Home (theory of the ego death and rebirth experience)
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Corresponding history of Fatalism
and entheogens
Ideal religion is
entheogenic/deterministic/allegorical
The model
of time and personal control I have elucidated is a fundamental and basic model
to consider as a hypothesis and reference point that all initiates and
theorists of the origins of religion must know. No one should believe that time is an illusion, along with our
personal power to author our own future, but *everyone* should *know* this idea
as a fundamental hypothesis and point of reference.
If you
don't know the idea of block-universe fatalism, you have not begun to engage
with the ancients in their own terms; you cannot understand them as they
understood and experienced themselves.
People try to understand the ancients in terms of modern freedom or
modern determinism, but the only way to understand them is how they understood
and experienced themselves: as trapped in frozen, illusory time, with a
pre-existing future forced upon them, seeking to somehow find freedom and
escape from such a frozen tomb.
The
ancient version of reductionistic determinism was probably only a later,
proto-scientific way of thinking about a much older idea, of Fatalism as the
fixity of the future and of the entire time axis. The ancients were block-universe-, frozen-time-,
preexisting-future-Fatalists long before they were reductionist
determinists. People believed in the
frozenness and preexistence of the future, and our metaphysical inability to
change our future, long before they created atomism and the atomist concept of
'determinism'.
We can set
a specific date for the end of the shared tradition of perceiving the frozen
future in the mystic altered state: around 410, when the mystery religions were
crushed. On that date, the open future
was (for awhile) declared open for business.
Yet, of course, the problematic nature of our personal control with
respect to time was bound to thrust itself up embarrassingly again,
traitoriously overthrowing the pretense of our personal power of will -- the
phallus wielded by some god or devil speared the liver/will controlled by our
personal agency.
As always,
the will (organ of personal control), and the member of rebellious uprising
remained at war with each other, and Augustine eventually embraced a kind of
determinism and predestination that remained at the center of intellectual
concern during the rest of the Christian era.
The
mainstream did not engage with the issue of personal control and the presetness
of the future, and they did not have access to the mystic altered state, so
they continued, in a naive and innocent mode, to experience the future as open
and contingent on their own initiated acts as sovereign moral agents.
It was
truly the age of sin and delusion, with the masses assuming the future to be
open, as they were oppressed (or oppressed themselves) into being all
uninitiated, all naively innocent children, lacking experience of initiation,
lacking the perception of the fixity of the future and the experience of our
impotence as metaphysical agents who initiate our own actions and author our
own future.
The
ancient tradition of the mystic altered state and the habit of intellectual
investigation of our nature as change-agents continued, but only with the kind
of suppressed vigor of an underground tradition.
The early
to middle modern era created the clockwork universe with reductionist
determinism (with the future "closed" in the sense of being pre-set
but *not* pre-existing).
The 20th
century world invented the Copenhagenist interpretation of quantum mechanics to
attempt to evade the great problem of metaphysical unfreedom, but they managed
only a fleeting victory, through suppressing the problematic alternative,
hidden variables, endorsed by no less than Einstein and Bohm. Even Schrodinger's cat was an unreliable and
ultimately traitorious ally for the Copenhagenists, because the cat was only
created by Schrodinger to portray the absurd and dubious aspect of
Copenhagenism, to show what dubious beliefs you must also adopt if you embrace
Copenhagenist quantum indeterminacy.
References
for QM controversies:
James T.
Cushing - all his QM books, including his recent textbook, Philosophical
Concepts in Physics. He's the authority
on how Copenhagenism cheated to win dominance and shut out the hidden variables
interpretation of QM.
Quantum
Theory and the Flight from Realism - Christopher Norris. I haven't read it yet; appears relevant.
Einstein,
Bohr and the Quantum Dilemma - Whitaker.
I haven't read it yet; appears relevant.
Finally,
with the rediscovery of entheogens, the Nag Hammadi library, and the Dead Sea
Scrolls, we re-discover the initiation experience of the fixity of the future
and the perception of our impotence as metaphysical change-agents.
