Did all religions come from the use of psychedelics?

[wooger]

^ or just crazy. Many of the prophets in religious texts sound like they have schizophrenia lol. Old testament is just filled with crazy ass stories that a schizophrenic would come up with.

I agree. I remember reading an article that suggested mohammed had temporal lobe epilepsy. I wouldn't doubt it.

What I really don't understand tho, is people who become religious after taking drugs and hallucinating. I mean, YOU ARE ON DRUGS. It might be an experience that you can take something away from and use to improve your life/give you a new perspective but becoming religious because of it is ridiculous.

 

[Solipsis]

That's very easy to say from the outside, but some things are just ineffable and mystical states can be attempted to explain by using antropomorphic models and the like. Morals are perhaps not hard to understand but to realize and believe in them, that tends to work better if you experience it rather than having someone tell it to you especially in times when morals are much more loosely established.
Tripping almost always gives me a feeling of being part of a whole which makes it that much easier to emphasize with the rest of the world, not only other people but on a lot of other levels as well. When that boundary disappears temporarily and you suddenly see what impact your actions have on the rest of the world and see it from another perspective that can cause a ++++ experience, one that changes your identity, convictions, beliefs, your life mission even.

It's not about hallucinating things that aren't real, it's about a message being conveyed that can still be equally worthwhile and true whether it is the form of symbolism or visions or whatever. The fact that they come personified in false vessels conjured by your mind is a detail. The message can still be extremely powerful and it would be shortsighted to ignore that. Just like with DMT, I don't really care that much how real the machine elves are by any standard, to me it matters what message they share with me. You can take something from that, and it can teach a lesson that is much less subject to distortion or even so simple and pure that it remains intact upon integration.

Lastly an example from me personally: I detest the church as an institute, I find it depressing that armies of people do insane things in the name of Jesus even though their actions directly contradict the values they stand for e.g. 'fight the infidels in the name of love, though obviously very conditional love!', I think it's very sad how Christian beliefs are misapplied for instance when people wish to have genesis taught in science classes next to evolution and I could go on and on about wrongful doings under a righteous flag... but!!!
I do know a Franciscan pastor who actually reminds me more of a buddhist in the way he speaks and he leaves out all the bullshit and keeps it pure. And I think I also rather have people who have admirable moral principles founded on Christian beliefs that don't go further than that, than people who have no moral principles and do whatever they want.

Well yes, religion is in many cases a crutch, it's often a huge dogmatist organism gone out of control brainwashing people with memes and we can do better, we can write our own similar principles many of which are in the law anyway and leave out the rest... but for a lot of people that's a long way to go since they might be to weakly personally developed to make that leap to total self-responsibility.

 

[eLeSaH]

Ah yeah, sure meditation does also work. BUT the thing is, it sounds more realistic that for example someone accidently took a high dose of mushrooms instead of trying to meditate for a long time.

 

[Solipsis]

People in our era in the western world would certainly say that, we have busy lives, much complication and we are usually wired to be conscious and attentive through out the day up to the point that we are on the edge of stress and hyper-vigilance. That makes it more difficult to meditate long and often, but I assure you when I took retraites like one 'official' Zen retreat and others mostly at my mother's peaceful house when she was away... it becomes easier.

So now imagine eastern cultures where it is much more common and a tradition, imagine those cultures and places much more quiet and peaceful than metropolitan areas... then I think it's not unrealistic at all that someone or multiple people in the course of time take meditation so far and deep that they find a message to carry out at some point.

Artwork by the way, like indian tapestry-like patterns, I find those suspicious... because those are the types of things many people tend to see on mushrooms even when it is not their own culture at all. I subscribe to the theory that those patterns come from within ourselves, perhaps reflections from sensory or neural pathways or the way they are affected when psilocin is acting. Because that would actually be universal.

On the other hand I've had some seriously wicked visuals when on my 4th day of 5 meditating on retreat but there were no tapestry like patterns, it was more like complete color inversion and dissociative-like bizarre shifts in space and time.

 

[yog]

I believe religion came from certain individuals direct experience of the divine reality/god.
The divine reality can only be known through a mind that have transcended duality: thoughts are dual, and the ego is thought.
This full, open and original mind state have been called Rigpa, no-mind, etc.

It would be better to say that religion comes from the ego-less state, which is accessible through psychedelics.
But there are countless more ways there; fasting, surrender, joy, laughter (where is the ego when you have a real belly laugh? ), trauma, shock, helplessness, meditation, sexual union, mindfulness...

