Religions Suppress Spiritual Epiphanies

Religious divisions and existential unity: the secret of entheogens

Crop of AI-generated image by Çiğdem Onur from Pixabay

Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Wiccans — they all disagree about religious matters for the same kind of reason the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, Blue Jays, and Astros clash on the baseball field.

Sports teams are designed to conflict with each other; that’s their purpose. You’re supposed to cheer for your home team. The doctrinal side of state religions, too, is meant to support a civilization’s values, so societies are distinguished by the religious myths and practices that prevail in different places and periods.

A culture is like a person’s ego. You want to feel good about yourself and proud of your accomplishments. Collectively, we’re just as anxious to satisfy social expectations. The official, mainstream presentation of our religion assures us that our way of life is in good standing with the ultimate arbiters, with the great spirits or forces of nature. Most religions, after all, align with the geographical borders of civilizations: Hinduism is based in India, Islam in the Middle East, and Christianity in Europe and its former colonies.

When people from different religions or sects talk about theology, the content of scriptures, or the priestly interpretations of them and of their religion’s history, chances are they won’t agree. They’ll be playing the civilizational game, justifying indirectly how they’ve competed for resources, waged wars, negotiated social hierarchies, and tolerated economic inequities. Mainstream religious doctrines and practices are largely old defenses and obfuscations of those dubious material realities, as Karl Marx pointed out.

Religions are therefore divided by their creeds and priestly customs, which are typically overtaken by political and economic interests.

The existential revelation of entheogens

However, religions also have a perfectly unifying aspect, which is usually kept secret, buried as it is in the heresies and esoteric traditions. Religions are united by the availability of a personally transformative, existential epiphany, by the peak state of consciousness generated most powerfully and reliably by certain psychoactive drugs known as “entheogens.”

Entheogens include cannabis, DMT, psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, peyote, and beer or potions mixed with ergot alkaloids. Each has different neurotropic effects, but when taken as an entheogenic preparation in a religious context, they’re functionally the same.

The entheogen’s primary function is to snap a mind out of its mundane stupor and to awaken it to a transcendent dimension and a divine purpose. This is the reason why so many religious myths are about rebirth, enlightenment, apotheosis, and epiphany. What unites religions is the personally transformative, irresistible experience of awakening to the possibility of a nobler way of life.

You can see this theme play out in the history of religions, beginning with shamanism in prehistoric bands of hunter-gatherers. Shamans used entheogens to contact the “spirit world,” as they put it. The experience was terrifying, as the shaman would feel like he was dying. But if he was brave enough and sufficiently prepared and purified, his soul seemed to ascend to another plane on which he consulted with divine beings that would bypass his egoic prejudices and seem to teach him ultimate truths about our role in life.

When civilizations arose to guard the fruits of agricultural and military advances, those ego-shattering revelations from entheogens were twisted like everything else to suit the political agenda of the monarch or warlord whose rule was absolute. Religion or spirituality became theocratic. Thus, polytheistic myths proliferated as part of the state religion, to provide heavenly warrant for the divisions between the emerging social classes.

But even the earliest of these organized religions contained kernels of the esoteric, “spiritual” mindset. In Egypt, for example, the solar cycle symbolized the theme of personal transformation, as codified in the myths of Osiris, Horus, and Isis. The Sun seemed to rise each day and descend to the underworld at night to resurrect and regain the power to ascend again. The Pharaoh was thought to embody that power of resurrection and transformation, as an incarnation of Horus, as the higher self who was the resurrected Osiris (like the ascendant Sun). Osiris was the lord of the underworld and judge of our souls who aids the descendent, dying, lower Sun or self.

The details differ, but the spiritual or existential mission is the same. And all the world’s religions passed along their version of the same tradition that enshrined the entheogenic experience. The Greeks had the Mysteries and the kykeon potion, China its folklore and hallucinogenic herbals, and India the Upanishads, Jainism, Buddhism, and soma. Jews had Kabbalah and cannabis in their anointing oil, Christians Gnosticism and the mysterious Eucharist, and Muslims Sufism and hashish.

Jumbled memories of the same hallowed purpose — of enlightenment or awakening to our higher self by entheogens — passed into the modern secular world via alchemy, Jungian psychology, and various secret societies such as Freemasonry.

Now there are numerous speculative conspiracy theories, from theosophy to aliens, to explain this historical pattern. Yet there’s no need for a flimsy overarching narrative to minimize the differences between religions or to eliminate all the mysteries in life. Entheogens have different physiological effects, and the visionary experience depends on the setting and the initiate’s mindset. Moreover, some civilizations such as China are less spiritual or more pragmatic than others.

