Search Results for: Scott Korb

Getting There Too Quickly:Aldous Huxley and Mescaline

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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

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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

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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

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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 →

A Questionable Purpose, A Test of Words

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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 Jack Downey

Last month, a team of researchers from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, led by Dr. Karen Terry, published a 150-page report entitled The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010 .  The report is the second installment of  research into the scandal that has crushed the American Church for the past two decades as reports of abuse and its administrative cover-up came to light, the high-water mark being the 2003 prison murder of convicted abuser priest John Geoghan.  Causes and Context is the culmination of five years of research initiated by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) National Review Board, to the tune of $1.8 million, approximately half of which was funded by the USCCB itself.  Its preceding document, The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, was meant to be a descriptive analysis of the phenomenon – cataloguing the 10,667 individual reports of sexual abuse by clergy from 1950 through early 2003 – with Causes and Context providing more analytical reflection.  However, the study’s immediate legacy has been marred by allegations—and threats–from critics of all stripes that the research itself was crippled in some way by ethical bias, aggravating the already tectonic divisions within American Catholicism on the subject. Continue Reading →