The Institute for the Advancement of Psychedelic Christianity

Early in the article linked here, the author and self-professed ayahuasca skeptic, Dalston Playfair, uses the well-worn analogy that compares a psychedelic-induced mystical experience to a helicopter ride to the summit of a mountain, and a mystical experience achieved through some other spiritual discipline to climbing up the mountain on foot. “The view is the same, but at the end of the helicopter ride you know less about the mountain.”

Given the beautiful description, in the next-to-last paragraph of the article, under the heading “Recalled to Life,” of the feeling of involvement in mankind that he felt after the experience, I wonder if he would now agree with me that the helicopter-ride putdown, of psychedelic means, shows a lack of understanding?

The feelings and thoughts expressed so beautifully in that last paragraph and in John Donne’s meditation remind me of the love of God and of one’s neighbor as oneself that are the heart of the Christian religion.

Ayahuasca: A Skeptic’s Notes

With very frequent searching in my heavy, thick Oxford Spanish Dictionary, I am reading, in Spanish, Miguel de Unamuno’s Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho. Reading it in Spanish gives me a chance to use and improve my Spanish, a feeling of accomplishment, and pleasant memories of living in Salamanca while I was teaching in a study abroad program there. Also, there are only fairly expensive editions available in English translation. A quick search of Amazon reveals that one hardcover edition of Anthony Kerrigan’s translation is priced at $859.82, and another one, a used hardcover, priced at only $60.46, is ranked #9,470,737 in Amazon’s Best Sellers Rank. Suffice it to say, this is not a book likely to be the book of the month in a book club these days. And if you were to propose it, you might be met with an awkward pause followed by someone changing the subject. Nevertheless, nevertheless, dear reader, I am recommending to you that you buy that $60.46 edition and do your bit to bump up that ranking, but also that you read it, because it is a very great work of literature.

Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer, wrote that he regarded The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations as Unamuno’s greatest work, and that he didn’t think Cervantes’s Don Quixote needed to be retold, as Unamuno had done. I only finally read the whole Don Quixote while I was in Salamanca, a year and a half ago, and I am only about halfway through Unamuno’s retelling of it, and it is slow going and I am taking my time; but already I can tell that I think it is at least as wonderful as The Tragic Sense of Life, has the same message, and tells that message in a way that is no less profoundly moving than it is delightfully entertaining. What is that message? Here, finally, is the passage I want to share with you, in my own inelegant translation:

“If inspirations of the heart and faith in the eternal release us from the anguishes of the night of superstition and fear of the unknown, why when the light of experience shines do we have to make fun of those inspirations and of that faith? And so much more as we will once again need them, since as night follows day, a new night will return after this new day, and thus between light and darkness we go on living and going to an end that is neither darkness nor light, but something in which both are combined and confounded, something in which heart and head are merged, and in which Don Quijote and Sancho are one.”

Assume reductionistic physicalism: that all our thoughts, perceptions, emotions, volitions are nothing more than brain processes. Then all that we are conceiving of when we conceive of the brain are nothing more than brain processes. In other words, the brain is in the brain. But that brain must also be in another brain, and so on in a vicious infinite regress. This is just the problem of the homunculus turned inside out. Such is the philosophical “progress” of Daniel Dennett, who was so impressed by his teacher Gilbert Ryle’s “ghost in the machine” argument.

The assumption, that an objective world completely free of subjects of experience is the ultimate explanation for our world that includes subjects of experience, gives rise to the so-called “hard problem of consciousness,” that is, the problem of explaining what it’s like to be the subject of an experience entirely in terms of the functioning of the brain. But the solution to this problem is not just hard, it’s logically impossible. One’s own brain is something of which one can be aware, either as a concept or a mental image or series of perceptions of an organ with extremely complex interconnections of parts. But no matter how complex it is, it is still only a small part of the greater complexity of the entire field of things and events of which one can be aware.  My brain is here in this room where I am typing this. There are other brains in other parts of the house, just as complex as mine, I suppose. This house is but one of many buildings on the earth, which is itself very complex, and but one planet orbiting one of many billions of stars, etc. I can think about any or all of those things as well as think about my brain, and all my thoughts are supposed, by reductionist philosophers like Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, to be nothing more than something going on in my brain.  So, the solution to the hard problem is logically impossible, for it would consist in explaining a thing, the entire field of what I can be aware of, as being nothing more than a part of that very thing, the part that consists of the empirical evidence and theories about the functioning of my brain.