But the overall facts are plain. The spiritual power of religions that saves them from being just political frauds has been based all along on the reality of the “religious experience,” which is largely the psychedelic vision of a strange reality that shocks the initiate into a humble, compassionate, wiser frame of mind. The initiate is forced, then, to confront the abyss between the profane dimension of blissfully ignorant, ordinary life, and a higher plane that’s seemingly populated by all-knowing guardian spirits or inner voices.

Unlike theologies, creeds, and myths which you can argue about and interpret for eternity without reaching anything but a superficial, politically correct consensus, the impact of the entheogenic experience is overwhelming. Direct experience can be more potent than any story, argument, or mundane commandment. To be sure, the spiritual experience itself ends as the intoxicant’s effects wear off, but the initiate must assimilate the memory of having encountered something uncanny while high in the peak state.

Religious suppression of the ecstatic vision

Two implications of this are likewise undeniable. First, mainstream, organized religions have generally resisted the use of these entheogens and thus been at war with their authentic, spiritual mission.

That is, the exoteric contents of religion are politicized, secularized, and degraded over time. The spiritualists who meant to speak out as prophets or visionary reformers were often demonized and persecuted as heretics. Entheogens were banned to preserve the power of the priestly class and to avoid upsetting the blind and bestial unfolding of the profane social order.

Civilizations didn’t suppress entheogens, authentic spirituality, or the grasp of our existential status in the same ways or to the same degree. India had its Vedic caste system to rationalize, but compared to other religions, Indian ones wear their spirituality on their sleeve. Ancient Egypt, too, was transparently spiritual/existential.

Chinese folk religion is the shamanic heart of China’s spirituality, but that animistic folklore about magically influencing the spirits that govern nature was fused with more politically useful ideologies, namely Confucianism and Taoism. Confucianism was pure secular humanism, comparable to Aristotle’s teleological philosophy of nature, and Taoism emphasized the need to surrender to our natural role, not to attempt to transcend that role out of humanistic pride or progressive ambition. Such conservatism and collectivism favoured the dominance hierarchies (kingdoms or empires) that persisted in China, as they did throughout the premodern world.

Christianity’s war against spirituality

But the prize for most egregious suppressions must go to the monotheistic religions, and specifically to Western Christianity. By identifying God as a transcendent creator, and by demonizing the deification of human nature, the monotheist countered the revelations from entheogens with religious propaganda. For the experience of being divine while high on a peak state of consciousness, the monotheist substitutes a pale imitation, namely the promise of union with God in the afterlife.

It’s a testament to the power of the entheogenic experience that the heretical message persisted despite the totalitarian measures of theocratic repression. The most pernicious and shameless culprit was the Roman Catholic Church with its tireless, systematic campaign to be the “universal” faith. Of course, entheogenic ecstasy seems to have the power to unite humanity with no need for priestly hierarchies. Thus, the kind of universality that Catholics had in mind was a politically enforced conformity, one that suited the character of a Judaized, rejuvenated Roman Empire.

The Jewish heritage of Christianity injected the collapsing Roman Empire with a moralistic purpose. Pre-Christian Rome had been relatively tolerant and multicultural, yet Christian Rome would seek to control everyone’s minds, taking literally Jesus’s remark about how we should be wary of our thoughts, not just our actions.

But what’s most galling here is that the entheogenic message hides in plain sight in Christianity. This was the ingenious tactic of disguising the possibility of “resurrecting” to a new, enlightened life by “dying” to our mundane preoccupations. The disguise was just the historicizing of the myth of Jesus’s death and resurrection, which made the experience of enlightenment an exclusive affair.

Typically, a myth is meant to be taken metaphorically, as the myth uses characters to signify general phenomena. Eastern Christianity leans slightly in that direction, due to its Greek philosophical disposition. But if the Christian insists that Jesus was God’s only son or that God incarnated as just one man two millennia ago, she’s missed the point. More precisely, this Christian has succumbed to the Church’s ancient political ruse and lost track of what spirituality or existential authenticity has always been about.

When you consider this thrust of the history of the world’s religions, it’s obvious that the message that’s buried in orthodox Christianity is that the through-line of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection is symbolically the proper destiny of all people. We’re all poised to snap out of our mundane stupor, and to see through the delusions that sustain the appalling charades and disgraces of mass human conduct. We have the potential to die to the lower selves of our animality and ego, to the sociable side of ourselves that bows to bullies or thrives on domination. And we can rise again to our seemingly higher self, to an incarnation of ourselves that’s inflamed with righteous zeal and divine creativity.