 

[Daikomyo]

I think there's an awful lot of wishful thinking going on here. There's going to be a fundamental difference between your experience of tripping in the 21st century and some guy 2000 years ago. You're educated, you know it won't do you any harm, so you can sit there pontificating "Ah yes, this feels quite mystical, reminds me of that account in a book I read about God"

Try looking at it from the perspective of some uneducated guy 2000 years ago. He has no idea what the trip means, he has fuck-all understanding of ideas of the brain or how it works, probably lives in a hut and digs holes to shit in. The idea that he's going to be able to connect tripping with intellectual ideas about God is pretty fucking far-fetched isn't it. My guess is he'd run around a bit, run to someone elses hut for help and they'd try and beat the demon out of him. Even in the 21st century people have bad trips - can you imagine how high the bad trip rate would be back then?

It's also wishful thinking to presume that the modern epistemology is the only one that is valid that has ever existed. What does a person being "educated" in the modern sense have anything to do with them deriving spiritual or philosophical value from a trip? What does them living in a hut and shitting into a hole have to do with being spiritual? Are you judging them for not having our modernisms?

How do you even know what some person's idea of a trip was 2000 years ago, and why does the fact that it happened 2000 years ago mean the account is somehow less trustworthy?

Yes, I'm sure bad trips have happened all over the world and throughout all time - does that mean good trips were impossible? Did they even think of them as "trips"? There are cultures who use entheogens who don't even see them as substances, but as Beings that enter them and grant them specific teachings. The way people view entheogens around the world is just as diverse as the number of creation stories that exist.

If you want to read more about plant spirit medicine and how humanity has always used this mode of communication of medicine and knowledge

I'm not sure humanity has always used tripping as a way of life. It's mostly concentrated in a few isolated spots in South America. And even then it wasn't as if people just went round and tripped for fun or to "meet God". There was usually one guy who tripped for the tribe and it was almost exclusively for "medical purposes". If your kid was dying and nothing else worked you went to the bloke who tripped to see if he could find any help for you. Like the africans went to a witchdoctor. The placebo effect in these cases was the key - even now if an african witchdoctor tells someone they are going to die the people are so gullible they often rapidly die just from placebo.

A lot of the "evidence" that Mckenna suggests for tripping in Africa has been shown to be bullshit - that drawing of "the mushroom man" with mushrooms coming out of his body for example. It turns out that drawing used in the book is a "representation" of the real drawing that was done by Mckennas wife. When you look at the real drawing it doesn't look anything like a fucking mushroom man.

I do accept that it's possible to read psychedelic use into religions - you read the book of revelations "A serpent appeared from the sea and a diamond dropped out of it's arsehole" - "Like wow, he must be tripping!!". But you can read it into anything - voodoo, the moonies. Even that fucking idiot who created Scientology - "Aliens from another planet? Telling mankind how to live? He must...have BEEN TRIPPING ON DMT!!!".

Nah, it's bullshit.

First of all... when I talked about plant spirit medicine, I was not referring to psychedelics, but those are included too. If you read the anthropological research about herbal medicine in indigenous cultures, the stories are very fascinating. Whenever modern scientific researchers go to indigenous regions (like the Amazon) to discover new medicines, they often turn to locals. The trial and error theory is always applied by modern science in terms of how these people discovered the medicines they use, but when asked how the discovered the medicine, the answer is universally the same around the world: they talked to the plants.

How is it that in the Amazon rainforest, where there are millions of plants and billions of potential plant combinations, Ayahuasceruos figured out that ayahuasca + datura = a deep, entheogenic and spiritual experience? Beyond psychedelics, how were medicines discovered in the first place? Do people seriously believe that villages of limited resource would send their own people into the woods to randomly sample plants, and maybe dying, to figure out what does what? Impossible, especially in a place like the Amazon.

Clearly humans have always had some connection to plants that we have lost touch with in the modern. I am not claiming that I know how it works and I'm not saying all this to try and validate my modern entheogen use like McKenna is. What I'm saying is that this goes way, way beyond just tripping. These are entire epistemologies unto themselves and writing them off as pre-modern and primitive is INCREDIBLY short sighted.

I highly recommend those two books I mentioned earlier, especially the first one by Buhner. He offers plenty of scientific research that you can verify that will shed light on this for you. He's not so agenda based like McKenna.

 

[Roger&Me]

Did all religions come from the use of psychedelics?

No, religion arose from the need to control large groups of people.

 

[Bardeaux]

Religion originates as an answer to many pressing existential questions that arose from higher cognitive functioning, IMO. Psychedelics could sure amplify these questions but to claim that all world religion has its basis in psychedelia is... a little outlandish to me.

This.

