Are all the world's religions psychedelically based?

[BackToBasics]

It is well known that through certain drugs Man can reach a state of Spiritual or Mystical awareness.
Some claim to have met God himself, while others say they have reached higher planes of existence where they have met intelligent beings who want to share information with them. Budgie has had a few experiences of that type himself.

There is also growing evidence that ancient cultures used psychedelics for their mind-altering properties (There have been discoveries of rock-art with pictures of mushrooms sprouting out of human bodies and the like).

Maybe they saw the 'beings' that they met on their journeys as 'god-like' creatures (Budgie thinks they almost certainly did), and started to worship them. And that could be how religion began.

Now, if that were true, it would probably mean that all of the world's major religions are all based on psychedelic drug use. Can't imagine the any Church would be happy about that

The fact that all the religions have different claims about who 'God' is, could be due to location. Different locations in the world have differing natural psychedelics, so all cultures would have a varying view on the subject.

What does swiy think?

[FrankenChrist]

Based on psychedelics? Often.

But not all psychedelic experiences were necessarily substance based. Exhaustion and deprivation of food and water can also cause hallucinations. This is why seekers of mysticals experiences went to live in caves or in the desert.

Read Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception. It also has useful speculation on it.

[BackToBasics]

Budgie brought that book not so long ago, but hasn't got round to reading it yet. Maybe he should

[Dalfir]

There's an old Jewish parable about 4 Rabbis finding themselves in Pardes (Paradise), given the chance to receive all cosmic knowledge. One Rabbi went insane, the other killed himself and another became a heretic.

One of them emerged unscathed for he chose to not accept enlightenment he wasn't ready to comprehend.

Sounds a lot like a couple of friends munching 'shrooms in a forest. History repeats itself.

[kneal6]

I just watched This Talk by Terence Mckenna and he talks about evolution being driven by psillocybin, and it definitely makes sense for people to get the idea of a higher being from psychedelic experiences.

It's worth noting that all modern religions seem to be thinly veilled paganistic sun- and moon-worship so it's very probable they've ultimately all been born out of psychedelics.

[Paracelsus]

As said before, not all 'psychedelic' religious experiences are triggered by use of substances. For example, temporal lobe epilepsy can cause sudden visions, feelings of talking to deities, feelings of being 'chosen', etc. Some scientists have even 'proven' that St. Paul had temporal lobe epilepsy, and I can think of at least one other religious leader who could've had this or a similar disorder.

[kneal6]

People have been having psychedelic experiences through meditation, breathing techniques, fasting etc. for a very long time, but I'd question whether those methods would have had enough large-scale social momentum to cause entire peoples to set up the religious structures we have today. I find Mckenna's theory much more plausible: 30-40 thousand years ago we had to come down out of the trees and find alternative food sources, and psillocybin mushrooms would have been abundant, and it seems natural to me that this is what caused us to start believing in a higher power, en masse.

The other methods seem like alternatives we invented when they became less abundant or when we moved out of Africa to the rest of the world and couldn't access psychedelics as easily.