An objective world, completely free of subjects of experience, cannot be the ultimate explanation of our world which includes subjects of experience.

Here is a sneak peek of the cover of my new book, Psychedelic Christianity, due in about 9 months.

Here is an excellent essay on the case for psychedelics from Quillette:

http://quillette.com/2017/09/04/the-case-for-psychedelics/

Midwest Book Review:

As informed and informative as it is thoughtful and thought-provoking, Dreams and Resurrection: On Immortal Selves, Psychedelics, and Christianity is especially recommended to the attention of non-specialist general readers with an interest in the nature of death, the concept of an afterlife, the human psyche, and metaphysics. Exceptionally well written, organized and presented.

 

Fr. Richard Rohr, O.F.M., Center for Action and Contemplation, Albuquerque, New Mexico:

Because most of us do not think too seriously about such things as eternal life, nor do we think in a dispassionate way, I cannot imagine that anyone would not profit from reading this well-reasoned, but also ‘faith-filled’ study about our life beyond this life. Read and be energized!

 

Rev. Dr. R. Scott Colglazier, Senior Minister, First Congregational Church of Los Angeles:

. . . wonderfully, exhilaratingly, and convincingly interesting . . . . I’m so glad I spent time with this book. Not only was it intellectually engaging, it shifted some of my own thinking regarding life after death, and more to the point, about what it means to be a human being. And so I say to my friends and colleagues: Buckle up. Enjoy the ride. Prepare to see yourself (and everyone around you) in a new way!

 

Dr. Kurt Smith, Philosophy Professor, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania:

Dreams and Resurrection joins a celebrated history of important philosophical works dedicated to exploring the concepts of death and immortality. In the tradition of great public intellectuals such as Alan Watts and Jiddu Krishnamurti, Jack Call makes a very difficult topic accessible to the non-academic reader without sacrificing the standards of academic intellectual rigor.

 

Simon Small, Priest and author:

A fascinating personal argument for the reality of eternal life and its relationship with Christianity, using the rigorous approach of the western philosophical tradition, spiced with the author’s psychedelic experiences as a young man. Highly recommended.

Continue reading “What they’re saying about Dreams and Resurrection”

https://www.amazon.com/Psychedelic-Christianity-Ultimate-Goal-Living/dp/1785357476/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1536523911&sr=1-1&keywords=psychedelic+christianityOrder your copy today! (That’s not really an order but just what I would like for you to do if you please.)

From Psychedelic Christianity: on the ultimate goal of living

I want absolutely fresh newness, as on the day of Creation, with solids that look like they have just gelled from liquid, and liquids that look like shining solids, and everything breathing and squirming with life.

If life is ultimately meaningless suffering or pleasure – I don’t believe there is such a thing as meaningless joy – for even one person, then it is for me too, and I have missed the ultimate goal.

And here is the flaw of utilitarian ethics: the assumption that there can be an impersonal, objective summing up of the values or disvalues of many subjective experiences.

The ultimate goal from my point of view is deep contentment from every possible or actual point of view.

The truth has already been revealed. It can be forgotten, ignored, seem to be hidden. But it is not hidden. It will be revealed again when it seems most hidden. That is the message of psychedelic experience, and it is the message of Christianity.

A psychedelic Christian is just a Christian who acknowledges that psychedelic experience is a way of learning how to be in the right relationship to God.

What makes the world the way it is, is a person and not a thing or an impersonal force; because if it were a thing or a force, then you and I and everybody else would just be parts of that thing or masses of stuff subject to an external force, like dead leaves blown along by the wind. And we aren’t like that.

As a result of our envy, we think of ourselves as things that can be destroyed and lose consciousness forever. Jesus represents seeing ourselves as loving children of a loving parent, so that even when that which we most feared is actually happening, we are not destroyed but rise again. And all of this is consistent with psychedelic experience.

