Mystical experiences

Some Paracelsian alchemists, especially Heinrich Khun rath (ca. 1560-1605) and Stefan Michelspacher (active ca. 1615-23), were objects of persecution on the part of hoth Lutheran and Catholic authorities. Khunrath was an alchemist from Saxony, the heartland of the Reformation, but his theological stance was characteristic of the second generation of Protestants who felt that Luther s work had been left incomplete and that another religious reform was essential. In Khunrath s ideas this would take the form of a Lutheranism that could accommodate an autonomous personal piety. To express their Lutheran piety intellectually the alchemists employed the terms of Paracelsian theosophy, while they found an emotive outlet in the mystical experience of the power and grace of the Holy Spirit. They felt themselves to be inspired (literally breathed ) by the Spirit, a force that they identified with alchemical pneuma. Khunrath called himself an enthusiast, hlled with the presence of the divine. 

I first became interested in mystical experiences and warped realities while eating sushi and contemplating psychedelic worm intestines. Let s discuss the psychedelic worms in a moment, because first I would like to tell you about my childhood and where I live today. 

Ayahuasca is one entheogen of particular interest to spiritual explorers. The term entheogen comes from theo, or god/spirit, and gen (create). Thus, entheogens are substances that generate experiences of transcendence and God. Peyote or psilocybin mushrooms are traditional examples of entheogens, and often taken for the purpose of having a mystical experience. 

Why is DMT a less valid path to God or transcendence than a Gregorian chant, Baha i prayer, or Melungeon meditation How can we say that a mystical experience triggered by prayer is superior in revealing truth and beauty than the experience triggered by drugs or abnormal electrical firing in the brain s temporal lobes And what about people who both pray and meditate and explore with DMT ... 

Strassman, Rick, M.D., DMT The Spirit Molecule A Doctor s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences (Rochester, Vermont Inner Traditions International Limited, 2001). 

Moreover, if we can understand the squares experiences, we ll have a perfect metaphor for spiritual enlightenment, God, and all manner of mystic experience. ... 

Is God A State of Mind by Laurie Barclay, WebMD Verification of Mystical Experience, by Ian Goddard "Jit"... 

Josephson was greatly inlluenccd by transcendental meditation techniques of the 1960s and 1970s and believed that mystical experience should be incorporated into science. Ills latter research also included work in the theory of intelligence. 

Greeley s interviewers also asked about mystical experiences ( Have you ever felt as though you were very close to a powerful, spiritual force that seemed to lift you out of yourself ), brief alterations of consciousness that generally are ineffable (cannot be really communicated with words), revelatory (provide certain knowledge about basic human concerns), transient, and passive (in the sense that they happen to, rather than being directly caused by, the person). Much to their amazement, they... 

The fundamental reason for taking psychedelics is the experiences they produce. These experiences may be of many kinds. Walter Pahnke (1967) has recently classified them into five types psychotic, characterized by fear, paranoid symptoms, confusion, impairment of abstract reasoning, remorse, depression, isolation, and/or somatic discomfort psychodynamic, in which unconscious or preconscious material becomes vividly conscious cognitive, characterized by "astonishingly lucid thought" aesthetic, with increased perceptual ability in all sense modalities and psychedelic mystical, marked by all the characteristics of spontaneous mystical experience observed in the literature. These experiences may be the cause for the effects of psychedelics on behavior. They are also the fundamental thing that must be explained if psychedelics and their effects are to be understood. 

It seems to me that the eventual outcome will be the construction of psychedelic parks. In general, these will feature a large center for therapeutic, creative, and other uses, supervised by medical men and guides, and a psychedelic chapel for religious and mystical experience. The most likely setting will probably be a park of artificial environments. The dimensions of the park need not be very great, since space counts for little in the experience. A point of some importance, however, is the matter of diversity, for one of the major characteristics of these experiences, after all, is flux. 

The idea of mystical experiences resulting from drug use is not readily accepted in Western societies. Western culture has, historically, a particular fascination with the value and vir-... 

It struck me, therefore, that if any of the psychedelic chemicals would in fact predispose my consciousness to the mystical experience, I could use them as instruments for studying and describing that experience as one uses a microscope for bacteriology, even though the microscope is an "artificial" and "unnatural" contrivance which might be said to "distort" the vision of the naked eye. However, when I was first invited to test the mystical qualities of LSD-25 by Dr. Keith Ditman... 

The content of the mystical experience is thus inconsistent with both the religious and secular concepts of traditional Western thought. Moreover, mystical experiences often result in attitudes that threaten the authority not only of established churches, but also of secular society. Unafraid of death and deficient in worldly ambition, those who have undergone mystical experiences are impervious to threats and promises. Moreover, their sense of the relativity of good and evil arouses the suspicion that they lack both conscience and respect for law. Use of psychedelics in the United States by a literate bourgeoisie means that an important segment of the population is indifferent to society s traditional rewards and sanctions. 

Second, drug use may be criticized as an escape from reality. However, this criticism assumes unjustly that the mystical experiences themselves are escapist or unreal. LSD, in particular, is by no means a soft and cushy escape from reality. It can very easily be an experience in which you have to test your soul against all the devils in hell. For me, it has been at times an experience in which I was at once completely lost in the corridors of the mind and yet relating that very lostness to the exact order of logic and language, simultaneously very mad... 

An Experimental Examination of the Claim that Psychedelic Drug Experience May Resemble Mystical Experience... 

Some of the researchers who have experimented with synthesized mescaline, LSD, or psilocybin have remarked upon the similarity between drug-induced and spontaneous mystical experiences because of the frequency with which some of their subjects have used mystical and religious language to describe their experiences. These data interested the author in a careful examination and evaluation of such claims. An empirical study, designed to investigate in a systematic and scientific way the similarities and differences between experiences described by mystics and those facilitated by psychedelic drugs, was undertaken (Pahnke, 1966, 1967). First, a phenomeno-... 

Unity, the most important characteristic of the mystical experience, is divided into internal and external types, which are different ways of experiencing an undifferentiated unity. The major difference is that the internal type finds unity... 

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