So we have
three eras, which Jonathan Ott contrasts in terms of entheogen availability and
I characterize also in terms of grasping the concept of the non-open future.
o In the Age of Entheogens, people experienced
the future as pre-existing and closed; freedom was problematic.
o In the Pharmacratic Inquisition, people
experienced the future as open; freedom was taken for granted.
o In the Entheogenic Reformation, people learn
again the concept of the pre-existing and closed future; freedom is problematic
or taken with a metaphysical caveat, but has become a stable convention.
Entheogenic/Deterministic/Allegorical
Religion as Ideal Religion
The
objections and "evidence" raised against the entheogen theory of the
origin of religion aren't significant.
These objections are: entheogen users are typically lame, and most
religionists didn't use entheogens.
People also point out other ways to trigger the mystic altered state,
such as forms of meditation.
The most
important form of religion is esoteric entheogen-based. We need an entire theory of the relationship
to esoteric entheogenic aspect of a religion to the remainder. And a model of the relation between the
ideal potential of entheogens to the limited realities of entheogen usage over
history. I'm only secondarily
interested in history and what various schools have done and said. My main interest is more abstract, more
general.
Most
religion is bunk. Much of Wilber,
Watts, Tart, Grof, and others is distorted.
I disagree with most scholars, most doctrines, and most traditions,
including Gnostics and likely even those many Gnostics and Mystery-Religionists
who used entheogens. Certainly some
number of people in all religions have used entheogens. What is at issue is the role of these
entheogen users, and the ideal potential that entheogen use points toward.
I do
sometimes talk more generally of loose cognition, bracketing off how it was
triggered. But I am looking for the
simplest theory of religion, and an entheogen-based theory is simplest.
All
religious schools are corrupt and partly ill-formed, but the ideal religious
schools are philosophical, experiential, entheogenic, deterministic (in my
block-universe timeless sense), and master mythic-experiencing allegory enough
to recognize religious myth as such, such as mythic Paul, Jesus, Ignatius, and
Buddha, and savvy enough to recognize political allegory and strategic myth as
happened in the formation of official Christianity.
Are most
entheogen users lame? Sure. Are most Gnostics lacking in elevated
experience? Yes. Is most religion deluded Literalism? Yes.
Yet we can still talk about and determine essentially what the religions
of Late Antiquity were *really about* -- even if the people of the time were
all over the map in their understanding.
Antique religion was essentially really about using entheogens to
encounter and somehow transcend block-universe determinism
I'm
looking at religions only to selectively pick and choose the most ideal
aspects: which are the entheogen trigger, the experience of determinism, and
the use of religious mythic allegory to allude to such experiencing. There is no shortage of entheogen evidence
in Gnosticism, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and other religions -- you just
have to begin looking for it, which we've barely begun to do.
It's far
too early to say how much evidence there is - but there is enough to pick out
to support the entheogen theory, that the true, ideal, ultimate, purest
fountainhead of religion is entheogen/determinism/allegory. *That* is the essence or heart or
pivot-point of religious transformation -- all the rest of religious schools is
noise and confusion.
For
creating a basic theory of the ego death and rebirth phenomenon, I take the
best ideas from Wilber, from Valentinus, from Plotinus, from Grof, from Tart,
from Maria Sabina, and throw the rest in the garbage can.
The pure,
simple, ideal, source of religion is the use of entheogens to encounter
block-universe determinism with all its myriad ramifications, often mythically
allegorizing such an encounter and interpreting other mystic's
allegorizations. If some Gnostics or
Buddhists were doing something other than that, we could study their approach
to religion, but it's not the simplest, purest, most ideal source.
As a
theorist, in some sense I'm *against* non-augmented meditation. My deepest disagreement with Wilber is that
he preaches meditation and has almost no entheogen knowledge, and portrays the
Mystery-Religions in the worst light possible, while I consider entheogens to
be Christ's flesh, the true vehicle of the Holy Spirit, and consider the
Mystery Religions to have been quite close to the ideal source religion of
entheogenic block-universe determinism encounter, mythically allegorized, and I
treat non-augmented meditation as hardly worth a footnote.
