The Institute for the Advancement of Psychedelic Christianity

How delightful it is to go for a walk wearing my new Enchroma glasses! Even the color of the sidewalk is beautiful. Even the whiteness of a white car, the blackness of a black one, the brilliant star of the sun on a piece of broken glass in passing, not to mention the flowers and the fine details of greenery, dirt, bark, and leaves.

What a mistake it is to denigrate the senses and the body! I can understand social inhibitions about sex, because of the reproductive, emotional, and health consequences. But still, sexual fascination and pleasure are among God’s greatest gifts, as are the colors of the world, as are the human abilities to invent devices such as hearing aids, glasses, telescopes; and skills, such as painting, writing, composing and playing music, and writing, that enhance sensory perception and deepen one’s gratitude for the givenness of this rich treasure: seeing all those colors, hearing all those pitches, feeling the rhythms, loving the sight of a naked woman, caressing and being caressed, sexual play, tasting delicious food and drink.

Food and drink, like sex, can bring problems. And I suppose we can think of bad art–bad painting, bad sculpture, bad architecture, bad music, bad writing–as ways of doing things with colors, shapes, sounds, in depictions, descriptions, and compositions, that cause disgust rather than delight in the gifts of God. Similarly, even some healthy bodily functions can provoke disgust, and the body cannot escape sickness and pain, decrepitude and death. But it is only because the simple pleasures of life and health and our senses revealing the beauties of the world are so heavenly that the loss of them in sickness, decrepitude and death are so regrettable. And it is only because truthful art is such an apt expression of gratitude for God’s creation that dishonest and ugly art is such a waste of time and effort.

An appeal to experience gives us every reason to expect that although death means leaving this world behind, it is not permanent unconsciousness but rather transformation into or recovery of another life. So, death is a limit on what one can achieve in any given lifetime, but there is no limit on how many lifetimes one will have. Death will be a return to that state of being one had before birth, and that state of being was one that turned into one’s life. Life is a gift, and it is everlasting, and it comes with the beauty of all these colors. It would be wonderful even without them, but here they are, purely for delight.

Suddenly, for no discernible reason, he realized that this was a dream. It wasn’t because of a dawning awareness that the only way to make sense of what was happening was to understand that he was dreaming, as had happened to him on numerous other occasions. On the contrary, he found himself thinking that despite the fact that he knew without any doubt that this was a dream, it all seemed as real, as vivid, as indubitably concrete as anything he had ever experienced. It happened just at a moment when he noticed how beautiful the sunlight was, shining on the wet pavement. Thinking about it later, he recalled the line from Keats’ poem, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” He had been suddenly struck by the beauty of what he saw and as suddenly certain of the truth that he was dreaming.

The dream continued a while longer. When he realized he was no longer dreaming, but just thinking about what he had dreamt, he got up, took his notebook and pen and jotted down his memories of the details of the dream:

Applying for a job. Insurance office.
“You’re hired. Hours: 8-5 and 5-10.”
“Get a haircut.”
“That’s a dealbreaker. I’m not getting a haircut.”
Car wouldn’t start, then started, engine racing, could only drive in reverse. Up a hill, finally got it to stop. Later, a man helped, found the problem: electronics, a round piece with strips out of kilter. Loose screws inside, turned out to be just extra screws.
At the workplace again, my job was dealing with electrical things. Caused a problem, fixed it. Saw a place for lunch nearby. Charming, Italian decor. But no lunch break.
Leaving, trying to find car. Flash flood coming down the street. Turned around, went in other direction. Saw two dead, very big cockroaches. Up the sidewalk, sun shining through onto the street. Beautiful. Realized it was a dream, but noticed how unbelievable and vivid and detailed everything was. Turned left, up a hill, dead skunk lying on the ground to my right. Hillside on the left. Beautiful building with a sign: “Clarenton House.” University campus. Slippery hillside, steps up ahead, women students walking up them. Sunshine slanting past trees, across the yard, mellow early autumn afternoon.

He went back to bed and back to sleep. Later that morning, now fully awake, he wrote the following notes:

There is no inside without an outside no outside without an inside, no soul without a body, no body without a soul. But can there be good without evil or evil without good, beauty without ugliness or ugliness without beauty?

Is truth independent of beauty? Is falsity independent of ugliness?

Is it possible to tell the truth in such a way as deliberately to hurt someone? I know it seems possible, but is it really? Will that really be the truth? Does the intention to hurt falsify in some way what is said?

In what way can fiction be true? Can we distinguish between fiction and nonfiction in a painting? We can admire the skill with which an artist has realistically portrayed a person or a scene, but there are always other features of the work of art by which we judge its artistic success: choice of subject if nothing else. In literature, the flow of the words, in painting, the contrasts between light and darkness, the use of colors One of the things most enjoyable in good narrative fiction is the way it enhances one’s experience of everyday life by calling attention to the details of it by the writer’s using details of sensory description to create the verisimilitude of the narration. This same effect can occur with nonfictional narrative also, but there the appeal seems to be more the knowledge or belief that the narrated events actually occurred in this same world in which one is living one’s everyday life.

If you would like to receive a copy of the new audiobook version of Life in a Psychedelic Church in exchange for an honest review, contact me through the contact form on this website.

The audiobook version of Life in a Psychedelic Church is now on sale. Through the vivid voice of narrator Gary J. Chambers, Jr., you will hear what life was like in the Neo-American Church in the 1970s and how looking back at those times can point the way forward to a new understanding of life in a psychedelic church. Click here for details.

https://www.amazon.com/Life-Psychedelic-Church-Memories-Musings-ebook/dp/B086P85X7N/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1596845085&sr=1-1

Click here to listen to the first movement of Mary Jo’s Sonata. To listen to some of her other music, see the drop-down menu at the top right of the homepage: New music by Mary Jo Call. https://myiapc.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Sonata-First-Movement.mp3

Listen to Mary Jo’s Invention in C.

https://myiapc.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Invention-in-C-Major.m4a

It is a very popular thought among psychedelic intellectuals that psychedelic experience reveals that nondualism is the truth about reality. The very word “nondualism” and it adjectival forms are supposed to somehow express in language that transcends language a concept that transcends conceptual thought. Rhetorically, this has the advantage of creating an automatic shield from any analytical criticism. Theoretically, nondualism is supposed to be distinct from monism, since monism is opposed to dualism or any kind of pluralism, leading to a dualism of monism vs nonmonism; but how does nondualism escape a duality of nondualism vs dualism? In practice, the term “nondualism” is supposed to imply a rejection of supernaturalism, since the supernatural is thought to presuppose the natural as the realm that it transcends. But naturalism equally presupposes the supernatural as the realm that it rejects. We can acknowledge that we need to understand the concept of the natural in order to understand the concept of the supernatural and vice-versa and yet believe that one is more fundamental than the other. The proponent of naturalism thinks that supernaturalism is just a faulty theory about nature. But an intelligent defender of supernaturalism can reply that the naturalist always promises but never delivers naturalistic explanations of things like love, freedom, and the meaning of life, and instead is forced by his own assumptions effectively to deny them. If it seems unacceptable to you, as it does to me, to deny the reality of those things, then you can instead accept that the supernatural realm is the fundamental reality of which the natural is a part.

Here is a clip from a filmed documentary digitally converted and posted on YouTube of my former teacher, the Chief Boo Hoo of the Neo-American Church, talking about LSD and God. When I say it is “newly discovered,” I mean newly discovered to me. Art’s daughter, Kristen, sent me the link.

https://youtu.be/lv7bLOEkNQM

Listen to another of Mary Jo’s beautiful compositions. https://myiapc.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Sarabande-1.0.mp3