Psychoactive Sacramentals

Religion and Alcohol: Sobering Thoughts is an intriguing and thought-provoking collection of ten essays divided into two main parts. The first part focuses on the use or prohibition of alcohol in various religious traditions, with chapters exploring the Christian New Testament, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and tribal religions. The second half of the book considers alcohol in its historical context, with chapters examining drinking in medieval monasticism, Victorian England, the American South, and films, as well as the influence of movements such as Alcoholics Anonymous.

Acorns delineates the future of humanity as a reunification of intellect with the Deep Self. Having chosen to focus upon ego (established securely by the time of Christ), much more beta brain wave development will destroy our species and others, which process has already begun. We create our own realities through beliefs, intents and desires and we were in and out of probabilities constantly. Feelings follow beliefs, not the other way around.

Can drugs be used intelligently and responsibly to expand human consciousness and heighten spirituality? This two-volume work presents objective scientific information and personal stories aiming to answer the question. The first of its kind, this intriguing two-volume set objectively reports on and assesses this modern psycho-social movement in world culture: the constructive medical use of entheogens and related mind-altering substances. Covering the use of substances such as ayahuasca, cannabis, LSD, peyote, and psilocybin, the work seeks to illuminate the topic in a scholarly and scientific fashion so as to lift the typical division between those who are supporters of research and exploration of entheogens and those who are strongly opposed to any such experimentation altogether. The volumes address the history and use of mind-altering drugs in medical research and religious practice in the endeavor to expand and heighten spirituality and the sense of the divine, providing unbiased coverage of the relevant arguments and controversies regarding the subject matter. Chapters include examinations of how psychoactive agents are used to achieve altered states in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism as well as in the rituals of shamanism and other less widely known faiths. This highly readable work will appeal to everyone from high school students to seasoned professors, in both the secular world and in devoted church groups and religious colleges.

Reveals entheogens as catalysts for spiritual development and direct encounters with the sacred • With contributions by Albert Hofmann, Huston Smith, Stanislav Grof, Charles Tart, Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, Frances Vaughan, and many others • Includes personal accounts of Walter Pahnke’s Good Friday Experiment as well as a 25-year follow-up with its participants • Explores protocols for ceremonial use of psychedelics and the challenges of transforming entheogenic insights into enduring change Modern organized religion is based predominantly on secondary religious experience--we read about others’ extraordinary direct spiritual encounters in the distant past and have faith that God is out there. Yet what if powerful sacraments existed to help us directly experience the sacred? What if there were ways to seek out the meaning of being human and our place in the universe, to see the sacred in the world that surrounds us? In this book, more than 25 spiritual leaders, scientists, and psychedelic visionaries examine how we can return to the primary spiritual encounters at the basis of all religions through the guided use of entheogens. With contributions by Albert Hofmann, Huston Smith, Stanislav Grof, Charles Tart, Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, Frances Vaughan, Myron Stolaroff, and many others, this book explores protocols for ceremonial use of psychedelics, the challenges of transforming entheogenic insights into enduring change, psychoactive sacraments in the Bible, myths surrounding the use of LSD, and the transformative ayahuasca rituals of Santo Daime. It also includes personal accounts of Walter Pahnke’s Good Friday Experiment as well as a 25-year follow-up with its participants. Dispelling fears of inauthentic spirituality, addiction, and ill-prepared encounters with the holy, this book reveals the potential of entheogens as catalysts for spiritual development, a path through which faith can directly encounter God’s power, and the beginning of a new religious era based on personal spiritual experience.

Spiritual practices, or awakenings, have an impact on brain, mind and personality. These changes are being scientifically predicted and proven. For example, studies show Buddhist priests and Franciscan nuns at the peak of religious feelings show a functional change in the lobes of their brain. Similar processes have been found in people with epilepsy, which Hippocrates called the sacred disease. New research is showing that not only does a person's brain activity change in particular areas while that person is experiencing religious epiphany, but such events can be created for some people, even self-professed atheists, by stimulating various parts of the brain. In this far-reaching and novel set, experts from across the nation and around the world present evolutionary, neuroscientific, and psychological approaches to explaining and exploring religion, including the newest findings and evidence that have spurred the fledgling field of neurotheology. It is not the goal of neurotheology to prove or disprove the existence of God, but to understand the biology of spiritual experiences. Such experiences seem to exist outside time and space - caused by the brain for some reason losing its perception of a boundary between physical body and outside world - and could help explain other intangible events, such as altered states of consciousness, possessions, alien visitations, near-death experiences and out-of-body events. Understanding them - as well as how and why these abilities evolved in the brain - could also help us understand how religion contributes to survival of the human race. Eminent contributors to this set help us answer questions including: How does religion better our brain function? What is the difference between a religious person and a terrorist who kills in the name of religion? Is there one site or function in the brain necessary for religious experience?