I resent
the way Wilber's crowd treats Grof and Tart as the acceptable theorists for
scholars to treat as representative of entheogenics. Grof and Tart are mediocre theorists on the subject, at
best. I don't consider them nearly
adequate representatives, just as I don't consider priests to represent
Christianity adequately and I don't consider Buddhist authorities as close to
the mark. I consider other scholars to
be so inadequate, I'm creating a theory myself.
My
disagreements with the scholarly consensus are profound, and I have my own very
specific theory. The worst criticism I
fear is that my theory is vague. Love
my theory or hate it, I'm victorious simply by virtue of *having* a theory, a
*definite* identifiable theory.
People
take issue with every aspect of my theory, but what alternative is there to
this theory? Clouds of swirling vapor,
talk of ultimate consciousness that's no different than regular mundane
workaday everyday consciousness, religion without religious experience... such
a theory or model is an unclear thing with no utility, a nebulous abstraction,
merely some obscure sophisticated "school" -- as people accuse Christianity
of having become when overintellectualized.
There is a
definite type of experience found in all religions that are worth the name, and
a particular innate capacity of having the no-separate-self/no-free-will
experience/ insight/ revelation/ transformation. We ought to study the religions of around 200 C.E., and their
roots and later versions, to find how true and pure and close to the source
they were.
Any
Gnosticism far from this fountainhead, with no sacred meals and intense,
non-ordinary experience of the transcendent, isn't worth the name
"religion" and isn't worth studying, being bereft of the Holy
Spirit. Such Gnostic religion is lower,
literalist Gnosticism, or at least, not the ideal Gnosticism even if it's the
majority of the actual Gnosticism. Most
Christianity is not the ideal Christianity, though it's the majority.
Theoretical
ideal religion should be informed by mundane actual religion, but not limited
by it. Instead, a theory of religion
must decide carefully what aspects of actual religion to elect and elevate as
the ideal -- the same problem as that of differentiating orthodoxy from
heresy. Which is "the real
teachings", and which is "the false teachings" or "the
lesser teachings"?
In a
sense, I want to craft a domesticated (yet intense) Gnosticism for the masses,
but it will be different than most religion for the masses that we have so
far. The goal is to theorize about
intense experiencing *and* to have intense experiencing, so that the theory and
the experiential state easily build each other up to a transformative climax.
My goal is
not to explain all aspects of religion and religious history, but rather, to
define a theory and a paradigm that elevates and highlights
entheogenic/deterministic/allegorical elements. It's really a matter of ergonomics and product packaging.
The
entheogenic/deterministic/allegorical theory of religion, with its way of
telling history and choosing what to emphasize as ideal, is by far the most
ergonomic, potent, graspable, intense, and quick technology of religious
experience and revelation. I study the
religion of 200 C.E. because I recognize it as highly ergonomic in many
ways. Evidence that works against this
theory (paradigm) is considered by this theory to be less legitimate and less
important -- "heretical" and bastardized, or at best an experimental
innovation that differs from the Ideal standard form of high religion.
I am in
principle fully committed to a paradigm that axiomatically assumes the
entheogen theory of the origin of religion.
Great article on paradigms with regard to the authenticity of Pauline
writings: http://www.depts.drew.edu/jhc/doughty.html Regardless of backtracking on the part of Thomas Kuhn and Ken
Wilber, paradigms (frameworks of interpretation and investigation and axiomatic
assumptions) are everything; all-important.
There is no shortage of evidence for the entheogen theory, but first we
need to be able to perceive the evidence, and that requires the lens, the right
paradigm.
This
paradigm or theory, with its choice of elevating the entheogenic Gnostics over
the non-entheogenic Gnostics, is worth commitment or consideration because it
works: it delivers the results it claims to, easily and efficiently. As one who wants to define a product with
benefits and deliver the goods, I'm against Literalist Christianity, against
non-entheogenic Christianity, against freewill Christianity, against
ethics-oriented Christianity, and for all schools within all religions that are
ergonomic.
