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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
The Haight-Ashbury: A History.
Perry, Charles. (1985).
New York: Vintage.
ISBN: 0-394-74144-7
Description: Paperback,
xii + 306 pages.
Contents: Preface, 7
chapters, epilogue, index.
Excerpt(s): The dissolution
of all solid boundaries, especially the distinction we feel between
ourselves and the outside world, led to deep philosophical questions.
Before psychedelics a college philosophy teacher might have given
anything to get thousands of people to question so seriously the
reliability of sense data, the nature of the self and the ultimate
reality of the universe. The welling, oceanic feeling of an acid
trip was felt as the presence of a single experience/entity pervading
everything, the world and the individual alike, and acidheads
described the essence of reality in terms suggesting this lack
of individuation or discord: Peace, Love, Oneness, Harmony, Beauty,
Bliss, Freedom. Or they might speak more abstractly of a transcendental
Consciousness that was as one with Being. The spectrum of philosophical
positions ranged from solipsism.
One common development was what might be called
gnosticism, because it resembled the strain in Western thought
according to which the universe is not the work of a loving Creator
but a trap, or at least a mistake, into which our
have wandered from the perfect world that is their true home.
... But one strain of Gnosticism associated the perfect world
with the mind itself: Gnostic salvation was sometimes called "inheriting
the First Mind." In the psychedelic community the experience
of seeing everything disappear into a ceaseless froth of change
and relativity often led spontaneously to the idea that reality
had to be consciousness itself, rather than an object of
consciousness. (pages 265-266)
Compilation copyright © 1995 – 2001 CSP
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