Steve McIntosh, Reality Sandwich
Waking Times
The following is excerpted from The Presence of the Infinite: The Spiritual Experience of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, recently published by Quest Books.
For thousands of years, and perhaps even before the emergence of Homo sapiens, humans have altered their consciousness through the use of psychoactive botanicals. While most of these substances produce merely a mild moodÂ-altering effect, a few have been found to trigger profound nonordinary states, which are inevitably imbued with religious significance by the cultures that employ them. The use of psychedelics for religious purposes can be traced to the classical civilizations of antiquity, such as in the Eleusinian Mysteries of the Greeks or the sacred soma used in Vedic rituals. Psychedelic botanicals have also been in continuous use as sacraments in indigenous cultures worldwide for centuries at least. The existence of such mindÂ-altering psychedelic substances, however, was largely unknown to the culture of the developed world until early advocates of progressive spirituality began to extol the virtues of psychedelic experience.