The platonic metaphors of the cave and levels of reality pass on the experiential sense that the peak state of consciousness literally feels higher than ordinary cognitive processing. You feel like you’re detaching from your body and ascending to something like the top of Mount Sinai where Moses met God. The cave is where we’re trapped in ignorance, and the Orphic and Jain traditions took the body itself to be that trap. The mind frees itself from the body’s animality by getting high, that being the most undeniable way of realizing that the life we live as benighted quasi-animals, as drones or predators in a societal megamachine is a grotesque sham.

Personhood (the dangerous combination of self-awareness, reason, autonomy, curiosity, and ambition) is anomalous in nature, giving us the godlike power to awaken to a cosmic mission, to create the kingdom of God on earth. That kingdom is hardly anything as medieval as the Taliban’s flavor of barbarism. Rather, as you can glean from the ravings of marginalized prophets, artists, and visionaries, the realistic divine order would be more like an unstoppable galactic civilization populated by Promethean humanists who are unified by their shared appreciation of both our tragic existential predicament and our transformative, progressive potential.

Image by Burak Erk from Pixabay

The irrelevant clash with science

The second implication is that the notion of an entheogenic epiphany runs up against scientific knowledge. Scientists will explain the experience of peak states as being hallucinatory. While high, you’re not talking to spirits that exist on a supernatural plane; instead, different circuits in your brain are energized and communicating with each other in unusual ways, and you attempt to make sense of that temporary rewiring by modeling the experience as a dialogue with divine forces, aliens, machine elves, or Mother Earth.

However, that conflict with science is practically irrelevant. Even if the scientific explanation is conceded, as it should be, the fact remains that were everyone to ingest an entheogen, all human life would be radically altered from that day forward. What matters to the revelatory, apocalyptic experience isn’t whether the contents point to a knowable higher reality. Instead, what matters is the challenge the altered states force on our mundane, secular preoccupations.

While low as opposed to high, we’re naturally concerned with family, business, sex, money, and our various hobbies and pastimes. To be psychedelically high, however, is to perceive the relative smallness of those animal, social, and self-centered concerns. You suddenly feel as though you’re empowered or informed by a divine presence or that you’ve virtually been possessed by the forces that rule over you and have been suddenly foregrounded.

Again, if the challenge were just that the initiate is presented with a troubling argument or rhetorical plea to change her ways, she could dismiss that discourse and rationalize her decision with a counterargument. The powers of reason and rhetoric are two-sided and often open-ended, in that there’s usually a pro and a con that apply to every worthwhile topic of conversation. Yet if you witnessed, say, a clown exiting a taxi and flying away on a balloon, you’d know what you saw. Even if you hallucinated the whole thing, the fact that a hallucination could be so convincing would compel you to question the nature of consensus reality.

The transformative effects of the existential revelation are much more powerful because the hallucinations wouldn’t be so random and meaningless. In the religious context, when the drugs are presented with reverential intentions (which avoid giving you a “bad trip”), the effects cohere around that theme of ascending to a more enlightened state.

Even if you’re just talking to another part of yourself while high, that “higher” part is as good as angelic. The entheogen strips away your egoic defenses, leaving you with the fundamental truth of your life that you might have unconsciously known all along. Wrestling with that truth of where we’ve gone wrong, and with the nature of reality and how we should be spending our limited time is the supreme path.

For example, even if gods don’t exist and are only convenient mental projections, what is objectively real is the availability of a voice that feels divine to everyone who ascends to the peak state while high on an entheogen. And what’s real is how that experience fosters the initiate’s maturation into a humbler, more questioning, openhearted individual.

In short, there’s an atheistic reading of this entheogenic epiphany that is no less revelatory than the theistic one. The former interpretation is phenomenological in that we bracket or ignore the question of whether the peak states are realistic or whether they refer to a hidden outer reality. Instead, we focus on the powerful psychosocial effects of this crash course in existential questioning.

As adults, we’re liable to take life for granted, as the familiarity with our routines makes us jaded. Indeed, we learn how science disenchants nature, eliminating the mysteries that were crucial to our most comforting intuitions about the meaning of life. We might worry, then, that life is a cruel charade.

But once we incorporate the hidden history of the world’s religions into even this stance of hyperskepticism, unsettling possibilities present themselves. We can appreciate how the religious ideals that have guided — and sometimes plagued — civilization have been drawn from an accidental apocalypse, from a tearing away of mundane perceptions, and a turbocharging of cognition.

For centuries, artists have used intoxicants such as alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis to fuel their creativity. But in so far as religion has directed most human activity for thousands of years, civilization is the product of the hidden, certain knowledge that all needn’t be as it seems and that we have a high calling.