Religion and drug use / mental illness.

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I have a theory about a lot of religious stories, especially the strange hard-to-believe ones like a lot of the Old Testament:

The people who experienced them were under the influence of psychoactive plants or had some form of mental illness (maybe associated with the plants).

At least that'd explain somethings.

I really can't stand when people have arrogant statements like "It was the power of the Lord" or "There needs to be some mystery in life, that's what makes it interesting" or any other way of saying they're completely ignorant and flying blind yet refuse to accept this.

I hate when things are sooooo prevalent, like religion, yet noone can satisfactorally explain them >:[. Ever wonder why there're so many athiests etc are around? I refuse to categorise myself into any group, athiests and agnostics included - simply because too much is unexplained. The only group I'd consider that I know of is the Taoists.

I get worked up easily, sorry. Anyway, just thought I'd see if anyone can support my theory and share it. I don't want to hear the arguments that "every 900 years the reed sea or whatever has a tsunami or something" because I've researched all of those arguments and they're too thin.

Your argument is no thicker. Not by a hair.

Occam's Razor also indicates that naturalistic explanations, especially the ones with probable historical, geological, and archeological precedents, actually do hold a lot of water for say, the book of Exodus and even some of the New Testament. Of course, these don't account for all of the alleged miraculous events that reductionists and revisionists are so uncomfortable about, but not much can be usefully said about them anyway. These are mysteries, but beautiful mysteries.

Mysteries in life are not a necessity, but an inevitability. I find it odd that you label those people arrogant who have either chosen resignation to these mysteries or found faith in the greatest mystery of them all. If you can't accept that there are still ultimate mysteries in life and history that cannot be discounted by whatever lame explanation you'd use to keep reality in a neat little box, I imagine there are a lot of things you can't accept.

What is the greatest mystery of them all?



I don't think most atheists believe that there are no "mysteries" in life, if that's what you're implying.

Recent (and ancient) theories in ethnobotany suggest that humankinds conciousness develeoped in the unique way it has due to the catalyst of ingesting entheogenic plants, particularly the tryptamines.

Tryptamines in high doses produce overwhelming sensations of having been transported to another plane, inhabited by other intelligent beings. Different cultures which had no way of communicating physically have too much shared experience for it to be coincedence. Virtually every polytheistic religion is identical in the major respects. (comparative eligion). Harmaline (an MAOI) is slso called telepathine becuase its use frequently induces telepathy.

Short answer: taking psychedelic drugs under the correct conditions (set, setting, expectations) can trigger a religious experience of mind-blowing proportions. The road to revelation can be as terrifying as it is ecstatic. If going to church on sunday genuinely took you anywhere near to god then imo, the average person would be too scared to go back the following week!

if some guy wrote something thousands of years ago and just a few years ago we found out because of technology we have now, leaves a great doubt in my head...like who the hell told him all that,he couldnt had guess it...there is a God and he has sent messengers, you just need to be patient , sit down and read some texts and youll find the truth.

i used to do drugs and belive me i wasnt feeling God at all.

The problem is the overwhelming majority of these religious messengers teach that it is wrong to question (the only well-known exceptions that immediately spring to mind are Buddha & Crowley). There are some very inspiring books written from an analytical viewpoint, but most people opt for the 'quick fix' of mainstream monothiesms.

I find the idea of 'faith' in the conventional sense utterly repugnant; there are perhaps some people to whom i could entrust my life, my physical existence. But never, under any circumstances whatsoever could i even contemplate entrusting my soul to anyone like that. Its simply far too precious, probably infinitely more valuable than i could ever hope to comprehend.

DMT (dimethyltryptamine) is a powerful visionary compound that induces the trance states i mentioned above. At high dosages it is said to take the voyager beyond the astral realms into samadhi (enlightenment, or seeing god)

DMT is a naturally occuring neurotransmitter present inside every human brain. Its illegal in most western countries, so ironically we are all criminals!

The most likely explanation for any religious experience (unaided by plant/drugs), is the individuals DMT (or related substance) level being raised beyond the normal threshold. This might occur as a result of intense meditation, praying, fasting or other activity, some people are probably more prone than others naturally. Human counciousness itself can be reduced to electrical & chemical pulses, so in essence Life IS drugs.

