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Religion and Psychoactive Sacraments:
An Entheogen Chrestomathy
Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D. and Paula Jo Hruby, Ed.D.
Author Index | Title Index
Emerging Woman: A Decade of Midlife Transitions.
Rogers, Natalie. (1980).
Santa Rosa, CA: Personal
Press-The Person Centered Expressive Therapy Institute.
ISBN: 0-9605634-0-7
Description: Paperback,
second edition, 201 pages.
Contents: Introduction
to the first edition-1980, Introduction to Second Edition, 6 chapters
[Chapters 1, 4 and 6 have two parts.], acknowledgments.
Note: The author is daughter
of psychologist Carl Rogers and is co-founder
and Creative Director of The Person
Centered Expressive Therapy Institute in Santa
Rosa, CA.
Excerpt(s): Two years
later, after much thought, consideration, and waiting for the
right time, I tried windowpane acid. I had listened to the tales
of a psychiatrist friend who had found LSD
an exhilarating, opening experience. He did not treat such trips
lightly. Nor did I. I waited for a time when I felt an inner stability
and when I was not responsible for anyone else. My worst fear
was that I would go into some insane space and not be able to
return. A few days after this trip I sat at the typewriter and
wrote. The experience had been profound. I was embarrassed by
some of what I had felt, wondering if anyone else would understand.
(page 143)
The greatest impact this acid trip had on me was
to entirely alter my view of death. This has affected the way
I live. I grew up adamantly agnostic, pragmatic, a skeptic about
anything religious or spiritual, with a down-to-earth orientation.
I scorned notions of god, of life after death. I dismissed the
possibility of psychic phenomena and denied that dreams might
be an important part of life. In college the only spiritual philosophy
I ever accepted was Emerson's view
of the Over-Soul. If I had been asked to draw a
picture of death I would have drawn a black box; that is all.
Now I have tried drawing pictures of death in which I am fusing
into the horizon, feeling ecstasy. My sense was, and is, that
the strong beam of light from the setting sun on the ocean horizon
will pull me into its orange warmth, and I will sink into a "beyond."
(page 148)
Compilation copyright © 1995 – 2001 CSP
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