(Article) Line up for the scientific, psychedelic mystical tour

[hippiechick]

This came to my attention thru the Graham Hancock message board. Hancock's new book 'Supernatural' http://www.grahamhancock.com/supernatural/ touches on this topic as well.

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060930/bob8.asp

Bruce Bower

<snip>

The comfortably furnished room in a corner of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore seems an unlikely setting for spiritual transcendence. Yet one after another, volunteers last year entered the living room–like space, reclined on the couch, swallowed a pill, and opened themselves to a profound mystical journey lasting several hours. For many of them, the mundane certainty of being a skin-bounded person with an individual existence melted away. In its place arose a sense of merging with an ultimate reality where all things exist in a sacred, unified realm. Participants felt intense joy, peacefulness, and love during these experiences. At times, though, some became fearful, dreading unseen dangers.

Johns Hopkins psychopharmacologist Roland R. Griffiths and his colleagues have taken psilocybin out of its traditional context and far from the black-light milieu of its hippie-era heyday. Griffiths' team is investigating the drug's reputed mind-expanding effects in a rigorous, scientific way with ordinary people.

<snip>

Griffiths' recent work was inspired by an unusual 1963 investigation conducted by physician and minister Walter Pahnke. Half of 20 Protestant seminarians randomly received psilocybin before listening to a radio broadcast of a Good Friday service. The rest took a B vitamin that caused the skin to flush.

After the service, many members of the psilocybin group reported unusual spiritual experiences. Four of them had full-blown mystical reactions, which they said included ecstatic visions and a feeling of oneness with God.

In interviews conducted 6 months and 25 years later, members of the psilocybin group attributed many more positive changes in attitude and behavior to the Good Friday service than vitamin takers did. Psilocybin-induced mental states had apparently triggered lasting improvements in people's lives, researchers concluded.


... more at link ...

[I Have A Dream]

1. Very interesting.

I've always suspected that if I were to have one of these experiences, I'd never want to go back to reality and would always be longing for that state when I was not in it. I've stayed away from any form of "recreational" drugs because of this. (Maybe I abused drugs in a past life. :shrug:)

[rumpel]

2. the problem with "mushrooms" and other such

material, is that unlike culturally traditional shamans, who are trained and disciplined in their vision quest, many people are not capable to handle these substances.
I always felt it extremely dangerous to experiment with such substances and unnecessary - We can acquire the wisdom from within - anything further, and only thereafter, I think, one has to be on the path of a traditional shaman.

btw, in the 70's my friend went camping one day, and they picked some plants to put in their ra-men - after eating their brew, my friend ran off and was found 3 days later in an abandoned shed chewing his shoe - :rofl:
A military kid, he was sent back to the US.

There is an interesting book written by an anthropologist called "The Cosmic Serpent", by Jeremey Narby, in which he touches on this subject.

http://www.amazon.com/Cosmic-Serpent-Jeremy-Narby/dp/0874779642

[lildreamer316]

3. Same kind of thing with MDMA.

MDMA is used in much the same way....and has been very helpful to many people. It's such a sad thing the gov't felt threatened and made it schedule 1. It does not deserve it.

If anyone is interested in more info, let me know.

[cassiepriam]

4. Someday we will just take a pill to feel spiritual?

There is a "God center" in our brains. If we stimulate it, people feel connected to a higher power. And act in ways considered to be more spiritual.

This is an interesting study and there has been work on the neurological underpinnings of spiritually before but this is a bigger study which is more controlled. And it has hit the popular press so there is a great deal of buzz about it in the religious and psychological communities.

(I happened to be attending a traditional religious service two weeks ago, and the clergy person giving the sermon spent most of the sermon talking about this study... interesting.)

[hippiechick]

5. Interesting ...

" ... Griffiths also plans to explore how brain processes unleashed by psilocybin compare with neural activity in people who experience drug free spiritual epiphanies. "There's good reason to believe that similar brain mechanisms are at work during profound religious experiences, whether they're produced by fasting, meditation, controlled breathing, sleep deprivation, near-death experiences, infectious disease states, or psychoactive substances," he says..."

Maybe that then lends to the 'we all have it' theory - similiar to how folks think of ESP and clairvoyant tendencies - and that perhaps some of us just need more of a nudge to get there? Perhaps instead of evolving, our species has DE-volved and we've lost touch with a whole other aspect of "self" in our attention to the issues closest at hand (food, shelter, protection, etc).

?? :shrug: ??

[cassiepriam]

6. I believe that we all have the same basic neural and anatomical

equipment in terms of spiritual and psychic functioning.

However like any other part of the body we are born with certain
genetic strengths and weakness; spirituality and psychic skills are no different. (clairvoyance seems to run in families
and usually along the maternal line.)

For example some of us may have a more developed pinneal gland from birth either by chance or heredity. Others may develop that part of the brain due to environmental factors. My theory is that children who have been abused or neglected will develop spiritual or psychic skills as a coping mechanism. The early detection radar is critical to survival. And adults how face crisis in their life may also develop these parts of themselves.

And then others are developing those parts of their brains by choice, via the use of the methods described above.