MDMD drugs and nature religion

[Doug Millison]

Given the use TRP makes of various substances in M&D, I thought some of you
might be interested in this post from the MAPS list today.  I believe
TRoberts is Tom Roberts, editor of a recent book called _Psychoactive
Sacramentals_, which I recommend to anybody who is interested in the
subject of entheogens.
-Doug



From: TRoberts38 at aol.com
Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 10:08:33 EST
Subject: MAPS: Americas' "nature religion"


These excerpts from from: Fuller, Robert C. (2000) Stairways to Heaven:
Drugs in American Religious History. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.



Perceiving God in the Natural Order

The following chapters examine the historical record of the role that drugs
have played both in fostering personal religious experience and in helping
to create solidarity among members of religious communities. It is
important, however, that we remind ourselves that a great deal of religion
in the United States exists outside of churches, temples, and synagogues.
And while some drugs have functioned in the two sacred worlds associated
with America's "churched" religions, others have functioned in the service
of what might be called "unchurched" religion.

This is particularly true in connection with what religious historians term
"nature religion." Nature religion has been a persistent theme in American
religious history. It is a form of spirituality that in independent of the
doctrines or rituals of institutional religion. Nature religion doesn't
define spirituality in terms of church attendance or adherence to any
specific creed. Nor does it possess a sacred scripture or claim to have
been granted absolute knowledge in the form of revealed truths. Instead,
nature religion looks to human experience for intuitive knowledge of God.
It is based upon the conviction that God is always and everywhere available
to humans, if we but learn to become receptive to the subtle presence of
divine spirit in and through the natural order. Whereas the biblical
religion of America's churches stresses the transcendence of God, nature
religion is based upon experiences of God's immanence. And, importantly,
whereas biblical religion teaches that there is a gulf or chasm separating
humans from God, nature religion is a form of spirituality that sees the
"natural" and "supernatural" as intimately connected orders of life.

The term nature religion is applicable whenever a form of spirituality is
based upon the belief that "contact" with God can be initiated within
nature. What distinguishes nature religion from the revealed religions of
Judaism and Christianity, then, is this conviction that every human being
can awaken to the presence of a divine power. Religious orthodoxy in both
Judaism and Christianity teaches that any contact between the human and
divine realms must be initiated by God (or perhaps by God's angelic
messengers). ’Ķ Mystical experiences imply that these individuals - on
their own - have learned to initiate "contact" with the divine. This helps
to explain why religious institutions often develop negative attitudes
toward ecstasy-producing drugs (even when drug-induced mystical states were
prevalent in the early development of this religion). Prohibitions against
drugs are, as anthropologist Mary Douglas has demonstrated, frequently
motivated by the desire to prevent individuals from having direct access to
the divine. Conversely, advocacy of drug use to obtain religious
experiences is often an expression of commitment to some version of nature
- rather than churched or biblical - religion.
(pages 12 - 13)

Importantly, however, nature religion has an inherent tendency to quest for
more ecstatic forms of mystical experience. Nature religion implies that
every human being has the potential to experience a vivid connection with
the divine spirit that flows through all things. Thus, when the
nineteenth-century philosopher and mystic Ralph Waldo Emerson went alone
into nature, he was moved to the mystical realization that the individual
human mind can open itself to the influence of a divine power. Emerson
wrote that in such moments, "all mean egotism vanishes, I become a
transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of Universal
Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God." With these words
Emerson voiced what might be called the ecstatic form of nature religion.

Emerson was claiming that there are particular states of consciousness that
create a connection between the divine and human realms. When "mean
egotism" or the normal mind-set of everyday life is temporarily set aside,
we make ourselves receptive to a range of sensations that are ordinarily
excluded from awareness. Such nonegoistic states of consciousness enable us
to become receptive to what Emerson described as "an influx of Divine Mind
into our mind." Mystical ecstasy is thus an imminent possibility of
experience. The path to achieving full communion with God is one that leads
right through our own minds. (pages 14 - 15)

Those who yearn for a closer harmony with nature's sacred depths are
attentive to those conditions that permit us easier access to the "recesses
of consciousness." And this, of course, is precisely why certain drugs have
been a continuous part of American religious history. Tobacco, datura,
peyote, LSD, marijuana, wine, and coffee have all been seen as vehicles to
direct, personal mystical experience. These elixirs of ecstasy are believed
to open up a range of sensations ordinarily relegated to the margins of
awareness. And, in so doing, they give persons a communion with nature and
a divine reality that is beyond the mind's ordinary reach. (page 15)

’Ķ The history of religion in America is at least in part the story of how
persons have sought pathways that might lead from the kingdom of nature to
the Kingdom of God. And thus this study of Americans' attraction to various
elixirs of ecstasy provides important clues about our enduring search for
stairways to the  heaven of mystical experience. (page 16)