Alright mate that's fighting talk. I'm not looking for a fight nor am I calling anyone arrogant - I said that some people's words are arrogant - maybe even mine... but I explained that I get worked up and also apologised in my post because, hehe, I know I'm not the only one.

Can you expand on your last sentence? It's quite complex and mind boggling to understand. There's like a quadruple-negative in there?

That's sad, as you will remain cynical and never be able to see the joy or happiness in anything - you are always looking for the catch.

Questioning and searching was the basis of making my faith stronger, and not weaker. An epiphany for me was when the crucial structure of water and the way it freezes - top down, forming an insulating layer of ice to keep fish and so on alive over winter - was revealed by my science teachers (almost to a man or woman religious themselves and seeing no contradiction in Genesis). To them, the Big Bang and evolution merely confirmed that, although not a literal truth, the Creation story had at least a grain of truth in it. It got the order of creation right, if not the timescale. In fact one of my biology teachers was a staunch creationist, though this is probably a rather unusual occurrence, certainly in Britain where we try and take two opposing arguments and combine them rather than come down firmly on one side or another.

Cultures "on the edge" of civilisation often need coherence and internal stability - look at the instability of the Weimar Republic for a society that was coming to terms with the loss of a keystone of its common heritage and the reaction it produced in search of coherency and stability. The worst societies in history have always tried to supplant religions as competitors, and usually found to their cost that religious belief has gone deeper. In Catholic Poland, religion survived in a country which, although part of the Soviet bloc, managed to accommodate other civil groups not directly controlled by the Communist party. Religion was a force for regime change and provided an alternative to the system and ultimately proved stronger than the rationalist force that tried to supplant it. Communities need to enforce conformity in some circumstances to protect from outsiders; what we are seeing as oppression now may have been the result of marauding hordes of people trying to destroy farms or homes in the past and those people were in need of something like religion that brought them together rather than drove them apart. Weimar was destroyed by its own internal chaos following the bankruptcy of the old-style German militarism, and the Nazis seized the opportunity like any group of good politicians and created something more horrific than any religion has ever created. Once the war was won, Hitler had plans to completely destroy at least Catholicism and probably the entire church.

Also drugs may account for one or two of the books but probably not for all of the major religious works written over the centuries, including the Jewish, Christian and Islamic texts as well as most of the books written over the intervening years. I have never ever taken drugs and never will do (nothing stronger than the odd glass of wine or cup of coffee) yet I have come in the last two years to fully accept religion as an active force and God in particular. I thought I would never be able to make the leap of faith required but have done it because of circumstances in my own life covered elsewhere that really brought home to me Jesus' ultimate sacrifice - and eventual resurrection. Even if treated only as a myth or an exaggeration, it is still ten times more powerful a story than anything cynics can put out. I do believe that many atheists are humanists and have found spiritual contentment elsewhere in serving mankind directly, but to dismiss others' beliefs as the result of chemical hallucinations is to do a disservice to the many people who have found that belief or faith in a God is one of the most powerful creative forces behind them or gives them a rock in a turbulent or chaotic world and helps them make sense. By all means disagree, just don't insult.

It is insulting to put all religious belief down to deliberately altered consciousness. I would suggest you read some of the books C S Lewis (of Narnia fame) put out - he was very good at rationalising his faith and some of his poetry is the most beautiful I've ever written.

On the contrary, I have experienced moments of overwhelming joy where I saw beauty in everything. Moments which felt like centuries. There was no need to be looking for the catch because there was no middleman to deal with.



Re-read my previous post, the point I was trying to make is that human conciousness
IS a chemical hallucination. Whether its the predominant serotonin-hallucination we are probably both having now (aka ‘concensus reality’) or some other chemical balance that would produce a different view.

Any perceptual experience or thought process whatsoever can hypothetically reduced to the neural level and described in terms of neurotransmitters, pathways and other facets of brain activity, because it has occurred inside a human brain.

