Review: Season of the Witch
Don Jolly reviews Peter Bebergal‘s new book, Season of the Witch. Continue Reading →
Search Results for: Peter Bebergal
RAW Believer
Peter Bebergal on Robert Anton Wilson, from a post at BoingBoing:
So it is with great respect and admiration that I celebrate the life of Robert Anton Wilson during this memorial week by remembering that he was the great believing skeptic, someone for whom the collection and curating of all that is weird was his life’s work, who reminded us always to question everything, while recognizing that we should never stop exploring. I sure wish RAW was alive today, especially at a time when there is something like a real Occult Revival going on, from the psychedelic explorers who see 2012 as a great trans formative event, to the huge increase in the membership of organization like the O.T.O. and Freemasonry, and by extension a whole load of conspiracy theories. RAW warned against any idea, group, or person that claims knowledge of the “Real” Universe, echoing Umberto Eco who wrote in Foucault’s Pendulum we should be mindful of turning metaphysics in mechanics.
Getting There Too Quickly:Aldous Huxley and Mescaline
By Peter Bebergal
Between his 1932 vision of a sterile dystopia in Brave New World and the 1962 novel Island about a spiritual utopia, the author Aldous Huxley experienced two things; the Hindu religious philosophy known as Vedanta and psychedelic drugs. In Brave New World, people are addicted to Soma, a hallucinogenic that artificially simulates a kind of dull transcendent state, and so makes religion irrelevant. In Island, the Palanese (residents of Pala where the book takes place) ritually use the drug moksha for spiritual and mystical insights. It wasn’t that by the time he was writing Island Huxley no longer believed that civilization was potentially doomed to a homogenized over-indulgent consumer culture, but rather that there was another possibility for human destiny. Soon after writing Brave New World Huxley saw this other opportunity but believed it would take work, a disciplined and rigorous adherence to a spiritual ideal. By the time he got around to writing Island he was convinced there was a faster, less strenuous way to find the higher purpose of human consciousness: mescaline.
Huxley had long been interested in the hallucinogenic properties of certain plants but it wasn’t until 1953 that he encountered the work of Humphry Osmond. Continue Reading →
I'll Never Grow So Old Again: Ditching the Drugs But Still Looking for the Transcendence
An exclusive excerpt from Peter Bebergal’s Too Much To Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood, published last week. Bebergal will be reading from Too Much at the NYU Bookstore on Wednesday, October 12th, at 5 pm. Come on by; he’ll sign a copy for you. For more details, click here.
By Peter Bebergal
In 1882 the psychologist William James (the novelist Henry’s older brother) published a number of articles, both anonymously and under his own name, in which he described his use of nitrous oxide. What we know as laughing gas he believed “simulates the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree.” James expanded this thesis in his definitive classic on religion, Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he captures the essence of his beliefs about mystical consciousness: “It is that our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different . . . No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.” From a psychological point of view, James was convinced there was a common underlying phenomenon related to mystical states: an overwhelming sense of unity with the sacred dimension of reality. Call it nirvana, moksha, satori, Christ consciousness, or, in Hebrew, devekut—for James it was all the same.
This promise, this offering that has so long been associated with LSD and other psychedelic drugs, has meant different things to different people. For some it was the promise of liberation from those social norms that seemed to homogenize and dilute real experience. For others it was the promise of liberation from the ego. Some have written about hidden worlds, layers of dimensions that transcend the science of physics. Others wanted nothing more than to know God or some aspect of a divine consciousness. Maybe it was revelation, or prophecy of a sort, an experience not unlike those had by saints and mystics. It was a promise of universal transformation. In other circles, there was, and still is, the hope that drugs could alter the effects of mental illness. Continue Reading →
I’ll Never Grow So Old Again: Ditching the Drugs But Still Looking for the Transcendence
An exclusive excerpt from Peter Bebergal’s Too Much To Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood, published last week. Bebergal will be reading from Too Much at the NYU Bookstore on Wednesday, October 12th, at 5 pm. Come on by; he’ll sign a copy for you. For more details, click here.
By Peter Bebergal
In 1882 the psychologist William James (the novelist Henry’s older brother) published a number of articles, both anonymously and under his own name, in which he described his use of nitrous oxide. What we know as laughing gas he believed “simulates the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree.” James expanded this thesis in his definitive classic on religion, Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he captures the essence of his beliefs about mystical consciousness: “It is that our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different . . . No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.” From a psychological point of view, James was convinced there was a common underlying phenomenon related to mystical states: an overwhelming sense of unity with the sacred dimension of reality. Call it nirvana, moksha, satori, Christ consciousness, or, in Hebrew, devekut—for James it was all the same.
This promise, this offering that has so long been associated with LSD and other psychedelic drugs, has meant different things to different people. For some it was the promise of liberation from those social norms that seemed to homogenize and dilute real experience. For others it was the promise of liberation from the ego. Some have written about hidden worlds, layers of dimensions that transcend the science of physics. Others wanted nothing more than to know God or some aspect of a divine consciousness. Maybe it was revelation, or prophecy of a sort, an experience not unlike those had by saints and mystics. It was a promise of universal transformation. In other circles, there was, and still is, the hope that drugs could alter the effects of mental illness. Continue Reading →
A Lexicon of Morality: Before Nature and Magic Went Separate Ways
A review of Gregory McNamee’s translation of On the Nature of Animals (Trinity University Press, 192 pp., July 2011).