I can imagine living in prehistoric times trying to understand why water keeps falling from the sky or why loud light keeps striking the ground or why the big ball of light kept disappearing every night. As culture became more complex people started noticing that the little lights in the sky were actually traveling around and that the movement of these things corresponded with phenomena here on Earth. People began planning harvests and predicting seasons based on the movements of the eerie deities in the sky. Naturally, more and more unexplained phenomena was explained with more and more complex superstition, inevitably leading to organized religion.

Then some societies began discovering that certain plants held certain other-worldly characteristics which could only be explained through more superstition

 

[Pegasus]

I don't know why it is hard to believe that psychedelic or even cannabis use could have inspired some spiritual people. Look at the use of mescaline in the Americas for example. Cannabis and mushrooms certainly existed in the areas that modern religions originated, and that they could have been used by the spiritual people themselves is hard to deny. Psychedelic users can definitely be spiritual people.

No, religion arose from the need to control large groups of people.

Religion as we understand it today speaks little of the actual lives of the people during that period. What we're told is religion is a story told after the fact. The people who the stories were about were definitely inspirational people. Religion as we see it was not created by these people, however.

 

[wayab]

religions that didn't come from use of psychedelics are full of shit ahhaha

 

[Thorns Have Roses]

No, religion arose from the need to control large groups of people.

LOL, so religion will not arise in small groups of people?


I will posit that the human mind is hardwired to seek out patterns, and is also inquisitive. So when man finds out how things are, that still leaves the question of why they are. From here arise superstitions (not to mention understanding allows one to plan, sort of granting one control over the universe), this goes from great metaphysical explanations of the big questions to your lucky pair of socks helping you win the game. When you have a large enough group of people with the same superstitions, they may become codified as fact (imagine how easy this was in the small and relatively isolated communities of the past!). From here ideas can take on lives of their own, as alleged facts coalesce and influence each other, gradually building up very elaborate belief systems. I also think at certain levels of complexity, systems influence their constituent parts as much they are influenced by them, leading to them developing in unpredictable and not immediately obvious ways.

Or at least that's my take on the matter. As to psychedelics inspiring religions...certainly they were intimately involved with a number of traditions, but not all of them.

 

[DwayneHoover]

Seems pretty probable if you ask me. The most common attribute of psychedelics is that important & deep previously hidden truths are being revealed to you. Short leap from feeling that to becoming a visionary/prophet and from that to the founding of a religion. Perhaps some of them even get some things right, as psychedelics tend to inactivate mental filtering and allow more information "in" and more varied thoughts to occur... So with a wider spectrum of activity it's likely to result in additional "truths" being stuck upon. Or for a cynical analysis, maybe they just allow more "systems of thought" to be conceived than would normally be typical, giving a higher likelihood of ones being struck upon that have a high propensity to result in "belief."

 

[Quantum Perception]

This is one of the topics i focus on a lot (I'm a nerd for this kind of topic). Here is a quote from Mary Barnard I think really lays out this thesis that psychedelic experiences are the root of religious and mystical experience:

"Which was more likely to happen first: the SPONTANEOUSLY generated idea of an afterlife in which the disembodied soul, liberated from the restrictions of time and space, experiences eternal bliss, or the accidental discovery of hallucinogenic plants [and/or fungi] that give a sense of euphoria, DISLOCATE the center of consciousness, and DISTORT time and space, making them balloon outward in greatly expanded vistas? The [psychedelic] experience might have had an almost explosive effect on the largely DORMANT (or survival based) minds of men, causing them to think of things they had never thought of before."

Therefore: the Hindu Soma, the mystery drink at eleusis, the sacramental communion of Christianity, the mushroom eating of the Aztecs, etc etc, all show that religions revolve around some sort of experience which one realize a revelation of some sort.

So I think if psychedelics are not at the root of religious and mystical experience, they are at the least very very likely to be.

 

[Quantum Perception]

No, religion arose from the need to control large groups of people.

You have to ask what would cause survival based organism to contemplate things like beauty or the ultimate, or transcendent god, w.e. Some animals live in large groups (cattle, ungulate animals, insects, monkeys) and they don't need religions and symbolic communication. It had to be some sort of experience that removed one from there day to day routine, sounds familiar? (psychedelic experience).

These ideas that religion was purely for the benefit of priests or ways of oppressing people is a facile attempt to understand what religions actual do and mean. I mean don't get me wrong, I do think later on power hungry people hijacked these forms of observation and worship, but that wasn't the intent to start the religion or mystical system itself.

 

[Thorns Have Roses]

Plenty of people have profound mystical experiences without the benefit of exogenous chemical help. Even I myself have some experience with this, and whilst the most sweeping conclusions and amazing scenarios have been drug induced, many of the feelings and thoughts people on here typify as psychedelicized can be independently experienced/developed.