The more we treat politics like a sport and the less we treat it like a religion, the better off we are.

Are we to say that God can’t bring about his kingdom by a just use of force, but that we can? That hardly seems like piety. Surely it is more accurate to think that God can’t do the logically impossible thing of bringing about love by using force and neither can we.

What can be seen is the outside. What can’t be seen is the inside. But the inside is experienced, directly, by each one of us.

Ironically all too often people who think of themselves as believers in science betray empiricism by accepting unquestioningly the pronouncements of authority figures who claim to speak for science.

Psychedelic Christianity is not an appeal to the Bible as “the inerrant word of God.” The appeal is always and only to what rings true in the light of one’s own experience.

We know our usefulness to others in this life is limited, so we want others to consider us not just as useful, but lovable whether we are useful or not.

The Institute for the Advancement of Psychedelic Christianity is proud to present one of Mary Jo Call’s latest compositions, “Moonrise.” Click on Moonrise on the menu and enjoy!

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is this worth?

Review of Suffering: if God exists, why doesn’t he stop it?
by John Morris

Morris’s answer to the question posed in the title of his concise but fairly thorough little book is that God cannot make things better, from our present point of view, by eliminating or even reducing injustice and suffering, without actually making things worse, from what our eventual point of view will be; because if he exercised the control that would be necessary to relieve our present suffering, we humans would not be free to become the virtuous and self-reliant creatures we need to be in order to, as he puts it, “multiply God’s virtues.”

In other words, God is stopping the suffering of grief and injustice, and the only problem is that from our present point of view, he isn’t doing it fast enough. So, the question becomes “Suffering: if God exists, why doesn’t he hurry up and stop it?” Morris’s answer is that he is doing it as fast as divinely possible, since the world would actually be worse if he were to take away the challenges of suffering through which we become morally virtuous and if he were to use force to prevent us from doing anything unjust, for that would be nothing more than to exercise his own virtue rather than to multiply it through the free actions of his creatures. We have to become morally virtuous on our own by living through the challenges of grief and injustice, becoming just and self-reliant, god-like beings who will no longer do anything unjust or suffer from the pains of evolving nature.

I am paraphrasing rather than directly quoting Morris because I am trying to show what I understand him to be saying. And if I have accurately represented what he says, I think he is right, and that he has said something very important. But here is something he wrote which I will quote directly, and which I think muddles the case:

“Whether or not there is an afterlife, the importance of the Earth remains unchanged: contrary to what some preachers suggest, believers and unbelievers are all in the same boat! Earth is still the only home all of us shall ever have with our present bodies and minds. So this life is not a rehearsal, but the one and only performance.” (p. 57)

If there is no afterlife, then there will be no point of view in the future from which we will see that our suffering made sense. So, I think what he should have said is that either there is an afterlife or else our suffering will only stop with our deaths and is not justified by anything that will come later. And then he could have said that if there is an afterlife, it doesn’t follow that this life is only a rehearsal. He has already explained why there is nothing trivial about how we live our present lives.

The problem of evil and the problem of suffering have traditionally been thought of as problems for religious believers. The unbeliever can argue that there is no satisfactory answer to the question of why an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful God would allow evil and suffering, and give this as at least one reason for his or her disbelief in God. But it is not recognized often enough that the unbeliever has his or her own problem of evil and suffering. I think Camus recognized it when he said that suicide is the “only one really serious philosophical problem.” The unbeliever is faced with the question of why life is worth living even though evil and suffering are real. He doesn’t have to explain why a good God allows them, but he does need to explain why a life worth living allows them. That is the sense in which believers and unbelievers are in the same boat. But believers have the advantage of allowing themselves to hope for a future that is in the process of coming about, where grief and the other natural and artificial sufferings of life have become a more than fair price to pay for a deep joy; while unbelievers are constrained to pooh-pooh this as “pie in the sky bye and bye,” and come up with some other way of understanding how it can be all right that one day they will die utterly, or, as is more common, avoid thinking about it, all the while regarding themselves as hard-headed realists.