The
most-ergonomic and most-reliable schools are bound to be the
entheogenic/deterministic/allegorical schools.
By "allegorical" I mean greatly concerned with mastering
mythic-experiencing allegory as a language and rational, symbolic, masterful
mode of thinking and expressing specific ideas relating to specific experiences
and insights of the mystic state of cognition.
I've read
various articles by Grof in collections where he's treated, with Tart, as
"the" representative of entheogens, or rather psychedelics.
Grof takes
the birth canal metaphor literally.
That's probably reflected most in this book:
Beyond the
Brain: Birth, Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0873958993
1986,
rank 74K (popular)
I enjoyed
skimming his book
The Cosmic
Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0791438767
1998,
rank 54K (popular)
I don't
know if I like the book:
Spiritual
Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0874775388
1989,
rank 41K (very popular)
I have a
few of his books. I haven't found him
worth studying closer. I toss him into
the bucket "mediocre psychology-based entheogen-informed New Age
self-help". I'd be interested in
hearing his work reviewed. I've read
Wilber's criticisms of his work -- I think Wilber has the same complaint I do:
Grof reduces spiritual death and rebirth to bodily death and rebirth, applying
the "birth" metaphor in a physically reductionist way.
In tossing
out commentary on such writers, I was surprised and impressed by a skimming of
Ralph Metzner's book (1986, 1998) on classical metaphors of
self-transformation, the patterns and metaphors of transformation comparative
mythology, literature and poetry, philosopher writings, esoteric teachings East
and West, "reaching beyond psychology, the field in which I was formally
trained".
Right
there is the problem: the 'Psychology' conceptual framework; the Psychology
paradigm and perspective and conceptual framework inherently distorts the
subject of religious experiencing too severely to permit comprehending it and
breaking through to enlightenment and transformation of the mental worldmodel
from egoic to transcendent thinking in such a way that mythic-experiencing
allegory is recognized and comprehended.
I loathe
and detest such a "Psychology" approach to the mind and
enlightenment; I hate it every bit as much as the "Spirituality"
approach to transcendent knowledge. I
take a "Cybernetics" approach instead, hitting the real core of the
matter: cognition, mental models, and self-control thinking. I detest most of all, approaches to the core
transcendent knowledge that are distorted; I distance myself from my brothers,
pushing them aside to make room for a more on-target framework that can
penetrate where they are bouncing off and slipping off the surface of the
egg.
I'm Luke
Sky-Walker flying along the Death Star; the other pilots aren't hitting the
target; I bump them out of the way to get it right. Or I shun the vector of him most like me, Dark Father. You have to perform such deep modifications
on the approach called "Spirituality" to get to Truth, and such
profound alterations of the "Psychology" approach to correct and fix
it, that we can say that these approaches merely get in the way and prevent
fulfillment; they are misleading; they start with ill-formed axioms and
assumptions.
There is
so much that is right with Wilber, Freke & Gandy, Watts, Grof, Metzner,
that it's a challenge to legitimately criticize them. I like that Metzner's book criticizes (basically Wilber's) linear
developmental model with sequential stages and praises comparative metaphors
for transformation. Metzner is anti-hierarchy.
I'm anti-sequential and anti-hierarchy because both serve to delay
getting to the main point.
My
approach, per Watts, has always been dualistic in the sense of highlighting two
and only two stages: the transformation, aided by loose cognition, from egoic
thinking to transcendent thinking, forming at most a two-level
"hierarchy": milk and meat, goats and sheep, lost and saved, damned
and saved, moral and immortal, Jew vs. Gentile (Valentinus per Pagels' Gnostic
Paul), Children of Darkness and Children of Light, unfaithful and faithful, and
so on and on through all possible polarities.
