all description matches the mystical states of consciousness described at the core of many religions and religious experiences. It makes sense then, that this is one avenue by which science can reliably reproduce results, blending mysticism and rationalism, the occult and the scientific, the metaphysical and the physical.

Erik Davis, through his incredibly well structured talk, made the point that trying to intellectualise, which may lead to over-intellectualising, someone else’s path which includes mystical type experiences, may not get one very far. And that is probably part of the problem.

There’s plenty of people within science and medicine (and the government, and the general public, etc etc etc) who are looking at these concepts from the sidelines, having little to no first-hand experience themselves, or fearing to stray too far from the establishment for reasons involving one’s personal career or reputation, that may just not get it.

It’s kind of like an astronomer telling Buzz Aldrin what it’s like to walk on the moon. One may have to actually experience the path of mysticism within the appropriate context, to experientially understand these other points of view that are too often neglected.

Perhaps instead of narrowing the focus deeper and deeper to look at the fine details of these religious texts, religions in general, and the mystical experiences found within them, it could be beneficial to come back to the core experiences that we’re all capable of sharing, and take it from there.

(Based off evolutionary concepts, it begs the question… What’s the reason for all these mystical experiences? Do they have a purpose? Is it a built-in mechanism so that we, us, you and me, as an individual self, in which we are but one part of the grand total of Consciousness, which has manifested itself into individual human beings with individual perceptions of reality, can access these states of consciousness to recognise both the separation and oneness of all, with a constant feedback loop of information and experience progressively leading to more and more self-awareness of the physical universe itself, in which the non-physical is already completely aware of itself? — Try and wrap your head around that one!)