Your brain contains the psychedelic neurotransmitter DMT, as does every human brain on the planet, whether prophet, saint or atheist. That’s not an insult - it’s a fact.

If your faith requires you to feel insulted by science, then really thats a personal issue for you to deal with in your own way. I think perhaps whats happened instead, is that you missed the meaning of my post, either from a lack of clear explanation on my part, or because of the sheer enormity of the paradigmn shift involved (DMT as an endogenous neurotransmitter), which is perfectly understandable.

I understand what you are saying, certainly. It's a matter of what happens inside our brain when we have a religious experience or come to some kind of "epiphany". It reminds me of when my boyfriend told me that I was suffering from a chemical imbalance that later led to my diagnosis with AS. Yes, in a way I do have a mental problem - or a different wiring from anyone else - but it doesn't mean I don't feel things keenly or can be dismissed as mentally imbalanced. There is no absolute ultimate truth, but beliefs are strongly held for other reasons than a chemical imbalance - which only explains *how* we think, and not *why*. We cannot know for certain God exists - but if you look for something a bit deeper than chemicals in the brain, you can find it. You may not find it where I find it, but since you have experienced the overwhelming joy in everything - that I too have felt at times - you have obviously succumbed to your own version of what I feel when I look at the dove in the rose window of our church, see the sunlight streaming through it and thank Whatever for being alive, and well and able to appreciate small things like that while striving to make the world into somewhere I want to live in. That's what religion is to me.

As to not experiencing joy - I feel joy quite a bit - not so much nowadays, but still - and I reckon it is to do with serotonin in the brain. That is the "how" part. However, if I could release serotonin into my brain just by sheer force of will, I wouldn't need to find something that made me happy in the first place. Thus we come to the "why" part. Some people do take drugs to find that happiness. But others find happiness, say, in a quiet church, or on a beach in the Med in the sun, or in caring for others - that's what releases the serotonin and triggers the chemicals in the brain. So, scientifically, yes, you are right that religious experiences can be explained by chemical action, and probably induced by drugs. But you would be wrong in ascribing any religious activity or belief to this circumstances, because it is perfectly possible to believe in something with your brain unmanipulated.

We can agree to disagree on whether God exists and what religious belief has or hasn't done from the world. However when you start dismissing things that other people feel as mere imbalances or chemical reactions, it detracts from the spiritual and philosophical ideals that mean a lot to me. Starting from a premise that everyone has the right to have their own beliefs regardless of how they are arrived at, I was a little put out to hear it suggested that all philosophical discussions about religion - except for one or two in particular which you happen to believe in - is the product of altered states of consciousness. I for one enjoy CS Lewis' work, his poetry in particular is worth reading - it's not too overtly Christian in context and yet he seems to speak in a voice that conveys some of his insights into the joy he felt when his brain chemicals started going into imbalance.

I dont feel as if i am being dismissive, because I dont see how choosing to view such experiences from a more analytical angle would detract at all from their value.
Ecstacy, awe, peace, revelation are other sensations ascribed to the religious experience are just as valuable whether produced by an endogenous process or otherwise.
I dont believe that a sense of transcendance, by its very nature cant be cheapened by its method of acquisition, whether that be through quiet contemplation or a £5 deal in a dirty squat (i do Not recommend the latter )



I didnt mean to give the impression that i suibscribe to only one or two religions, to some extent i can claim to believe in just about ALL of them.

My religious background is in the study of metaphysics. By studying different faiths concurrently, it is possible to see through the superficial differences (caused by culture, politics and so on) and see that, in essence they are basically the same. (if your familiar with C. Jung, he calls these core-values the 'archetypes')

This approach also makes it possible to comprehend conciousness and spirituality in diagrammatic and numerological terms (Jewish mysticism or qabalah). That doesnt detract from any particular faith taken on its own merits, but IMO if you study just one faith the superficial differences i mentioned are more likely to obscure the underlying truth. A comparative approach is therefore more efficient at yielding results. By listening to different 'messengers', all the minor discrepancies or falsehoods between them will tend to cancel each other out thus revealing their common ground.