My gripe
about Watts is merely that he wasn't as good with linguistic precision and
subtlety as he should have been -- he wasn't the best Analytic Philosopher --
and he didn't balance his recipe of emphasis quite right. The idea of timeless block-universe
determinism isn't clearly emphasized in his work; you'd have to really hunt it
out. He covers entheogens but without
historical background showing the entheogen origin of religion, and he doesn't
highlight Christian metaphors quite clearly enough in terms of altered-state
experiences. Watts essentially has the
puzzle pieces, most of them, but doesn't put them together in a way that makes
the airplane successfully take flight.
Freke and
Gandy are more challenging to criticize.
Their actual views are quite close to mine, those their actual position
is only partly reflected in their books.
I critique all authors in terms of my primary axioms, which began with
7-12 concepts but were later boiled down to three litmus tests, three primary
concepts: the entheogen theory, block-universe determinism, and
metaphorical/allegorical religious myth alluding to the experiences and
insights of the mystic altered state.
In abbreviation: entheogens, determinism, and allegory. These three points are expanded below.
1. The
entheogen theory of the origin of religion
This is
the real fountainhead of real religion is really entheogens, even if this has
been chronically suppressed and forgotten and seriously denied). I'm midway into developing this principle;
I'm still hammering out my set of assertions, with only a nod to
"evidence" -- all we have now are logically plausible likelihoods or
theories that would be highly coherent and simple, with efficient explanatory
power, more than corroborative evidence for such logically coherent and elegant
theories.
This is
the middle of the paradigm hammering-out, paradigm-defining stage. My post opening this thread is a major
advance toward defining this paradigm as a viable, self-standing, stable and
self-putting-forward paradigm. It's
self-strong enough to put itself out into the world as a problem forced upon
everyone. The entheogen theory of the
origin of religion is now too clear, too good, too sensible of a theory to
simply wave aside, even if there's little "evidence" so far.
It poses
such good, sensible answers to so many previously baffling questions, it's got
no real competition; it wins the elections by default, having no other serious
candidates. Either the sacred meals are
utterly incomprehensible to us -- that's practically the official Christian
view -- or else they are entheogenic.
The entheogenic proposal makes perfect sense and there is no objection
or weakness with the theory at all, not even the supposed lack of evidence
(more likely there's a ton of evidence, if we can learn to focus our eyes on
it).
Probably
the main moment when I was converted and saved, transformed and regenerated --
and there's tough competition among my experiences here -- was the time,
perhaps 1998, when two paths opened up in front of my eye: *either*
Christianity is magic, miraculous, supernatural, irrational, freewill moralist
-- *or*, it's metaphorical, allegorical, and deterministic. This master dualism is the be-all and
in-all, because all ideas can be perfectly sorted into two exclusive sets;
freewill moralism is absolutely grouped with supernaturalism and irrational
confusion and mundane moralism.
The
Eucharist poses this type of fork in the road presenting us with a choice and
two paths. Either religion as typified
by the mystery-religion era is entheogenic, or it is magical, incomprehensible,
unexplainable, utterly mysterious by nature.
2. The
*timeless*, *block-universe* theory of determinism
This is
opposed to the corrupt dominant conception of determinism as a causal chain
with open future. My work is finished
here except for discovering more connections to religious myth and mystic
philosophy, and more connections to the history of ideas in Religion and
Philosophy. The world badly needs a
book about the history of determinism.
All the
books about Hellenistic thought agree that heimarmene (Fate, Necessity, fixity
of events) is at the heart of their religious philosophy -- but why then isn't
that *emphasized* more clearly and forcefully?
Emphasis is *everything*. A failure
to correctly and sufficiently emphasize is a failure to comprehend: it's taking
me awhile to appreciate that emphasis makes all the difference and is
all-important.
Freke and
Gandy (their published books at least) fail to *emphasize* block-universe determinism
and entheogens. However, this is
largely a symptom of our time; Timothy Freke's Encyclopedia of Spirituality
must be vigorously applauded for putting a surprising emphasis, *compared* to
ordinary spirituality books, on entheogens and no-free-will: it's surprising
and shocking to find this in a vigorously New Age-styled book.