Can science, psychology, and biology explain miracles? This three-volume set attempts to answer that question, presenting the latest, as well as classic, thinking and research regarding miracles from fields that include psychology, psychiatry, theology, biology, and history. We have all heard of what seem miraculous events, which have surfaced across history. They range from stigmata and bleeding icons to deadly tumors that disappear and healers who succeed just by laying hands on the afflicted; from people who can predict unexpected events to so-called mediums and those who can allegedly see and speak with the dead. These books, led by an eminent scholar who serves as series editor for the Praeger series Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality, examine miracles of body, mind, and spirit, presenting the most recent research and writing on these uncommon events, aiming to bring hard science to some of the most persistent and peculiar phenomena associated with the human race. Can science, psychology, and biology explain miracles? This three-volume set attempts to answer that question, presenting the latest, as well as classic, thinking and research regarding miracles from fields that include psychology, psychiatry, theology, biology, and history. From news of a crippled woman who left her wheelchair and walked after an evangelist prayed over her, to stories of people who died on the operating table only to be revived to tell of bright lights and the pathway to the afterlife, we've all heard of what seem miraculous events. They have surfaced across history. They range from stigmata and bleeding icons to deadly tumors that disappear, and healers who succeed just by laying hands on the afflicted; from people who can predict unexpected events to so-called mediums and those who can allegedly see and speak with the dead. Some miracles are intricately tied to religious beliefs, but there are millions of people who ascribe to no particular religion, yet still believe that things happen that defy all laws of nature, and thus defy scientific explanation. In these books, eminent scholar J. Harold Ellens and his team of expert contributors examine miracles of body, mind, and spirit, presenting the most recent research and writing on these uncommon events as they aim to bring hard science to some of the most persistent—and peculiar—phenomena associated with the human race.

Concerned with scholarly, popular, and religious backdrops that understand the connection between psychedelics and mystical experiences to be devoid of moral concerns and ethical dimensions—a position supported empirically by the rise of acid fascism and psychedelic cults by the late 1960s—Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America traces the development of sixties psychedelic mysticism from the deconditioned mind and perennial philosophy of Aldous Huxley, to the sacramental ethics of Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner, to the altruistic religiosity practiced by Stephen Gaskin and The Farm. Building directly off the pioneering psychedelic writing of Huxley, these psychedelic mystics understood the height of psychedelic consciousness as an existential awareness of unitive oneness, a position that offered worldly alternatives to the maladies associated with the postwar moment (e.g., vapid consumerism and materialism, lifeless conformity, unremitting racism, heightened militarism). In opening a doorway to a common world, Morgan Shipley locates how psychedelics challenged the coherency of Western modernity by fundamentally reorienting postwar society away from neoliberal ideologies and toward a sacred understanding of reality defined by mutual coexistence and responsible interdependence. In 1960s America, psychedelics catalyzed a religious awakening defined by compassion, expressed through altruism, and actualized in projects that sought to ameliorate the conditions of the least advantaged among us. In the exact moments that historians and cultural critics often locate as signaling the death knell of the counterculture, Gaskin and The Farm emerged, not as a response to the perceived failures of the hippies, nor as an alternative to sixties politicos, but in an effort to fulfill the religious obligation to help teach the world how to live more harmoniously. Today, as we continue to confront issues of socioeconomic inequality, entrenched differences, widespread violence, and the limits of religious pluralism, Psychedelic Mysticism serves as a timely reminder of how religion in America can operate as a tool for destabilization and as a means to actively reimagine the very basis of how people relate—such a legacy can aid in our own efforts to build a more peaceful, sustainable, and compassionate world.