Let me put it another way; i have had powerful revelatory experiences through the use of entheogenic plants, i have also had revelatory experiences solely through mediation and contemplation. Although the magnitude and precise nature differed immensely between the different methods of acquisition, the essence of both methods had a remarkably similar feel.

Put simply; meditation and contemplation can produce powerful drug-like effects. So for me, the question of whether or not religious experience is connected to psychedelics quite simply has become a dead issue. If i can experience transcendental psychedelic-like effects without directly taking drugs, its a safe assumtion that other people have also reached that potential, and someone with greater spiritual leanings than myself would probably have had such experiences much more frequently and intense. Some of those people would probably want to tell other people of their experiences, or record their revelations in a book.

So to answer the OP's question succinctly; YES, all religious texts are most likely inspired by a psychedelic revelation, BUT the drugs involved may have been endogenous in origin.

Psych, I must say that I'm impressed with your posts - just the information I was looking for. I find the inner-workings of the brain to be extremely interesting. And I do mean extremely. I feel that this field needs to be studied from the first day of school till the day we die by everyone. I feel ONLY good things can come of this.

See, what REALLY RILES me up is people stating that it's wrong what you are saying, (supposedly dismissing other beliefs (even though you're not)), when THEY'RE DOING JUST THAT! I also feel that a lot of people need to learn your calm temperament - myself included. I find it impressive how you remained so calm in your replies to cat.

Although I must state that personally, I'm anti-recreational drug use. This even goes as far as nicotine, caffeine & alcohol (why these are legal is beyond me... anyway, I digress). My reason is that unless we have studied the brain & the chemicals flying through in huge depth (which a VERY small percentage of any population would have), we should take EXTREME care. It's taken me a lot of life experience and study to realise just how precious and delicate our brains are.

To add to my previous statements - it is not just Christianity that I'm talking about at all... I'm talking about many many many things - "woooooooow" i heard a lot of you say... "there's more than just christians, muslims and jews in the world????? no way!" Apparently (though I'm not sure how true it is), the Aztecs or something similar, maybe the Olmecs (excuse my forgetfullness) sacrificed huge numbers of people each day - I'm fairly sure this was for religious purposes?

THAT is the sort of thing that I need explained to me. Now do you defensive Christians understand where I'm coming from?

A new point:

My sister took an Astronomy night class. When talking to her, she mentioned that certain instances on the Sun's surface affect the behaviour of the inhabitants on Earth. I haven't thought how it'll relate here, but I feel that it might. Does anyone know about this? I'd love to find out.

PS - that groups of people such as the Egyptians worshipped the sun, needs no explanation to me

Christians (inparticular) are very quick to forget their faith was spread round much of the globe by systematic violent extermination of any culture, faith or scientific discovery that had the temerity to exist in its prescence. This legacy of persecution has become so culturally ingrained that it still persists in today, with the continued ignorance, demonization and prohibition of entheogenic plants. Culminating in perhaps the most ludicrous act of all, the US banning research into endogonous human neurotransmitters!

This has all had the effect of making your question very hard to answer, because many historical records of entheogen use were suppressed and eradicated centuries ago. Those brave few who continued to practice their religious heritage had to do so in hiding, relying on the word of mouth to pass an ancient learning down through the generations.

You might want to check out MAPS (Multi-disciplinary Association for Psycedelic Studies) Their basedin the States i think, so maybe things are changing for the better.
http://www.maps.org/

Ive got a big archive of ebooks on my hard-drive (got most of them last year in a single torrent!) Theres a document theorizing about the possible pychedelic origins of christianity (LSA) , a fascinating essay by Simon Powell which encompasses mesoamerican religions, neural pathways & Gaia theory.
Also loads of miscellaneous historical and research material by McKenna, Hoffman, Shulgin etc. If your interested, PM me & ill stick it on one of the filesharing networks.

There is a movie with Charlie Chaplin where Charlie's rich friend know's him from the bar. When Charlie tries to meet him in the street he doesn't recognise charlie.
It is only when he is drunk!

Some experiences can only happen when you are in a separate subconscious state. Also only when your in the same state can you recall those memories.