Generally,
I condemn New Age for making the same failures of emphasis as the paradigms of
'Psychology' and 'Spirituality': they don't emphasize entheogens and
determinism nearly enough.
The
Encyclopedia of Spirituality: Information and Inspiration to Transform Your
Life
Timothy
Freke
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0806999055
June
2000, rank 207K
The
paperback version is:
Spiritual
Traditions: Essential Teachings to Transform Your Life
by
Timothy Freke
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/080699844X
May
2001, rank 925K
3.
Allegory of mythic experiencing
Recognition
and sophisticated, yet simple and to-the-point, understanding of religious
mythic allegory for mystic-altered-state phenomena such as ego death and
perceptual distortion and some ten other signature noted cognitive
experiences. I'm looking forward to
reading more of this book, which is actually about comparative metaphors for
transformation, classical metaphors of self-transformation, the patterns and
metaphors of transformation comparative esoteric mythology:
The
Unfolding Self: Varieties of Transformative Experience
Ralph
Metzner
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1579830005
May
1998, rank 74K (popular)
It's taken
quite a bit of reading to finally find writings that concur with my allegorical
understanding of the Cross as a portrayal of willing sacrifice of the childself
way of thinking that is centered around the separate-self and free-will
illusion -- particularly rare is the understanding specifically of the *king*
on the Cross. I see most ancients,
heretics, and Gnostics, and mystics, and alternative theories of Christian
legend as only comprehending half of the required pieces.
To a large
extent, there are many researchers who have published *half* of the puzzle
pieces, so I "merely" have to do the work of arranging all these
half-solved puzzles into one completely solved puzzle. Certainly the greatest block to
comprehending the esoteric, real meaning of the Cross is the Literalization of
the man Jesus.
The
assumption that there was a single outstanding man Jesus actively prevents
people from even asking effectively what the Cross means -- especially what the
general concept of "would-be king on a cross" means. To imagine the Cross without imagining a
*king* on it is to radically fail to comprehend the meaning of the Cross --
understanding this was the main milestone on my solving the puzzle of the
esoteric true meaning of the Crucifixion.
Wilber's
theory of the cross is pretty good but he omits any thought about the
"king" mytheme, though all myth always is about kings. Every myth begins "There was a
king..." The Bible, like all
religious myth, is packed cover to cover with allegorizations of the phenomena
and insights of the mystic altered state.
It's no wonder at all why people considered the Old Testament to be the
Homeric writings of the Jews.
I have
read almost all Wilber's books, mostly just once. I'm very familiar with his works and intellectually grew up
reading them, so he's in my blood. I'm
not an expert on his writings, or I am depending on how you conceive the
requirements for Wilberian expertise.
Wilber has a poor, shoddy, careless, dismissive, practically nonexistent
understanding of the Mystery-Religions.
His coverage of this topic is *way* below his usual level.
He always
portrays the Mystery-Religions in the worst light possible, using them as an
example of primitive, mythic-magic thinking.
It's a common mistake to use the commonest, most vulgar form of a
religion as representative. We should
emphasize far more than Wilber's disappearingly faint praise, that *at their
best* the Mystery Religions knew a thing or three that we barely have a glimmer
of.
To
compensate bad with worse, Wilber makes an exception for Mr. Jesus, praising
the odd and almost never-realized potential of the Mystery-Religions by using
Jesus as the one example proving that as crude and malformed and misconceived
as Mystery Myth is, some individuals were so awesomely advanced in their
"psycho-spiritual development", having moved through Wilber's
twenty-eight stages of development mysteriously faster than everyone else
around them, that they could achieve advanced "psycho-spiritual development"
*despite*, as Wilber would have it, the severe flaws and liabilities imposed by
the obstacle known as the Mystery Religions.
So Wilber
condemns the Mystery-Religions with the faint praise that one man, Jesus, was
able to use this wretched system to jump several stages ahead in Wilber's
cosmic Monopoly game, jumping directly to the coveted property of Boardwalk
early in the game. Unfortunately for
Wilber's abortively misconceived telling of the story, for all his theorizing
about "the mythic-magic level of psycho-spiritual development",
Jesus' thinking was based much more profoundly in sophisticated mastery of myth
that Wilber can grasp, seeing as Jesus *is* mythic-experiencing --
anthropomorphized.