 

[Quantum Perception]

Plenty of people have profound mystical experiences without the benefit of exogenous chemical help. Even I myself have some experience with this, and whilst the most sweeping conclusions and amazing scenarios have been drug induced, many of the feelings and thoughts people on here typify as psychedelicized can be independently experienced/developed.

Perhaps the only way to have a mystical experience without direct pharmacological influence is to be already within a symbolic culture where one has a sense of identity developed enough to say I am and to say I had a strange awestruck experience. Psychedelics cause us to expand our language because we try to describe these new experiences. So I can see how a hominid survival based mind can be pushed to make language from a drug experience, rather then that same mind being broken out of its routine of food sex and shelter and shallow social organization on its own.

Basically what I'm saying is: although these experiences can be done without drugs, I think its impossible to have a mystical experience outside of a symbolic culture, because one needs the knowledge of such a experience to exist in order to classify an experience as so. On the other hand, a direct pharmacological intervention could throw one outside of their normal causal rolls and experience something and come back with the intent of wanting to communicate it to others.

 

[Thorns Have Roses]

although these experiences can be done without drugs, I think its impossible to have a mystical experience outside of a symbolic culture, because one needs the knowledge of such a experience to exist in order to classify an experience as so.

Ah, there we are in disagreement, I don't think a symbolic culture is at all necessary, categorizing and codifying the experience into language/formal ideas does not affect its qualia.

 

[huolesoh]

yeah i don't see why not! The bible is full of strange stories, i think its possible the writers may be trippin

after all, a wide variety of psychedelic plants and fungi can be found in all corners of the world, i think its likely many different societies have used them.

There seems to be a recurring link between spirituality and psychedelics

 

[Quantum Perception]

"Ah, there we are in disagreement, I don't think a symbolic culture is at all necessary, categorizing and codifying the experience into language/formal ideas does not affect its qualia."
-Never Knows Best

^how would such survival based organisms contemplate the mystical if not forced upon them though a drug? all other experiences like traumatic events of violence and sickness etc, that create radical shifts in awareness needed for transcendental like experiences happen to animals all the time but they don't form culture.

i really think in order to get there (mystical experience) one needs to be pushed there pharmacologically in order to break out of the routine of survival. Suffering and other stressful experiences that push some to have mystical experiences are not alien to life, animals know these experiences well.

 

[Ismene]

It's also wishful thinking to presume that the modern epistemology is the only one that is valid that has ever existed. What does a person being "educated" in the modern sense have anything to do with them deriving spiritual or philosophical value from a trip? What does them living in a hut and shitting into a hole have to do with being spiritual? Are you judging them for not having our modernisms?

How do you even know what some person's idea of a trip was 2000 years ago, and why does the fact that it happened 2000 years ago mean the account is somehow less trustworthy?

But this argument works the other way too - how do you know that someone 2000 years ago experienced a psychedelic in the same way as you or me? We know how they work, that they don't damage the brain or make you insane, you've been educated so you can link ideas of "mysticism" into the trip - imagine you'd never heard of the idea of "God". Do you really think tripping would create that idea in you? It's a chicken and the egg argument. Certainly there are many cultures who have come up with the idea of God who have never tripped, so how do you explain those?

Do you know what Maria Sabinas parents told her when she first took mushrooms? "Don't take them because they make you insane". And that's from one of the very few cultures that tolerated mushroom use. Sabina herself wasn't some "venerated" figure in the community. Her husband used to get drunk and beat her up and she was viewed as the local wierdo.

the answer is universally the same around the world: they talked to the plants.

But what else would you expect from a primitive people who have no idea of science and are deeply religious? It's like asking a scientologist how he knows something - he's going to tell you it came from the aliens.

Do people seriously believe that villages of limited resource would send their own people into the woods to randomly sample plants, and maybe dying, to figure out what does what? Impossible, especially in a place like the Amazon.

It's not impossible. How did anyone realise that huffing petrol made you feel nice? Would anyone really sit there huffing petrol for minutes on end when it gives you a massive headache and makes you vomit? Did the petrol can speak to them? People are inventive and will try anything. I'm not saying that ayahuasca is obvious but it's not impossible either.

And incidentally something I've always wondered about that argument of "the plant told me to mix certain leaves and caapi". Which plant told them to mix them? Obviously it can't have been ayahuasca that told them because they'd have had to be on ayahuasca already.

These are entire epistemologies unto themselves and writing them off as pre-modern and primitive is INCREDIBLY short sighted

I'm not writing them off, I think they're wonderful. What I'm doubting is the idea that because we enjoy psychedelics that means our ancestors would have looked at them in exactly the same way as a 21st century man does.