Nature

It was a vast old religion, greater than anything we know: more starkly and nakedly religious. There is no God, no conception of a god. All is god. But it is not the pantheism we are accustomed to, which expresses itself as “God is everywhere, God is in everything.” In the oldest religion, everything was alive, not super naturally but naturally alive. There were only deeper and deeper streams of life, vibrations of life more and more vast. So rocks were alive, but a mountain had a deeper, vaster life than a rock, and it was much harder for a man to bring his spirit, or his energy, into contact with the life of the mountain, and so draw strength from the mountain, as from a great standing well of life, than it was to come into contact with the rock. And he had to put forth a great religious effort. For the whole life effort of man was to get his life into contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life, earth-life, sun-life. To come into immediate felt contact, and so derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy intermediary or mediator, This sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the root meaning of religion…a terrible cumulative effort…to come at last into naked contact with the very life of the air, which is the life of the clouds, and so of the rain.
(New Mexico)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

LSD the wonder drug

 When someone has a particularly intractable programming problem, or finds himself pondering a big career decision, he deploys a powerful mind expanding tool -- LSD-25. "It must be changing something about the internal communication in my brain. Whatever my inner process is that lets me solve problems, it works differently, or maybe different parts of my brain are used, " said Herbert, 42, an early employee of Cisco Systems who says he solved his toughest technical problems while tripping to drum solos by the Grateful Dead -- who were among the many artists inspired by LSD. "When I'm on LSD and hearing something that's pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into anther brain state where I've stopped thinking and started knowing," said Herbert who intervened to ban drug testing of technologists at Cisco Systems. Herbert, who lives in Santa Cruz, California, joined 2,000 researchers, scientists, artists and historians gathered here over the
Read more

Broader Insights

The gaining of self-knowledge while under hallucinogenic stimulation is specifically mentioned by the Indians of the Southwest, who feel that guilt is resolved by means of unrelenting self-criticism and visionary awareness of one’s sins. Ellis also refers to a similar state of perceptive introversion: “It was as if I had unexpectedly attained an objective knowledge of my own personality. I saw, as it were, my normal state of being with the eyes of a person who sees the street on coming out of the theatre of broad day https://www.facebook.com/Psychelics#
Read more

(96) Psychedelic Review

Image
(96) Psychedelic Review : By the revelations of psychotropic medicine, leading to a more fundamental view of human experience than Freudian psychology has hitherto supplied. The anxiety and rootlessness of modern life will be seen to be the result of inner barrenness, created by the frustration of our subconscious needs in a predominantly rational society. Empty utilitarianism, deprived of poetic faith, forces the sensitive being to reject reality, since reality is devoid of the emotional appeal that it formerly enjoyed. Man is a creature whose necessity is to dream; when the individual, or the race as a whole, is frustrated of its inner vision, it must suffer as when deprived of material health. Human beings are nostalgic for the fulfillment of their primordial Life. Their anxiety is not the result of fear, since modern life is more secure than ever before, but of the loss of inner destiny, of the devitalization of the illusions revealed in the yearnings of myth and poetry.
Read more