Wilber's
illustration of Jesus' heart omits the key part: the crown of thorns around it
which serves to in some sense *negate* Wilber's understanding of what the heart
means. Wilber entirely misses the point
of the crown of thorns -- literally failing to see it -- and he concomitantly
fails to even perceive the king motif: both motifs are literally at the heart
of the Crucifixion symbol. What is
crucified is ego, Wilber rightly says, one's child-self, but in the symbol ego
is represented by the *crucified and mortally wounded king-heart*, *the
cybernetic heart of sovereign self-control power*.
Wilber's
theory of determinism is almost as nonexistent as his theory of the
Mystery-Religions. His drawing of
Jesus' heart shows a profound ignorance and blindness to the most important
"word" in the language of mythic-experiencing: the mortally wounded
cybernetic heart of egoic kingship.
Wilber is only half-literate in the allegorical language of
mythic-experiencing and insight. Wilber
has practically no entheogen experience (Speaking of Everything, disc 2), yet
of my three key principles (determinism, entheogens, mythic-experiencing
allegory), his theory of altered states is improving enough so it may be his
strongest of these three areas -- which isn't saying much.
Speaking
of Everything (audio CD)
Ken
Wilber
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005UWIL)
Dec.
2001, rank 4K in Audio product category
Wilber
specializes in generalizing, and provides essential work that all we theorists
are thankful for, a framework to coordinate our work -- he says so himself. But Watts, and Freke and Gandy, run *circles*
around Wilber when it comes to the core and main pivot-point of
enlightenment. Wilber's broad theory of
religion or psycho-spiritual development is strong, but his theory of
enlightenment proper -- one room in his large mansion -- is remarkably weak and
poorly furnished, beyond redemption.
He needs
to drastically revise his core theory of enlightenment itself. Watts is relatively stronger at the core of
enlightenment and not so uniquely strong with the sweeping integral framework
like Wilber provides. Wilber deserves
all credit for his brilliant framework of Integral Theory, but not much credit
for enlightenment proper. I got enlightenment
from Watts (inefficiently and un-ergonomically), but I got Integral Theory --
not enlightenment -- from Wilber.
If you
want enlightenment, you won't get it from Wilber any more than from numerous
other psychology-based theorists. The
problem with Wilber is the psychology paradigm. That's why Watts doesn't rub me the wrong way: he's not *based*
in the 'Psychology' paradigm, but truly rather in the 'Comparative East/West
Religion' paradigm.
Any book
covers a certain subject from a certain perspective or paradigm. What is the "background" of Stan
Grof, Ken Wilber, Charles Tart, Timothy Leary, Dan Merkur, and so many other
theorists of religion who lack a real feel for religious mythic experiencing
and revelatory insight?
*Psychology*.
Investigators
from a 'Philosophy' background/perspective/paradigm fare even worse, being
unworthy of the venerable antique title 'Philosopher', the creation of which is
attributed to Pythagoras, High Mystic Philosopher. My perspective and paradigm is that of technology, informed by
the study of psychedelics.
I critique
theorists simply by ranking how strongly they emphasize 3 points, which I
abbreviate as entheogens, determinism, and allegory. My theory of enlightenment and religious experiencing is
essentially and distinctively a theory of entheogens, determinism, and
allegory; these are my signature emphases and I haven't found any other
theorist that *emphasizes* these 3 domains or issues -- barely even 2 of these
domains. Who emphasizes the following?
Entheogens
and determinism -- ??
Determinism
and allegory -- ??
Entheogens
and allegory -- Ruck & Staples' The World of Classical Myth: Gods and
Goddesses, Heroines and Heroes,
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0890895759
Entheogens,
determinism, and allegory -- Hoffman
Home (theory of the ego death and rebirth experience)