By Peter Bebergal
July saw the publication of Claudius Aelian’s On the Nature of Animals translated by Gregory McNamee. Aelian was a Roman teacher whose proficiency in Greek made him famous. Aeilan (ca. 175 – ca. 235) was also a collector of quotations, legends, and lore of the ancient world, and his On the Nature of Animals originally consisted of 17 volumes. McNamee’s version is a slight, one-volume book, intended for a popular audience. Still, its thoughtful curation teaches important lessons about the intersection between magic, natural history, and morality as well as the evolution of superstition toward what was thought to be a more rational form of theology.
We are governed, it was once thought, by a vast and complex system of correspondences. Plato taught that human beings are a microcosm of the cosmos, both containing a system of spheres that govern the motions and, as it were, emotions. It was also thought that the aspects and personalities of the planets correspond to certain plants and animals. Knowledge of these relationships would inform what is commonly called sympathetic magic where “like produces like.” Continue Reading →
Pathologizing the Sexual Revolution
Part of The Revealer’s series on the John Jay report, “The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010.”
by Peter Bebergal
The Sixties counterculture beleaguered most traditional religious communities. Not only was there an increase in behavior deemed inappropriate (drug use, promiscuous sex, and the generalized spread of anti-establishment ideas), there was what came to be seen as a distracting interest in non-Western, non-traditional spiritual philosophy and practices. Compounding this was the insistence by many young people that psychedelic drugs were a profound catalyst for helping them to break free of what they saw as dusty and dried out teachings spouted by clergy who had no understanding of the injustices of a country torn apart by war, racism, sexism, and homophobia.
It’s no surprise then that the recent report on the “causes and context” of sex abuse in the Catholic Church claims that one factor was the prevalence of counterculture values that peaked in the mid- to late-Sixties, characterized in the popular consciousness of hirsute young people taking drugs, having sex, and otherwise dropping out of society in pursuit of a naive belief in a cosmic utopia. This stereotype would ultimately reduce the Sixties counterculture, an extremely complex and diverse movement, to a kind of youthful pathology, or simply, deviance. As the report says: “The rise in abuse cases in the 1960s and 1970s was influenced by social factors in American society generally.” Continue Reading →
Report on Sex Abuse in the Roman Catholic Church
With commentary from FRANCES KISSLING, AMANDA MARCOTTE, ELIZABETH CASTELLI, SCOTT KORB, MARY VALLE, PETER BEBERGAL, JACK DOWNEY Continue Reading →
Tripping on Science: The Psychedelic Community Contests Terms
by Peter Bebergal
Despite their common, and mostly fringe area of concern, the psychedelic subculture — whose kaleidoscopic reflection includes Johns Hopkins scientists, transpersonal psychologists, dozens of independent (non-affiliated) researchers, writers, visionary artists, and the users themselves — is often at odds with itself. Above board researchers take pride in their work, adhering to the strict peer review process that all science is subject to. But to some, the work of psychedelics is the work of the spirit, of the non-rational, of connecting ourselves to something that may well not be testable or empirically verifiable. There are also clashes of personality, of ideologies, and of intention. Sometimes it’s simply a disagreement over words, what they mean, and how they should be used.
At the heart over a disagreement of the meaning of words within a very small subculture is another more essential divergence, one that reflects a wider cultural conflict between science and spirituality.
One of the most remarkable developments in the past ten years is the trending toward acceptance in the scientific community of research involving psychedelic drugs after an almost forty year period of disregard. But like other recent fields of research, such as work done with stem cells, DNA, and even evolutionary biology, it finds itself up against the question of spirituality. Continue Reading →
Kosher Enough
By Peter Bebergal
In April 2009, at the peak of the Swine Flu scare, Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman of Israel urged people to refer to the virus as the Mexican Flu, because, as we all know, pigs aren’t kosher. While both insulting and at its face absurd, Litzman’s request brings to the surface what might only be a bit of Talmudic minutiae for those whose daily religious lives depend on such things. Does something deemed not kosher to eat also render its very nature somehow unclean? An idea like this might make sense within the insularity of the ultra-orthodox, but for a Judaism that is worldly, the idea that we must avoid even the mere recognition of things we are forbidden to eat is troubling, to say the least.
Underlying the laws of kashrut (dietery law) is the very essence of much of halakhah (Jewish law): separation. Halakhah is filled with commandments regarding what is pure and what is impure; who is of the community and who is a stranger. Litzman’s wish conflates all of these by suggesting that even dietary laws speak to the heart of what it means to be Jewish, and by extension, what it means to be separate.
As a progressive Jew I find this heartbreaking, but as a father, I am confronted with how to teach Jewish values to my child while explaining Jewish law. Why do these things often seem mutually opposed? As Rabbi Arthur Green once wrote when discussing his relationsip to the Sabbath and the story of a six-day creation, “How can I affirm that which I deny?” Laurel Snyder’s new children’s book, Baxter, the Pig Who Wanted to be Kosher playfully finds it’s way around this tension by illuminating both laws and values as reflections of the other. Continue Reading →